New Statcast Data Shows Why Luis Arraez is MLB's Most Special Hitter

The hardest-swinging player in Major League Baseball today — perhaps ever — is sporting a .230 batting average with a good-but-not-amazing eight home runs and .452 slugging percentage.

The slowest-swinging player in MLB is hitting .301 with a .324 weighted on-base average, slightly higher (.321) than his hard-swinging counterpart.

Take heart, San Diego Padre fans: at least your team is paying Luis Arraez the league minimum, rather than paying Giancarlo Stanton at least $128 million over the next four years.

On Monday, Major League Baseball debuted the newest tool in its growing suite of advanced metrics under the "Statcast" brand: bat tracking leaders. In its crudest form, the visual tool allows users to quickly ascertain who's squaring up the baseball, who's swinging hard, who's doing both things, and who's doing neither.

Arraez is squaring up the baseball but not swinging hard. Stanton is swinging hard but barely squaring anything up. The rest of the league literally falls somewhere in between the two extremes.

Perhaps none of this is counterintuitive to fans of Arraez, who have been able to watch his skillset up close ever since the Padres acquired him from the Miami Marlins on May 3. San Diego sent Jacob Marsee, Dillon Head, Woo-Suk Go and Nathan Martorella to Miami in the deal.

Still, the size of the gap between Arraez and MLB's next-slowest swinger, Justin Turner, is a full 3 mph — remarkable considering the gap between Turner and Josh Rojas (the third-slowest swinger in the league) is a mere 1 mph.

Similarly, Arraez is squaring up the ball 4 percent more often than the next man on the list, Yankees star Juan Soto. Soto's bat speed allows him to hit the ball over the fence more regularly than Arraez, who has just 24 home runs in a six-year career.

Arraez's bat speed might limit his power, but the quality of his contact has allowed him to hit for average in an era where pitchers chase strikeouts and batters regularly trade contact for power. Arraez's .324 career batting average is higher than 85 percent of all Baseball Hall of Fame inductees.

highest % of swings that are squared-up, 2024:

Luis Arraez: 43.3% (62.4 mph avg bat speed)
Nolan Schanuel: 41.1% (66.3 mph)
Nicky Lopez: 39.3% (64.4 mph)
Juan Soto: 39.2% (76.1 mph)
Mookie Betts: 38.2% (69.4 mph)

squared up: reached at least 80% of possible exit velocity based… pic.twitter.com/SjM0QwoIXS
— Sarah Langs (@SlangsOnSports) May 14, 2024

Arraez is doing something no other hitter can claim. Now, we have more than just his outstanding batting average as proof.