Miami Marlins’ Luis Arraez reacts after hitting a single against the Toronto Blue Jays on Wednesday in Miami. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
MIAMI — Luis Arraez doesn’t think of the neon number he sees all around him. That’s no great surprise. As George Brett, the last hitter to seriously challenge hitting .400, said during that attempt, “You’ve got to think about nothing.”
That was September of 1980. That tells of the rare air, if not the full cultural distance inside baseball, that Arraez approaches. He doesn’t go as far as thinking about nothing, at least not yet, as he talks of his swing, his daily routine or his pitch-by-pitch surveying of the opposing infield to detect if the shortstop or second baseman take a mis-step to the right or left.
“I’ll hit it by him if he does that,” the Miami Marlins second baseman tells manager Skip Schumaker in the dugout.
That’s not just a fun anecdote to suggest why Arraez is hitting .402 entering Saturday’s game and, four games from the midseason, could have the highest batting average in history if he can nudge past Stan Musial’s .403 from 1948. This dugout remark to Schumaker is an every-game occurrence.
“I’ve never seen a guy actually look at the defense, pick a hole he’s going to hit it to and then hits it there,” Schumaker said. “He’ll see stuff. He knows what they’re going to throw to him, has a game plan to attack it and then checks where they’re positioning him and tries to hit it in a hole they’re not in.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. Watch his spray charts. He’ll hit it six hole, hit it to left, up the middle, to the right side of the shortstop, to the left side of the second baseman — and he’ll tell you before the at-bat, ‘I’m going to hit it right up the middle.’ And he’ll hit it up the middle.”
That explains Arraez’s nickname of “El Regardera” in his native Venezuela. The Sprinkler. It doesn’t explain how his 3-for-4 performance put his average back above, what, the Musial Line? Baseball names the Mendoza Line for batters going under .200. This is so unusual no one even names it.
Arraez’s first season with the Marlins after an offseason trade from Minnesota is wrapped in an even bigger riddle: How are the Marlins, with 11 losing teams in the past 12 years, in second place in the National League East and nine games above .500?
They haven’t even had a top-shelf Sandy Alcantara or an injured Jazz Chisholm. One thing’s for sure: If Chisholm returns next week as expected, it won’t be to the leadoff spot.
“We’ve got a .400 hitter there,” Schumaker said.
Arraez is central to Schumaker’s new brand of Marlins culture, too. Schumaker scoffs at the idea of anything being set, saying they’re not even a half-season into it. But here’s a for-instance: The Marlins take infield practice each day with Schumaker one of the two coaches hitting simultaneous ground balls to the right and left sides. This is new. The Marlins never took daily infield practice in recent years.
“He’s never missed a day of taking ground balls,” Schumaker said of Arraez. “If he’s doing it, why wouldn’t everyone? When we have optional hitting, he’s hitting every day. That sets a culture. When your best players are out there working, it makes sure everyone is out there working.”
The big question in late June around Arraez is whether his batting average will still be the big question in late July or August. It’s a long, exhausting season to hold up that number. Nobody has hit .400 since Ted Williams refused to sit out the final game of the 1941 season with a .401 average. He smacked five hits that day and rode into history with a .406 batting average.
Arraez knows of Williams through the prism of this season.
“He had a lot of hits,” he said. “What he did is hard to do.”
Williams, of course, played in an era before pitch counts, before bullpens, before international players, before starters by committee — way back before batting average was a secondary statistic. That’ll be part of the debate, of course. In the era of analytics, of OPS and Wins-Above-Replacement, can Arraez return the romance to the batting average?
It tells a lot about baseball that the Twins traded Arraez after he led the American League in with a .316 average. They got pitcher Pablo Lopez in a straight trade of needs. The Marlins needed hitting, and Arraez is hitting in a manner missing from the game today. He hits for average in a game that cares little about average. He rarely strikes out — 15 times this year entering Saturday — in a game where strikeouts seem a badge of honor for sluggers.
Arraez also ranks ninth in baseball in WAR. That proves the great value of his game while he begins the chase to bring the last statistical whale into the modern era. He’s not Williams. He’s not Brett. He’s just 26, too. You become a baseball legend by chasing the unthinkable. In late June, can you see a .400 Watch Party in late August?
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