Ketel Marte Is In the Conversation

The Arizona Diamondbacks came through this weekend having won eight of their past 10 games, and after a bumpy start to the season, the Snakes are suddenly one of the most dangerous teams in the National League bracket. They hold a playoff spot even though their franchise player, Corbin Carroll, has hit like Eric Bruntlett this season, and despite having gotten nothing from the 2-3-4 slots in a rotation that was supposed to be a strength. Literally nothing in the case of Eduardo Rodriguez, who makes his season debut today.

So I was a little surprised when I went on Ketel Marte’s page and saw that we hadn’t written a standalone article about him on the main FanGraphs site this season. That’s our bad. Let me make up for it.

I’m going to just come out and say it: Marte is the Diamondbacks’ best position player. I know Carroll had that huge season last year, but he’s dropped the crown and needs to take it back. I’ll also go so far as to say this: Marte is probably the most underrated position player in baseball. Certainly the most underrated among players who have been productive in the major leagues for a while.

Marte has been a name for close to a decade. He was a top prospect with the Mariners, and then found his way to Arizona in one of my favorite trades of the 2010s: Marte and Taijuan Walker to Arizona in exchange for Zac Curtis, Mitch Haniger, and Jean Segura. Especially because Segura was later traded to the Phillies — where he was a key starter on a pennant-winning team — in exchange for J.P. Crawford and Carlos Santana.

Crawford, of course, is now a totemic figure on the Mariners. Santana was shipped to Cleveland 10 days later in a three-way trade that brought Yandy Díaz to the Tampa Bay Rays. A butterfly flaps its wings in Indonesia and half the teams in the league get a long-term starter on the infield.

In 2019, Marte hit .329/.389/.592, which was a 6.3 WAR season and good for fourth in NL MVP voting. That’s a very specific kind of season. Back when I was doing broad-based awards pieces at The Ringer, I’d write up a close two-way battle for an award — Aaron Judge vs. Jose Altuve for AL MVP in 2017, for example — and the day the story ran my mentions would be full of tweets from Red Sox fans (not to single out Red Sox fans, but it was frequently Red Sox fans) who were angry Xander Bogaerts or whoever wasn’t “in the conversation.”

Marte’s 2019 was a perfect example of an In the Conversation season. Nobody in their right mind actually thought he was the most valuable player in the NL — the race came down to the wire between Cody Bellinger and Christian Yelich — but the MVP ballot goes 10 deep, and Marte was absolutely among the 10 best players in the league that year. And you know what? We don’t celebrate the strong down-ballot MVP vote-getter enough.

Five years later, he’s doing it again. (Marte is so hot that between when I originally filed this post and when you’re reading it, he homered to lead off yet another Diamondbacks win. So all stats are current through Sunday, unless stated otherwise.) Through a fluke of organization, five of the top six position players in WAR this year are in the AL, leaving Marte — currently tied for eighth overall at 5.0 WAR — less than a win behind Shohei Ohtani for the league lead. Marte would probably need an extremely strong finish, both narratively and statistically, in order to actually take home the plate, but once again he’s In the Conversation.

Marte has made two All-Star teams and started for the Diamondbacks in two playoff runs. And he’s been a monster in October. Our last standalone Marte article came last October, when Jay Jaffe wrote about how Marte had started his postseason career with an 18-game hitting streak. That’s the longest postseason hitting streak in major league history; big ups to Jay for keeping me from having to look that up. That streak ended at 20 games in the decisive Game 5 of the World Series, but Marte only had two proper at-bats in that game because he walked three times.

In his career, Marte is a .344/.385/.589 hitter in the playoffs, for a 158 wRC+. Among hitters with at least 90 career playoff plate appearances, that’s 18th all-time, tied with Albert Pujols and one spot behind Kirk Gibson, who had a famous playoff moment or two if memory serves. Among active players, he’s third behind Randy Arozarena and Bryce Harper.

