Let’s Dream on Gabriel Arias

If you’re a Cleveland Guardians fan, the ritual is surely getting old at this point. The team develops an All-Star middle infielder, and times are good. Then, inevitably, that player leaves and is replaced by a new and unproven middle infielder. Can the team make it work? Tune in next season to find out.

The latest intriguing replacement is Gabriel Arias, who, like seemingly every recent Guardians hitting prospect, is a shortstop by trade. He looked like the heir apparent to the job in 2023, backing up at short before Amed Rosario’s departure. But Arias scuffled, then broke his wrist at the tail end of the season. That injury might have lingered into last year, and whatever the reason, he struggled mightily, ceding the shortstop job to Brayan Rocchio. Luckily, in Cleveland, a contributing role is only one trade away, and now that second baseman Andrés Giménez is a Blue Jay, Arias heads into 2025 as a key part of the Guardians’ infield plans.

Plenty of the particulars of Arias’ 563 major league plate appearances are ripped right out of his last prospect report. Intermittent contact issues? Yeah, he strikes out a third of the time. Potential for power? He launched 10 homers in half a season in 2023. Defensive versatility? He’s logged time at every position other than pitcher and catcher. But the relative weights of each of those features of his game matter, and so far in his career, the contact issues have dominated.

It’s possible to succeed despite a high-strikeout game, and honestly, Arias is the right kind of player to do so. Teams will tolerate a player with a bad contact rate if he hits for power and contributes with his glove. The defensive component is already there, especially because of his versatility, but the power hasn’t arrived; his career .138 ISO is the domain of contact hitters, not boom-bust guys whose muscles have muscles.

Is that going to change this year? To be clear, I don’t know. Guys like Arias flame out all the time. It’s really hard to stick around and produce in the majors when you run even a 15% swinging strike rate – and he’s up near 20%. But if things work out, it’s fairly easy to see how they would. Really, one video is all I need to show you:

That’s Zac Gallen standing in the frame dispassionately. And that kind of reaction tells you where the ball went. No fingers pointing up for a pop fly. No watching to see whether the stadium would contain it. If the ball looks like it’s headed to the Grand Canyon and the crack of the bat sounds like a sonic boom, you probably don’t have to wonder whether your spring training park’s fences are deep enough; you can just move on to the next batter.

Why is this particular swing so important? I can think of several reasons. First, I wasn’t kidding about how hard Arias hit that ball. It came off of his bat at 116 mph. That’s the fifth-hardest-hit ball of spring training. It’s the second-hardest-hit ball that wasn’t pounded straight into the ground, and it was the hardest-hit home run. It’s a superlative individual effort, in other words. You can’t teach exit velocity, but exit velocity without launch angle is all bark and no bite. This homer is what hitting coaches mean when they preach elevating and celebrating.

The comparison to Arias’s past results matter, too. He’s never hit a ball even close to that hard in the big leagues, topping out at 114.4 mph. He’s never hit a ball that hard in the minors – at least, probably not, since Statcast data is newer there. Only 17 major leaguers hit a baseball harder than that in all of 2024. Numbers out of context are just numbers. 116? That could be an apartment number or the temperature in Palm Springs in July. Harder than either Juan Soto or Manny Machado hit a baseball in 2024? Now that’s interesting.

A related data point: Arias swung hard to hit the ball like that. Per Statcast, his bat was traveling at 79 mph when he made contact. That’s a robust number, to say the least. José Ramírez swung that hard only 36 times last year in a full season. Jhonkensy Noel, a 6-foot-3, 250-pound tower of power, was the only Guardian to consistently display more swing speed. If you’re looking for confirmation that the scouting reports were right, that Arias is capable of knocking the cover off the ball when he connects, this is a resounding check mark.

It matters, too, who was doing the pitching. That wasn’t some scrub hoping to impress the team before getting sent back to minor league camp. It was Gallen, an All-Star with two top-five Cy Young finishes. And it was hardly an easy pitch to drive; soft and low isn’t exactly the way you draw up your home runs. Gallen has made a living disrupting timing with an array of secondaries, and when he keeps the ball low like that, opponents have put up abysmal overall numbers, with a huge whiff rate and very few hard-hit balls in the air.

It’s not so much that Arias is going to do this every time. He hasn’t hit another home run this spring, in fact. But just demonstrating the ability is what’s exciting here. Toolsy, power-over-hit prospects often struggle to elevate the ball in game situations. They particularly struggle against secondary stuff; generally speaking, those are the ones that dart away from the bat at the last second, not ideal for guys who boast raw power but lack bat control.

Even more promisingly, Arias overcame one of his greatest weaknesses to hit that homer. Sure, all the swing and miss is one reason he hasn’t shown plus power in the majors yet, but an inability to lift the ball has been just as much of a problem. That’s not isolated to the big leagues; even in the minors, he’s consistently run elevated groundball rates. When he’s made contact with pitches of roughly that height in the past, it’s been a worm-burning parade. We’re talking two-thirds grounders, at least, and very little extra-base pop.

None of this means that Arias is going to excel in the majors this year. Those strikeouts are still terrifying. He’s not even excelling in spring training! But I still think it’s notable. I mostly ignore data and narratives in the spring. It’s too easy to beat up on weak competition or catch a hot streak that sticks in people’s minds because of recency bias, or to struggle because you’re working on a new pitch or technique. But I like to look for outliers, signs that a player has demonstrated a skill I hadn’t previously seen, and this is a case of that. It doesn’t mean Arias won’t fail. It just means that he’s worth looking at in a new light.

The Guardians need offense in a bad way this year. They need power in particular. And maybe, just maybe, Arias can give them that. If he does, remember that reaction from Gallen. “Wow, that ball was crushed” is what his body language says. The more pitchers Arias can do that to this year, the better Cleveland’s chances will be in an exciting, unsettled AL Central.