This winter features what just might be the most divisive case we’ve seen for a free agent in years.
We’re talking about Luis Arraez, who is either “the best contact hitter alive” or “a below-average baseball player,” with little middle ground. You might think he’s a superstar. You also might not think he’s worth a roster spot. It’s shockingly easy to argue either side of that.
The truth, as always, is somewhere in between, though. But where, exactly? How many teams might be interested in this, let’s say, very particular set of skills – and which teams might fit? As he reaches free agency for the first time, we’ll finally get to see how all 30 teams value this type of player.
Arraez, 29 in April, just set career lows in batting average (.292) and OPS+ (99, or just a tick below league average). Yet at the same time, he did so while posting just a 3.5% K-rate, which is merely the lowest anyone’s had in a full season since Tony Gwynn’s 2.6% way back in 1995. It’s an even more impressive number given the context of rising strikeouts in the game today, so if you were to go back to the start of integration in 1947 and look at every player’s strikeout rate compared to the league average of that season, it’s the second-best mark of any qualified player on record, just barely behind Nellie Fox’s 1958 – when he whiffed 11 times in 698 plate appearances. (It was an entirely different sport, it should go without saying.)
It’s much the same if you look at career marks, and here’s where the Gwynn comparisons are really going to come out. (And not just because Arraez played for Mr. Padre’s team in 2025.) Again, comparing to the average of the time, for contextual reasons, there’s a few things in common. Looking again since the start of the integrated era in 1947 …
If you want to say that Arraez is one of the greatest contact hitters in the sport’s history, the data would support you.
If you think it’s even more impressive than that given the ever-increasing spin, velocity, and arm angles in today’s game, it wouldn’t be that hard to make that case, either. Arraez, for example, saw 269 different pitchers this year, while Gwynn saw 138 in 1987, his best season, and Williams just 74 in 1941. Arraez’s ability to hit for average is a truly elite, differentiating skill, one which almost no one has. He might be (and is) a “one-tool player,” it’s just that it’s easily the most important of the five tools.
But also: There’s a whole lot more to hitting than “just making contact,” as we explored with the run of the Blue Jays, who went from a high-contact but low-scoring offense in 2024 to a high-contact AND high-scoring offense in 2025, because they managed to add bat speed and damage without sacrificing the contact skills. The team that nearly struck out as little as Toronto did, the Royals, also finished 26th in runs scored.
There’s other parts of the game that matter, and it’s here where the Gwynn comparisons start to fall apart.
Gwynn, though age 28, had stolen 181 bases, or 150 more than Arraez. He’d already won the first two of his five Gold Gloves, where Arraez routinely rates as among the weakest defenders in the game. In their respective age-27 and -28 seasons, Gwynn was 20% above average in drawing a walk, while Arraez was 50% below average; Gwynn had a slugging percentage 16% better than average, while Arraez’s is below average. The end result is that in those two years, Gwynn was worth 10.5 Wins Above Replacement, which is star-level, while Arraez has been worth 2.0 WAR total, which is below-average.
It all goes to show that teams will look at the total package, and not just “do you make contact,” because we’re talking about baseball players, not strikeout-avoiders. Another way to say it is that over the last two seasons, Arraez’s 107 wRC+ and 2.0 WAR make these players decent comparables:
Those are useful players, to be sure, but not necessarily players whom top teams are going to seek out and hand long-term contracts to. (In fact, Bleday was just designated for assignment by the A’s.) After all, if teams put a high value on winning batting titles, as Arraez did three years in a row, he wouldn’t likely be on his way to his fourth team in five seasons.
Part of it is that Arraez simply didn’t have his best season in 2025, but part of it, we’d argue, is that San Diego didn’t really deploy Arraez optimally. The No. 2 spot has come to be thought of as the lineup position where your best or near-best hitter lives, as the high-contact-hitter-behind-a-speedy-leadoff-man archetype has been left in the 1980s. Second is where you’ll find Aaron Judge, Bobby Witt Jr., Juan Soto, and Rafael Devers, among others. That’s where Arraez mostly lived, too, getting the fourth-most plate appearances of any second-hole hitter.
Among the No. 2 spots of the 30 teams, the Padres finished …
… which is troublesome. It’s not an ideal usage of arguably the most important lineup position in the game. Mostly, it didn’t set up Arraez to succeed based on his skillset, because a low-powered bat who doesn’t get on base that often just shouldn’t be hitting second or leading off, as he did 11 additional times.
