“Baseball is hard,” Luis Arráez says bluntly. Although the reigning American League batting champion is having an overall excellent season at the plate, he’s in the middle two-game hitless streak when he speaks with the Guardian. In a testament to the exceptional nature of his year this far, however, the Miami Marlins second baseman is still leading Major League Baseball with .382 batting average, even taking into account his recent micro-slump. By having his batting average hover so close to .400 this far into a season (it was above .400 on 10 June), Arráez is flirting with one of baseball’s most hallowed numbers.
Every sport has statistical milestones that, although arbitrary in many ways (it’s difficult to objectively defend the notion that scoring 100 runs in cricket is significantly more impressive than 99), nevertheless have a certain magic about them. There’s the four-minute mile and the two-hour marathon. Soccer and ice hockey have their hat tricks, basketball tracks triple-doubles, and recording 100 caps remains shorthand for sustained excellence in international rugby, cricket and football.
Endowing certain numbers with extra significance may be ubiquitous across world sport, but baseball retains a reputation for being especially obsessed with its statistics. The modern game documents everything from spin rate to pitcher extension to “sweet spot” percentage in extreme detail. Despite the overwhelming amount of data available, however, to many fans there are certain numbers in baseball that possess an almost sacred aura around them: the 500-home run club, the 3,000-hit club, and the .400 season batting average among them. You’ll notice the word “club” is omitted from the .400 batting average achievement. This is intentional. Of the three numbers just mentioned, maintaining a .400 batting average is by far the most exceptional. The 500-homer club and the 3,000-hit club have both welcomed at least 20 new members in the time since the most recent .400 season.
Related: US culture wars come to baseball as MLB celebrates Pride month
Although moderately common in the 19th and early 20th centuries, in today’s game maintaining a .400 batting average (recording a base hit in at least 40% of a player’s at bats over a season) is almost beyond the realm of possibility. Indeed, the last time someone did so, the US only had 48 states and Queen Elizabeth II was still a princess.
The notion that hitting .400 has become more difficult over time is supported by data – more than 20 players achieved the mark between 1876 (the year the National League was founded) and 1941. In the 80 years since, the closest anyone has come is when Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn averaged .394 in the strike-shortened 1994 season. What remains unclear is why.
Many put it down to an improvement in pitching. It’s generally accepted that pitchers in the modern game throw harder than their predecessors. As baseball columnist Sam Miller summarized in his data-driven deep dive into the topic, the absence of .400 hitters is “not because a .400 hitter doesn’t exist but because 1,000-strikeout pitchers do exist”.
Moreover, the increased use of relief pitchers means that modern hitters are more likely to face fresh-armed pitchers, or even hyper-specific pitchers subbed into a game because their skillset matches up well against a particular opponent. As a consequence, people like Arráez grew up idolizing hitters who, no matter their skill at the plate, had very little real shot of .400.
Baseball’s focus on power hitting in recent decades has almost certainly also played a role. Among other changes, baseball’s analytics revolution brought an increased focus on not just hits, but types of hit. By its nature as a statistic, batting average fails to take hit type into account and, on any given at bat, a home run or a double is inarguably better than a single. As such, it became fashionable to use more advanced metrics like OPS (“on-base plus slugging” – a slightly more complex number that includes walks and extra-base hits like doubles and home runs) to evaluate a hitter’s performance.
You needn’t look further than the current season to give an example of the discrepancies created by this new framework for assessing a hitter. At time of writing, reigning AL MVP Aaron Judge, a historically good power hitter, leads the majors in OPS despite ranking 21st in batting average (Arráez ranks 13th in OPS). Power hitters may be the award-winning darlings of the modern game, but they do not represent the only way to succeed. To that end, as a boy in Venezuela, Arráez styled his own game after players of an entirely different mold.
In 2020, Major League Baseball made the (arguably long overdue) decision to begin including statistics from historical Black baseball leagues in their records (professional baseball remained segregated until the late 1940s). Under this new framework, the last player to average .400 over a season was shortstop Artie Wilson of the Birmingham Black Barons. Many of the games played by Black teams, however, were barnstorming match-ups that are not reflected in official record books. As such, Wilson’s .400 season only accounts for his play in roughly 30 official “league” games (in comparison, Arráez has already played in more than 60 games this year). The last player to average .400 while playing more than 100 games in a season was Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams, who hit .406 over 143 games in 1941. Williams may be the figure most associated with a .400 season, but he’s not one of the players after whom Arráez styles his game.
