The Long-Awaited Jonathan Aranda Breakout

You could be forgiven for not noticing Jonathan Aranda until now. The former Top 100 prospect spent the past three years bouncing back and forth between Triple-A Durham and Tampa Bay without ever making more than 143 major league plate appearances in a single season. He missed substantial time due to injuries last year, and the majority of his time in the majors took place in September, once the Rays — a team that doesn’t get a ton of mainstream attention even when they’re successful — were out of the running. This year, the lefty-swinging 26-year-old has taken over the long half of a first base platoon for the Rays, and so far he’s been hitting the stuffing out of the ball.

After a trio of recent three-hit games — May 4 against the Yankees, May 8 against the Phillies, and May 11 against the Brewers — Aranda is currently batting .342/.429/.553, good enough to place among the AL’s top six in all three slash-stat categories. He ranks second in OBP and wRC+ (184), behind only Aaron Judge. His average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, sweet spot rate, expected batting average, expected slugging percentage, and expected wOBA all rank in the 94th percentile or above. Right now, he looks like the Rays’ next All-Star, filling the void left by the trade of Isaac Paredes, their lone 2024 representative at the Midsummer Classic.

This type of success has been a long time coming for Aranda, whom the Rays signed as a 17-year-old out of Tijuana, Mexico on July 2, 2015. International scouting director Carlos Rodriguez discovered Aranda while eyeing Cuban defector Randy Arozarena in the spring of 2015; after plans for a private workout with Arozarena fell through — he signed with the Cardinals but would later be traded to the Rays, of course — local scouts told Rodriguez to check out Aranda at the Toros de Tijuana academy. Rodriguez liked him well enough to sign him for a $130,000 bonus.

Aranda took his time climbing the ladder in the Rays organization. He didn’t hit for power prior to the lost 2020 season, and didn’t climb above A-ball until ’21. He broke out that year to win MVP honors in the Southern League, hitting .325/.410/.540 — all tops in the league — with 10 homers in 81 games after being promoted from High-A Bowling Green to Double-A Montgomery. He grazed the Baseball America Top 100 at no. 96 the following spring, and cracked the FanGraphs Top 100 at no. 72 in mid-2022, when his hot hitting at Triple-A Durham earned him his first call-up. Though he started hot, a 2-for-38 finish dragged his final line to .192/.276/.321 in 87 PA for the Rays. On the other hand, he took home International League MVP honors for his .318/.394/.521 line and 18 home runs in 104 games at Durham.

Aranda didn’t really have a defensive home at that point. “The Rays have played Aranda all over the infield, and he’s such a poor hands and feet athlete that we actually prefer him at second base rather than first, where he’d have to handle the ball constantly,” wrote Eric Longenhagen in Aranda’s 2022 prospect capsule, which was accompanied by grades of 30 for his fielding and 40 for his throwing. “This is the type of player who you try to hide on defense on any given day, playing him when you have an extreme strikeout pitcher starting, or shoehorning him in at 2B/3B depending on where the opposing lineup is least likely to hit the ball.”

At Durham that season, Aranda made at least 24 starts apiece at first, second, and third base, plus another seven in left field; he dabbled at all of those positions in Tampa Bay as well. He continued to shuttle back and forth between Triple-A and the majors in 2023. He spent the final six weeks of the season with the Rays, finishing with a .230/.340/.368 (101 wRC+) line in 103 PA at the big league level. With a strong showing in the Grapefruit League in 2024, he appeared on track to make the team out of spring training, but he fractured his right ring finger while fielding a groundball in a drill on March 19 of that year, and needed surgery to insert a pin. After a rehab stint, he joined the Rays in mid-May but scuffled and was optioned to Durham in early June; nearly three weeks later, he suffered a strained oblique, which sidelined him for two more months. He finally rejoined the Rays when rosters expanded in September, and with a hot month that included five homers, a .507 SLG, and regular playing time at first base, he finished at .234/.308/.430 (113 wRC+) with a 22.4% strikeout rate, a 7.7-point drop from 2023.

Manager Kevin Cash was particularly impressed by Aranda’s September run. “He was getting on pitches a little bit more, and being ready to hit from the first pitch on, and making the necessary adjustments within the game from what he learned in his previous at-bat,” Cash told the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin. To Cash’s point, five of Aranda’s six home runs were against starting pitchers in his second or third plate appearance against them.

After a winter spent working on his defense while playing for Obregon of the Mexican Pacific Winter League, Aranda won the first base job in spring training, bumping Yandy Díaz to regular DH duty. So far, Aranda has started 25 of the Rays’ 27 games against righties, but only three of their 13 games against lefties, with Díaz and Curtis Mead accounting for the rest. Six of his first seven hits this year were for extra bases, and he’s been raking ever since.

As Topkin suggested in the aforementioned article, the biggest factor in Aranda’s breakout may be the most obvious: regular playing time. The Rays have been awash in well-regarded infielders with offensive skill and positional flexibility such as Paredes, Díaz, Mead, Brandon Lowe, and now Junior Caminero. Even if some of them have been rough around the edges in the field, their bats have earned them playing time, and the Rays have found ways to make it work. So too with Aranda.

Aranda has a compact left-handed stroke, but he doesn’t have exceptional bat speed. In fact, his 70.1-mph average speed — matching last year’s average — places him in just the 20th percentile among qualifiers. While his fast swing rate has increased from 9.2% to 13.4%, he’s squaring up slightly fewer pitches (25%, down from 28.1% last year). He’s a disciplined hitter in terms of his swing and chase rates (44.8% and 27.4%, respectively), and his breakout has been fueled by a dramatic improvement in his swing decisions, as measured by Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric. From 2022–24, Aranda placed in the 10th percentile or lower, but this year he’s in the 88th percentile, and his quality of contact has improved:

As noted, a lot of those numbers this year rank in the 94th percentile or higher, with his hard-hit rate in the 99th percentile, behind only Shohei Ohtani, Rafael Devers, and Oneil Cruz.

Those increasing launch angles hint at Aranda’s success in getting the ball off the ground. He had a 54.5% groundball rate in 2022 and ’23, but cut that to 50.5% last year, and it’s now down to 43.5%. While his overall pull rate has dropped from 48.5% to 37.6%, his pulled air rate has only fallen from 20.6% to 18.8%, still a couple of points above league average.

Pitch-wise, it’s helped that Aranda has seen a higher share of fastballs this year (63.3%, up from 58.6%). He’s annihilating four-seamers, hitting .379, slugging .724, and averaging a 97-mph exit velocity against them. He does have a tendency to whiff on high cheese; his 41.9% whiff rate on four-seamers in the upper third of the strike zone or higher is nearly 19 points above the league average, but he’s also slugging 1.077 when he connects with those pitches (three home runs in 17 PA). The trade-off has been worth it.

Defensively, Aranda has been fine at first base — certainly better than Longenhagen’s 2022 assessment. Take the small-sample metrics with plenty of salt, but so far he has 2 DRS and 1 FRV at first and is up to 3 DRS and 2 FRV in 445 2/3 innings there in 2024–25. In a league with a resurgent Paul Goldschmidt and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., he’s got his work cut out to crack the AL All-Star team, but it was just two years ago that Díaz and Arozarena were voted into the starting lineup. But whether or not he earns the recognition he deserves, his breakout has turned him into a lineup centerpiece, one reason to take note of the Rays even as they battle to return to contention in the AL East.