As Ben Clemens of FanGraphs pointed out last fall, a big part of the issue with “a hit is better than a walk” is that it’s not, really, when no one is on base, and 56% of Arraez’s plate appearances this year came with the bases empty. Rather than hitting in the top two, getting more plate appearances than almost anyone, he would be better deployed hitting third, after a pair of better hitters make it more likely he’d have someone on base to move along, or much lower in the lineup, where he’s getting to the plate fewer times in the first place.
Still, there will be interest, because there’s some potential for a return to the hitter we saw in 2022-’23, and because there are some late-game situations against high-powered relievers where simply being able to get the bat on the ball might bring some extra value – assuming at least some rebound in his hard-hit rate, which fell from “low, but that’s not the point” before to “untenably poor” in 2025.
Where, though? Who fits best for this very exact skillset?
OK, hear us out on this one. If there’s any place where simply getting the bat on the ball really does matter, it’s in Coors Field. Despite a reputation as a home run haven, it’s mostly a place that inflates base hits, due to how enormous the outfield is and how poorly pitches move. (It increased batting average on contact by 13% over the last three years, easily the most of any park. Last year, the Rockies hit .270 at home and .203 on the road.)
Due to the difficulties in adjusting to the different way the ball moves at sea level vs. altitude, the Rockies also had the highest road strikeout rate of any team, something a noted contact king might be able to help overcome. Their issues were particularly acute at first base and DH, where they had the highest strikeout rate (by far) and lowest OPS (also by far) of any club. If Arraez has a very particular skill, the Rockies have a very particular need. (OK, lots of needs.) Incredibly, in 53 career plate appearances at Coors, Arraez has not struck out even once. Maybe that says something about Colorado pitching. It’s still amazing.
This lineup is baseball’s reigning leader for most strikeouts, and really it’s more than that, because last year’s 27.1% strikeout rate is the highest full-season mark of any team in baseball history.
“We need to improve in contact at the plate, no secret,” GM Perry Minasian said earlier this fall, and they surely do — and he also indicated his focus would be on finding a lefty bat. There’s a lot of smoke here.
It’s not quite as obvious as just plugging Arraez in, though, because they have a similar lefty first baseman in Schanuel, and DH may be spoken for by Jorge Soler and Mike Trout. Young second baseman Christian Moore didn’t exactly secure his spot in his 2025 opportunities, but they’re not going to bury the eighth overall pick from the 2024 Draft, either. Arraez feels like he fits this team perfectly; it’s a little trickier to fit him on the roster.
Cincinnati’s 1B/2B/DH combo had baseball’s fourth-highest strikeout rate, and with a whole bunch of righty bats in that mix — Spencer Steer, Matt McClain, Sal Stewart — there’s room to fit a lefty in there. Not, obviously, that you sign Arraez because you want power, but it’s hard to ignore the “frequency of contact” part of what president of baseball operations Nick Krall said last month.
“Obviously [with] more frequency of contact, you’ll be able to hit home runs in this ballpark. That’s something we’ve got to improve across the board,” Krall said.
Arraez would surely do that. The biggest issue here is that Cincinnati also wants to improve their lagging defense, which Arraez wouldn’t help as much.
Arraez spent all of 2023 and part of ‘24 with the Marlins, and he and his family still call Miami home, so there might be extra appeal on his end. The baseball fit is less clear, because Miami did just post MLB’s fourth-lowest strikeout rate, to go with MLB’s fourth-fewest homers, so it feels to some extent that they’ve got the “high-contact, low-power” thing covered. On the other hand, they have a wide-open spot at first base, which is currently ranked as 29th-best by FanGraphs. We could see it.
T-Mobile Park creates strikeouts. When you think about how a ballpark can affect offense, you tend to think of “does the ball carry well,” but in Seattle, it’s that it’s simply harder to make contact there. We dug deep into the why of that all last year, but it held true again in 2025; the Mariners were a league-average contact team on the road, yet had the second-highest strikeout rate at home. This happens, reliably, every year. Perhaps, then, bringing in a batter with the superpower of making contact would be a good antidote? The return of lefty-hitting first baseman Josh Naylor makes this somewhat less likely, but there’s plenty of playing time to be filled at second base and DH.
Returning to San Diego doesn’t actually feel like a strong fit, given that a low-power lineup just spent a season struggling to score runs, and because Jake Cronenworth and Gavin Sheets give the club other lefty options at first base and DH. But, GM AJ Preller indicated he had interest in exploring a reunion, so on the list they go.
This is actually a poor fit, but we’re noting them here anyway because this feels like it’s going to be a narrative this winter after the way the Jays handled the Yankees, who are full of high-strikeout sluggers. Aside from this not really fitting their style anyway, there’s not really a fit for a left-handed 1B/2B/DH on a team with Ben Rice, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Giancarlo Stanton — particularly if Cody Bellinger returns, too.