“I watched a lot of Endy Chavez [growing up],” he says, referencing the journeyman outfielder who, like Arráez himself, was a contact-hitting lefty from Venezuela. Chavez is one of many hitters who valued contact over power that influenced Arráez. Before joining the Marlins last offseason, the 26-year-old spent four seasons playing with the Minnesota Twins. In his time there, Arráez developed a close relationship with Hall of Famer Rod Carew (who had his own brush with a .400 season in 1978, when he hit .388 while playing for the Twins).
“He’s like my grandfather,” Arráez says of Carew. “We’re almost the same [kind of player] … I practiced with a lot with him. He pays attention when I go to the [batting] cage, just little things, but they’re good for me.” Seattle Mariners legend Ichiro Suzuki, another high-percentage contact hitter, also ranks highly among Arráez’s favorite players. “I met [Ichiro] last year,” Arráez says. “He’s still fast. I watched him take fly balls in batting practice. He can still play.”
It’s actually slightly inaccurate to describe Arráez as a left-hander. He throws with his right hand and entered the league hitting from both sides of the plate as a switch-hitter.
“I don’t like hitting right hand,” Arráez says. “My dad, he put me [on the right-hand side of the plate]. I would strike out a lot when I was hitting right-handed. So that’s why I went left-handed, because I would get more contact.”
Left-handedness is often seen as an advantage when it comes to hitting – in fact, lefty hitters are disproportionately represented in the major leagues (Williams, Carew and Suzuki also hit left-handed). The theory of left-handed advantage is that the vast majority of pitchers are right-handed. This means that, owing to the difference in angle between the batter and pitcher, left-handed hitters are able to see the ball a split-second earlier against right-handed pitchers. When discernible differences in the pitcher’s grip can have a huge influence on the ball’s trajectory, that extra moment of visibility can compound into a huge advantage over time.
The shift, a defensive strategy in which fielding players moved to unusual positions in order to field better against particular batters (especially lefties), addressed some of this left-handed advantage. The shift was outlawed this season, however, and never really affected Arráez anyway.
“They never changed [defensive positions] for me,” he says. “They played me normal last year.” The shift rarely worked well against Arráez because he is particularly skilled at hitting the ball to every part of the ball park. His ability led his sister to call him “La Rigadera” (“The Sprinkler”) as a child.
One of the few parts of the ballpark Arráez’s hits don’t often reach are the outfield bleachers. Despite leading the major leagues in hits the season, Arráez has only hit one home run. This is by design.
“It’s natural for me. Everybody wants to hit homers and, I mean, I want to hit homers too. But I don’t try to do that … It’s not for me. The guys who try to do that, they hit a lot of fly balls. Me, I just want to hit a lot of ground balls or line drives.” His ability to do the latter has generated a new nickname: The King of Line Drives. Arráez laughs. “That’s good, but I’ll stay with La Rigadera.”
There is a lot of baseball left this season and history suggests that Arráez will not finish the season with a .400 batting average (although he’s already coming closer than anyone has in 15 years). His light-hearted laugh about nicknames, however, is indicative of his upbeat attitude toward his exceptional season. Optimism helps in baseball (after all, even the very best hitters still fail to hit most of the time), and Arráez seems to have it. Refreshingly, he also doesn’t claim to be uninterested in his own individual success, something athletes sometimes do with performative modesty. “It’s amazing,” Arráez says. “Having .400 is big.”
Fortunately for Arráez, he also doesn’t have to choose between individual excellence and team success – his remarkable start to the season is accompanied by a strong start for the Marlins. Currently second in the NL East, as it stands the Marlins would make the playoffs this year after missing them for the previous two.
“I trust this team,” Arráez says. “We can do a lot of damage during the season. Right now, it’s early, but we’ve got a chance.”
So does Arráez.
