You’re Not Going To Believe What Xavier Edwards Is Slapping Now

The 2023 Miami Marlins were pretty good. They couldn’t hit much, but they had a huge surplus of pitching. Enough not only to survive an injury to 2022 Cy Young winner Sandy Alcantara, but to trade from that surplus and acquire batting champion Luis Arraez. They won 84 games and made the playoffs. Once there, they got completely smoked in the Wild Card round, but things seemed to be going in the right direction.

They weren’t. More injuries piled up in 2024. Other pitchers regressed. Many, if not most, of the key players from 2023 — Jazz Chisholm Jr., Jake Burger, Josh Bell, Jesús Luzardo, Jorge Soler, Tanner Scott, A.J. Puk, even Arraez himself — either were traded or left as free agents. So too did manager Skip Schumaker, who earned plaudits for his handling of a flawed but decent roster in 2023, but lost 100 games a year later with the shattered remnants of that playoff team. He’s probably better off.

If you want reasons for optimism, you’re going to have to look hard. But if you want to find the successor to Arraez, you can stop at the top of Miami’s lineup.

Xavier Edwards was a bit player on the 2023 Marlins; he got into 30 regular season games and batted just once in Miami’s two-game Wild Card round loss to the Phillies. But he got his money’s worth out of that plate appearance: He singled and came around to score Miami’s only run in Game 1. Elevated to starting shortstop for the Marlins in early July of last year, he hit .328/.397/.423 in 70 games. That’s a 128 wRC+, plus 31 stolen bases in 35 attempts, and 2.2 WAR in roughly half a season.

Now, I’m not saying that Edwards is as good a contact hitter as Arraez. Maybe one or two other guys in the entire league can put the bat on the ball as well as Arraez can; Edwards’ in-zone contact rate last year was 89.7%, which would’ve been 26th among qualified hitters if he’d doubled his playing time. Arraez was second in in-zone contact rate, at 96.4%.

Arraez struck out just 4.3% of the time and walked 3.6% of the time; those numbers are positively anachronistic. What in the Wee Willie Keeler does he think he’s doing? Edwards’ walk and strikeout rates are more normal by comparison: 17.2% strikeout rate and 10.9% walk rate. But these days, even a 17.2% strikeout rate is good for the best third in the league, and when Edwards makes contact — which, again, is frequent, he hits a lot of line drives. His LD% in 2024 was 22.7%, which would’ve been tied for 20th among qualified hitters with Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman.

So we’ve got a line drive hitter with plus bat-to-ball skills, at an up-the-middle position, with eye-popping baserunning numbers. The 31-for-35 stolen base rate in half a season is pretty bonkers on its own, but consider that Edwards produced 6.2 runs of baserunning value in just 70 games, which was a top-10 figure in baseball regardless of playing time. Baserunning creates less value than hitting or defense, but it’s a free six runs — more than 10 runs prorated over a whole season. Are you turning up your nose at an extra 10 runs if you’re the Marlins? I think not.

In short, Edwards was very, very good last year and I like a lot about his game, and I think his combination of on-base ability and speed makes him a very effective leadoff hitter. (And don’t underrate the speed part, since the middle of the Marlins’ order isn’t going to be that helpful in getting Edwards around the bases.)

So what’s the catch?

Wait, why would there have to be a catch?

There’s always a catch. It’s the Marlins. Plus, if I actually thought Edwards was an impact shortstop who could hit .330 with 70 walks and 60-odd stolen bases year after year, I’d be comparing him to, like, Elly De La Cruz and not Arraez. And I would’ve written about him months ago instead of waiting for a slow news day in January.

OK, fine, there’s a catch. Two catches, actually.

The first: “Catch” might not be the right word to use, because Edwards is not a shortstop long-term. Out of 34 players who logged 500 or more innings at short in 2024, Edwards was 33rd in total OAA, and dead last on a per-inning basis. Depending on what numbers you use, Edwards’ shortstop defense ranges from terrible to ho-ho-ho-rrendous. This is a second baseman if ever I saw one.

The second is that Edwards might hit a lot of line drives, but he doesn’t hit the ball hard at all. That’s evident just from his back-of-the-baseball card stats: a .094 ISO and just 18 extra-base hits in 70 games, including only one home run. But he did hit five triples, including three in the span of four at-bats in the third-to-last game of the season. That was the first three-triple game in Marlins history and tied the major league record; there have only been six other such games in the past 40 years and no others since 2014.

That’s a nice bit of trivia, but it distracts from a necessary bit of BABIP deconstruction. Edwards posted a BABIP of .398 in 2024; as a fast switch hitter who hits a lot of line drives and grounders, you’d expect Edwards to run a high BABIP, but you’d have to be Ichiro to even come close to sustaining a .398 mark.

And unlike Ichiro, Edwards probably could not win the Home Run Derby if he put his mind to it. Out of more than 300 hitters who saw at least 1,000 pitches in 2024, Edwards was tied for last in batted balls with an exit velocity of 100 mph or more: 14. He also outperformed his xBA by 76 points, which was not only the largest discrepancy in baseball among hitters with at least 100 balls in play, it was the largest discrepancy in baseball by more than 40%.

In short, I’m taking the under on Edwards repeating his .328 batting average and .397 OBP.

What’s a more realistic expectation, then? Well, we’ve got projections systems for that sort of thing, and as of this week, there’s not just Steamer but OOPSY. When I looked at Edwards’ projections for 2025, I wasn’t blown away, but neither did I despair.

Most of all, I realized something: Arraez was not the first stocky Marlins second baseman named Luis to put up goofy batting average figures. And I’d been comparing Edwards to the wrong one. Here are Edwards’ projected numbers for 2025, along with the totals for both Arraez and Luis Castillo (the original one) over their respective Marlins careers.

Let’s say Edwards hits in the high .200s, with a low-double-digit walk rate, basically zero power, and between 30 and 60 steals a year. We know exactly what that looks like in a Marlins second baseman, because Castillo did it for the best part of a decade. And while he never pushed the boundaries of the sport the way Arraez has, he made three All-Star teams, scored almost 100 runs per 162 games in a Marlins uniform, and hit second for a team that won the World Series. And if you needed any further grip for a 2003 flashback, Edwards even has Jeff Conine’s son playing behind him in an outfield corner and hitting lower in the lineup.

So now all the Marlins need to do is find this generation’s Ivan Rodriguez, Miguel Cabrera, Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, Derrek Lee, Dontrelle Willis, Brad Penny, Juan Pierre…