Luis Arraez’s Launch Angle Revolution

On Tuesday night, as I watched Luis Arraez, sparkler in hand, chatting with Otto Lopez outside the National League dugout, I couldn’t help but reflect on how he ended up in Philadelphia. This is Arraez’s fourth All-Star selection, but it’s also his first in four years. Although we’re only 90 games into the season, his 3.7 WAR is already a career high. As you surely know, the biggest improvement in his game came with the glove. Michael Rosen put it simply enough back in May, with an article titled “Luis Arraez Is Good at Defense Now.” At the time, Arraez had put up 5 FRV over 30 games. In the ensuing 61 games, he’s accrued another 3 FRV. The pace has slowed down, but he’s still grading out as an excellent defender (though the other defensive metrics admittedly disagree).

Today, however, we’re interested in Arraez’s offensive improvement. Arraez won his first batting title in 2022, and he did more than just put up a high batting average. He also walked more than he struck out, earning a 130 wRC+. He followed it up with a 131 mark in 2023, though he did so in a slightly different fashion. Both his walks and his strikeouts dropped below 6%, but he ran a .362 BABIP, which led to a .354 batting average. Essentially, he leaned way, way into his status as a contact god, and the sky-high BABIP made it all work out beautifully.

But Arraez took things too far. In 2024 and 2025 combined, his walk and strikeout rates fell below 5%, and his .307 BABIP, while above the league average, wasn’t good enough to carry an offensive profile that features no walks and no power. He ran a 107 combined wRC+, and because he was putting up negative value in the other parts of the game, he ended up with just 2.0 WAR. That put his value squarely between an average player and a replacement-level one.

If all Arraez had done this year was return to second base and put up good defense while keeping that same, slightly above-average batting line, it would have been enough to make him an above-average player again. But his bat has ticked up too. He went into the break with a 127 wRC+, the third-best mark of his career. If not for Lopez’s .334 batting average, Arraez’s .330 mark would put him in line for his fourth batting title. Maybe that’s what the two were chatting about during the sparkler break. We’re here to talk about what, if anything, Arraez is doing differently.

Three things jump out when we look at the usual statistical suspects. Arraez is running a 6% walk rate, his best mark since 2022, and his 4% strikeout rate is the second lowest of his career. Second, his BABIP is back up to .330, his highest mark since 2023. Lastly, Arraez is running an isolated slugging percentage of .130, still way below the league average, but the highest ISO of his career by quite a bit.

It’s close, but this is the biggest gap positive gap Arraez has ever run between his walk rate and strikeout rate. Because he almost never swings and misses, the two tend to move in tandem. When he’s swinging more, he neither walks nor strikes out. His 32% chase rate is his lowest in three years, while his 64% zone swing rate is his highest in three years. Swinging more in the zone and less outside it is a good combination. However, Arraez is running his lowest contact rate since 2021, and that’s probably a good thing.

Plate discipline is important for Arraez in a different way than it is for most hitters. He can hit anything at all. He almost never whiffs, and that’s not always a good thing. If you swing at a pitch up at your eyes, you’d rather end up with a swinging strike than a weak popup to the catcher. This year, Arraez’s contact rate is lower outside the zone. Again, this is relative to his performance last year; he still makes contact more than just about anybody else in baseball, and more than enough contact to avoid striking out. And the bat tracking data shows that when he does make contact, he’s squaring the ball up just as often as he did before. It’s just that he’s making contact a bit less often, which helps, because even amazing contact hitters tend to get lousy results when they swing at bad pitches. When he puts the ball in play on a pitch that isn’t over the heart of the plate, Arraez has a career wOBA of .320. On pitches over the heart, that number is .356, so it’s great that 48% of Arraez’s balls in play have come on pitches over the heart of the plate, the highest mark of his career by more than three percentage points. No wonder Arraez’s average exit velocity has ticked up to its highest mark since 2023, and no wonder his BABIP is back up.

