What Exactly Is Randy Arozarena Doing Right?

After a fantastic run in the World Baseball Classic, Randy Arozarena has stayed red hot. Defensive metrics see him as a hair better in left field this year, and he’s also been slightly above average on the basepaths. That’s a big upgrade from the extremely entertaining but ultimately deleterious aggression he showed in 2022. Oh, and I should probably mention that he’s the eighth-best hitter in all of baseball right now, right behind some guy named Trout. Arozarena is running a 182 wRC+, up from his already very good career mark of 129. All three of the figures in his .348/.412/.584 slash line would be career-best marks over a full season. Put it all together, and Arozarena is currently on pace to double his career WAR total.

How is he doing all this? I’m not completely sure. Don’t get me wrong; the numbers tell a story, and there are some other convenient narratives at hand. I’m just not convinced of how everything fits together. That’s actually why I was so interested in writing about Arozarena. He’s way more fascinating than some guy named Randy has any right to be.

Let’s start with one thing we can be sure of: Randy Arozarena is absolutely hammering the baseball. He’s always been capable of posting eye-popping exit velocities, but this year he’s doing it consistently. Last year, his average exit velocity was 89.9 mph and his hard-hit rate was 40.7%, both solidly above average. This year he’s at 95.1 and 59.2%. That’s not just good; that’s Yordan Alvarez territory. In terms of contact quality, Arozarena has never had a stretch like this:

It’s not just that he’s hitting the ball harder than ever. He’s also avoiding mis-hits at a career-best rate. His 7% soft-hit rate is tied for seventh-lowest in the league, and none of the six players ahead of him has a higher hard-hit rate.

Arozarena is also lifting the ball more than ever. His line drive rate is at 20%, and his fly ball rate is at 38.6%. While both would be career highs over a full season, this isn’t completely unprecedented. Arozarena has had previous stretches with lower groundball rates, though combined with his elevated hard-hit rate, this one has led him to a career-best 16.9% barrel rate. What’s new is his launch angle tightness. Despite all this lift, his popup rate is at a career low. Arozarena’s average launch angle is up by 3.0 degrees, but the standard deviation of his launch angle is down by 3.3 degrees. He’s consistently hitting the ball where he can do the most damage, reaping all the benefits of an improved launch angle with none of the downside. Courtesy of Baseball Savant:

The last big change is that Arozarena is using right field like never before. Batters tend to elevate the ball more when they’re going the other way, but that’s not nearly enough to explain what’s going on here. His 36.6% opposite field rate is well above his 24% career average, and his pull rate is also at a career low. This is something entirely new. He’s now spraying the ball all over the field, and he’s never had a stretch where he’s gone the other way so frequently or pulled the ball so infrequently. Further, when he hits the ball to the right side, he’s hitting it with authority. His career average exit velocity on balls the other way is 88 mph. This year it’s 95.2 mph:

As you can see, Arozarena’s hard-hit rate is roughly unchanged when he pulls the ball. He’s hitting more grounders than normal to the left side, and he’s succeeding there partly by hitting the ball harder and partly through batted ball luck. However, on balls up the middle and to the opposite field, his hard-hit rates have skyrocketed and he’s hitting the ball in the air more than ever. In fact, the numbers indicate that his 229 wRC+ to the opposite field might actually be a bit lower than he deserves.

Arozarena’s profile has always been a little bit tough to parse. For example, take a look at the heat maps below. On the left is Arozarena’s career slugging percentage per ball in play. On the right is his contact rate:

Some of the pitches that Arozarena really crushes, like the ones at the top of the zone, are also the ones he swings through most often. In fact, if you take a closer look, you’ll notice that Arozarena also tends to have lower contact rates right in the middle of the plate, a trend that has continued this year. He’s capable of doing damage below the zone, or on pitches just off the plate outside.

I bring this up because this is the part of the article where I would normally dig into the underlying metrics and tell you that Arozarena is mashing the ball because he’s chasing less, getting ahead in the count, and taking advantage of meatballs in the zone. Or maybe that he’s just focusing on the pitches he can really crush. That’s how these things tend to work. And while Arozarena is in fact chasing less and seeing slightly more pitches in the zone, I don’t really think that explains the transformation in his batted ball profile.

