Why the Twins Didn't Sign Luis Arraez

Luis Arraez has the highest batting average among active MLB players. His .317 is 14 points higher than the next highest, Jose Altuve’s .303 average. There isn’t another player over .300.

Arraez also registered the lowest strikeout rate since Tony Gwynn in 1995, retired on strikes in just 21 of his 620 at-bats (3.1%).

And he might have been in the Twins’ range before the Josh Bell signing. Jon Becker of FanGraphs compiles public estimates for free agents, and Arraez’s mean contract is $10.25 million annually. Estimates are split between Arraez getting a one- or two-year contract, ranging from $8.5 million to $15 million per year, which could fit into the Twins’ budget for upgrading first base.

But this isn’t about why the Twins could sign Arraez. It’s about why they didn't.

And it’s not because batting average doesn’t matter.

Put succinctly, it’s because he hasn’t played like the player the Twins traded away in years.

Between 2019 and 2023 (his first year in Miami following the trade that brought Pablo López to Minnesota), Arraez slashed .326/.379/.427, and his .806 OPS was 22% above league-average. This season, he was just league-average, slashing .292/.327/.392. If you’ve been following Arraez at all, you probably know that his batting average dipped this season. But there’s more going on here than bad luck.

There’s bad process.

Yes, even with one of the highest batting averages in baseball, and one of the best strikeout rates in the past 50 years, Arraez’s plate appearances are not good. It almost seems as if he’s focused all of his energy into not striking out, ignoring all other aspects of a good approach.

Some of this regression can be seen in his ability to draw a walk. Arraez has never hunted walks, but he sat around league-average as a Twin between 2019 and 2022, walking 8.7% of the time. When combined with his .314 batting average in Minnesota, Arraez got to flirt with a .400 OBP. That went out the window in Miami in 2023, but his .354 average made up for that loss in walks, as he still got on base 39.3% of the time. Since then, though, he’s had a .337 OBP between 2024 and 2025, which is about 8% above the league average during that time.

A slightly above average OBP is good, but paired with a roughly league-average .392 slugging percentage (35 points lower than it was during the first five years of his career), the overall production doesn’t match the sexy batting average.

Within and beyond his ability to draw a walk lies another issue: his swing decisions. Yes, Arraez isn’t striking out. But that doesn’t mean he’s taking good plate appearances. In Minnesota, he chased pitches outside the strike zone about 23% of the time, far better than league-average. Since leaving, he’s swung at about 34% of pitches outside the zone, nearly 50% more often and much worse than league-average. Put another way, for every two balls he swung at outside the zone in Minnesota, he’s swung at three since.

He has a remarkable ability to make contact with pitches, even outside of the strike zone, and he’s gotten better at it with age, going from about making contact with balls outside of the zone 86% of the time in Minnesota to 91% in Miami and San Diego. He’s also making more contact with strikes, going from 95% in Minnesota to setting a career-high 97.3% this year.

But also, he just set his career low for swings on strikes, at 60%. So he swung at a career-high percent of pitches outside of the zone, but he also swung at a career-low number of pitches inside the zone. That’s not supposed to happen.  

As he has been making more contact, his batting average has gone down. And pitchers are throwing him more strikes in the process. In Minnesota, 50% of the pitches he saw were strikes, whereas it’s been 55% since 2023.

I just threw a bunch of numbers at you, so here’s something else. Remember Willians Astudillo? La Tortuga? Well, Arraez seems to have a bit of the La Tortuga disease, where because he’s a guy who can put wood on anything, he’s putting a lot of pitches he probably shouldn’t be swinging at in play, and poorly. But then you add into that equation that he’s also swinging at fewer strikes than he ever has. It’s perplexing. And it bears out in the quality of his contact.

Arraez has the slowest swing speed in the league, and he’s consistently at the bottom of the league in hitting the ball hard, but over the past two years, he’s almost become a caricature of himself. You don’t need to hit the ball hard to get hits. Arraez has mastered the art of dropping one into the shallow outfield. But you need to get at least a little speed off the bat to have good contact.

It won’t surprise you to learn, after reading all of that above, that Arraez just hit line drives at the lowest rate of his career and grounders at the second-highest rate of his career. He made much more soft contact in the last couple of seasons than he did in the first five, and he made much less hard contact (naturally).

Arraez’s batting average on balls in play has dropped quite remarkably, too. It was .343 through his first five years, and it’s been .307 since. Some of that is luck, but BABIP can be sticky, especially for a player like Arraez who specializes in putting the ball exactly where it needs to go to get a hit. And the ball hasn’t.

Arraez’s swing decisions are getting worse. His quality of contact is getting worse. And his back of the baseball card stats are getting worse because of that.

Add to that the fact that Arraez is, at this point, a first baseman or DH, with the ability to fill in at second if absolutely needed (he started three times the number of games as a DH as he did as a second baseman last year, ceding those opportunities to a roughly average defender in Jake Cronenworth). And he’s a poor defensive first baseman by most metrics. And he’s an average runner at best.

I’ll make one concession, one sed contra to the title of this article. He made better decisions in Minnesota. He made better contact. He had a higher batting average. If they know what’s wrong with him and how to fix it, and if everyone else in the league knows what you now know, if they’re all scared off by his slipping performance, then sure. Maybe they could have made him a lowball offer and try to fix him. Even in his current form, he would have outperformed most of the internal options at first base and DH. But he’s not someone to get in a bidding war over, chasing that .320 average dragon. There are other options.