So how come this guy isn’t a star on that level?

Well, some of it is market. Phoenix isn’t literally a small market. In fact, given the density of training complexes and amateur talent in the region, you could argue that — in addition to being one of the five biggest cities in the U.S. — it’s one of the most important baseball markets in the entire world. But it doesn’t get as much shine as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and so on.

It also doesn’t help that, while Marte played for two very good Diamondbacks teams in 2017 and 2023, the Dbacks were total dogwater in between. They finished last twice, including a 110-loss campaign in 2021. Then there was the pandemic, plus a series of nagging hamstring injuries that dogged Marte throughout 2021 and 2022. What’s more, in terms of public image, Marte has moved up and down the middle of the field throughout his career, from shortstop to second base to center field, back to second base, back to center field, and finally to a steady position at second base over the past three seasons.

You don’t get credit for being the best second baseman in the National League if everyone thinks you’re still playing center field.

Last season, Marte had his best full campaign since 2019. He hit .276/.358/.485, which is a 127 wRC+. Among qualified hitters with a primary position of second base, he was third in wRC+ and fourth in WAR, at 4.4. (Mookie Betts and Marcus Semien blew away the field last year, after which the gaps closed up; one win separated Nico Hoerner in third place from Luis Arraez in 11th.)

This year, Marte is 2 WAR clear of Semien for the lead among second basemen. What’s he doing differently, apart from watching Betts move to shortstop and then break his hand?

Back in October, Jay noticed that Marte was much more aggressive at the plate than he had been in the regular season, and concurrently was hitting the ball harder. Because last year’s playoffs were such a small sample, I don’t know if it’s fair to call what’s happening now an extension of the 2023 postseason. (Marte’s walk rate is down and his strikeout rate is up from last year, but by less than a percentage point in the latter case.)

Marte’s chase rate is up from 24.4% to 27.0% year-on-year. His overall swing rate is up from 45.4% to 49.0%. But being more aggressive has unlocked a couple things in the Diamondbacks second baseman:

First, he’s hitting the ball harder. A lot harder. His hard-hit rate has gone up 11 percentage points compared to last year, which is the third-biggest year-over-year increase in the league, according to Baseball Savant. His xwOBACON is up 81 points from last year, the second-biggest increase in the league. Second, he’s dining out on low-hanging fruit: pitches in the strike zone and four-seam fastballs. Across all of those categories, Marte has gone from solid to elite. And he’s also improved in one area in which he was already a standout: pitches along the border of the strike zone. His wOBA on pitches in the shadow attack zone is .434 this year, the second-highest mark in baseball among batters who have seen at least 500 total pitches.

Now if all that Statcasty stuff is too hoity-toity for you, here’s the argument in simpler terms. Marte is two homers away (after he hit no. 28 on Monday night) from his first 30-homer season since 2019, which was the height of the juiced ball era, and four away from a new career high regardless of ball resilience.

As good as Marte has been, when healthy, for basically his entire career, he’s unlocked something new this season. He’s swinging harder than anyone since Benny Goodman and living with the occasional strikeout because when he makes contact, he — once again, like Benny Goodman — keeps churning out big hits.

Marte is far from the first person to make that kind of breakthrough mid-career, and oh yeah, it just clicked, this guy works next to Christian Walker, doesn’t he? Let’s check that pull rate, and sure enough, after never getting out of the low 44% range before in his career, Marte is pulling 48.8% of his batted balls.

Okay, so take the bat of a very good first baseman, give it a little more juice, and stick it on a plus defender at an up-the-middle position. That’s a downballot MVP guy, an In the Conversation guy. With a couple hot months to end the season for both himself and the Diamondbacks as a whole, Marte could even Altuve or Jimmy Rollins his way into ending up on the top of the vote total. At which point, my most-underrated-in-baseball premise will look downright foolish. But that’s the thing about underrated players: They don’t stay that way for long.