Arozarena’s chase rate is 7.5 percentage points lower than it was last year. That’s a big drop, but it also leaves him right around his 2001 rate, and he wasn’t running a 180 wRC+ or a 60% hard-hit rate in 2021. He’s striking out a lot less and walking slightly more, but he’s also whiffing more often. In fact, he’s seen more strikes overall and spent a lower percentage of the time ahead in the count this year.

Arozarena’s overall contact rate is up slightly, though again, it’s not that simple. He’s making more contact in the zone and whiffing more when he chases. I don’t know how repeatable that is, but it’s a neat trick if you can pull it off. Combine it with a lower swing rate (particularly outside the zone), and all of sudden more of his batted balls come on pitches in the zone. But still, we’re only talking about an increase of 2.3 percentage points. That doesn’t sound like enough to explain a hard-hit rate that’s jumped nearly 20.

Here’s the bigger thing: Name a split, and within that split Arozarena is hitting the ball harder this year than he did last year. Ahead, behind, or even in the count? Randy Arozarena is hitting the ball harder. Inside or outside the zone? Randy Arozarena is hitting the ball harder. Heart, shadow, or chase zone. Fastball, breaking ball, or offspeed. Lefty, righty, home, away, fly ball, groundball, line drive; he’s even hitting his popups harder. His numbers are down just a hair on the inner third, which is certainly understandable given his new propensity to rip the ball the other way, but that’s really all I could find. The guy is just plain hitting the ball harder, and I’m not prepared to conclude that it all comes down to his swing decisions.

That brings us to our two tidy narratives. The first is something Adam Berry described somewhat bluntly on the Ballpark Dimensions Podcast. “He was openly not really looking into scouting reports,” Berry told Mike Petriello. “He would ask the hitting coach or the manager, whoever ‘What’s this guy’s fastball?’ That’s all he needed to know before he went up for a plate appearance. He even told us last year at one point he didn’t know other pitchers’ names. He knew his fellow Cubans, and he knew Gerrit Cole, and that was it.”

Joe Trezza gave a more nuanced picture at MLB.com. It’s not that Arozarena couldn’t be bothered, Trezza explained, “He eschewed data, preferring to stay in the moment and let his natural ability take over. Sometimes, he told teammates, he didn’t even want to know the opposing pitcher’s name.”

I am definitely willing to believe that more preparation has helped Arozarena. Lest we forget, this wouldn’t be the first time that Arozarena has decided to put in extra work to up his game and done exactly that. Arozarena is still chasing breaking stuff at almost exactly the same rate, but he is laying off more four-seamers above the zone and offspeed stuff below it. That could be due to having a better idea of how pitchers are attacking him. At the very least, it’s safe to say that incorporating new information into his gameplan hasn’t hurt.

The other thing that could tie our story up with a bow is that Arozarena has made some significant changes to his swing. Last year his stance was extremely upright. This year, he’s crouching a bit more, as he did in 2020. Last year, his hands were up above his ear and he kept his back elbow up, with his bat at a much flatter angle. This year, he’s lowered his hands to shoulder height, with his elbow less elevated and his bat nearly vertical. All of that is completely new. When he goes into his load, he’s rotating his body away from the pitcher less and keeping his shoulders much more level. 2023 is on the left and 2022 is on the right:

Last year, you could pretty much see all of the 56 on Arozarena’s back; this year, you can only see a small part of the six.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any information about Arozarena’s new stance. He was using it both in spring training and at the World Baseball Classic, so it’s clearly the result of offseason work. To my knowledge, no one has written an article about it. Andrea of Scout Girl Report was the only person I found who’s mentioned it on Twitter.

I don’t know whether Arozarena made these changes on his own, with outside coaches, or with Tampa Bay’s coaching staff, and I haven’t been able to track down a quote about what he hopes they’ll do for his swing. I assume that the desired effect of all these adjustments — deeper crouch, lower hands, less rotation pre-swing — is to make him quicker, starting out with the various parts of his body closer to where they need to be when he begins his swing. Shortening up in this way clearly hasn’t hurt his power. He even set a career exit velocity record last week by hitting a Levi Stoudt four-seamer 114.3 mph. It could also be that lowering his hands and staying more level were changes intended to help him elevate the ball, in which case they have been a soaring success.

So this is where I’m going to leave you. Randy Arozarena is off to a great start. He’s got a new swing. He’s studying scouting reports. He’s chasing less. Through some combination of these factors, he’s elevating the baseball, using the whole field, and hitting it very, very hard. Maybe that’s all we need to know.