But let’s step back for a second. If Arraez is being choosier at the plate, why is his contact rate going down? Is he struggling to keep up because he’s lost some bat speed? That’s not it. On the contrary, he’s actually increased his average bat speed from 62.6 mph in 2025 to 63.3 mph in 2026. I’m not sure that he’s necessarily swinging harder, though. I think it has to do with pitch selection. Arraez isn’t just swinging less overall, he’s swinging less on the outside part of the plate:

As we learned when bat tracking data first came out a couple years ago, bat speed increases throughout the swing. Even if your swing is otherwise the same, swinging at an inside pitch, which you have to meet farther out in front, will result in a higher bat speed at the point of contact, which is what Statcast measures. The numbers back that up too. Arraez’s average intercept point has moved up nearly two inches, and he’s running the highest pull rate of his career.

Another thing that we were able to confirm when bat tracking data came out is that launch angle tends to increase later in your swing. Your bat path drops at the beginning of your swing, then starts rising again as it traverses the hitting zone. Arraez isn’t just pulling the ball more, he’s running the lowest groundball rate and highest fly ball rate of his entire career. For the first time in his career, the Pull Air section on his Statcast page isn’t shaded blue. In a small, small way, Arraez has undertaken his own launch angle revolution. No wonder he’s slugging more!

Now, all this might come as a surprise to you. It definitely came as a surprise to me. As I wrote awhile back, I expected the exact opposite from Arraez this season. I figured that playing in San Francisco, where it’s so hard to hit a home run to right field, would encourage Arraez to lean even further into his approach of letting it get deep and shooting it the other way. And indeed, all four of his home runs have come on the road. However, the effects of Oracle Park are more complicated than that.

Oracle is normally death to left-handed hitters, but Arraez is not a normal left-handed hitter. The numbers for lefties are so bleak because it suppresses home runs more than any other park. Guess who remains largely unaffected by that: The guy who almost never hits homers. It’s true that Oracle has stolen a few home runs from Arraez – three of them, by my count – but all three of them turned into triples:

And Oracle’s odd dimensions have bestowed other triples upon Arraez, who has a career-high seven this season. That’s the thing about playing in San Francisco. The fact that it suppresses homers so dramatically for lefties overshadows the fact that it increases the rates of other hits. For lefties, the deep dimensions and the bonkers wall fronting McCovey Cove make Oracle the sixth-friendliest park for triples, the seventh friendliest for doubles, and the 10th friendliest for singles. The deep dimensions help with singles, because they force outfielders to play deeper. When Arraez is at the plate this season, outfielders are positioned an average of four feet deeper in left, two feet deeper in center, and one foot deeper in right than they were last year. As his signature skill is dropping singles in front of the outfielders, it’s a BABIP-boosting boon. All of this is to say that Arraez might be the rare lefty for whom Oracle is actually a hitter-friendly park.

There’s a sabermetric slant to all this as well. I’m not sure how much of a boost Arraez’s wRC+ (and therefore his WAR) gets from playing at Oracle, but he is getting one. It’s sort of a weird situation. His wRC+ gets that boost because he’s a lefty, but because he’s not the typical lefty, the park may actually be boosting his actual production too.

So those are all the changes I’ve noticed. I don’t want to give the impression that Arraez has dramatically changed who he is, or to say there’s zero hot air in his BABIP. Two of his triples came on would-be singles that were badly misplayed, and his .308 xwOBA is only five points better than his 2025 mark. Also, in my experience, sudden drops in contact rate outside the zone aren’t always that sticky, so Arraez may end up giving back some of those gains. Most important, all of the changes I’ve just described are very small. Although Arraez’s hard-hit rate has bounced back from a career low in 2025, the increases in both bat speed and average exit velocity amount to less than a mile per hour.

Still, DRC+ is buying what Arraez selling. He’s currently at a 113, his highest mark since the 118 he put up in 2023. It’s not surprising and only mildly concerning that xwOBA isn’t impressed by Arraez’s improved pull rate, because it purposely ignores pull rate. And the change in his approach is real. Arraez is laying off the outside pitch and turning on the inside pitch in a way that he wasn’t before. I can’t say for sure whether this will continue, or why Arraez is suddenly eschewing the outside pitch. It makes him a little less of an outlier, a little less Luis Arraez-y, but it’s certainly working out for him so far.