July 1, 2023

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

On June 2 of 1980, George Brett was hitting .300. Then his bat turned into some kind of radar-equipped skillet. He relentlessly hit until he went 5-for-5 in Milwaukee, on Aug. 26. The Kansas City third baseman was now hitting .407.

Three consecutive two-hit games in September got Brett to .400 on Sept. 19. But he followed that with a four-hit week. Brett was back at .385 on Sept. 27 with four games left. He would wind up at .390 and win the American League Most Valuable Player award.

On July 1 of 1977, Rod Carew was hitting .411. He was posing on the cover of Sports Illustrated with Ted Williams, who hit .406 for the season in 1941. He stayed above .400 for 10 more days, then began to fade, point by point.

At the end he had 13 multi-hit games out of 17 for Minnesota, which got him back to .388. He had already clinched his sixth American League batting title, out of seven, but he also led the league in runs, hits (239), on-base percentage, OPS, intentional walks and triples (16). For that, he also was named MVP.

On Aug. 11 of 1994, Tony Gwynn was hitting .394. He had just gone 3-for-5 at Houston. That was Gwynn’s high-water mark since June 1. San Diego was on the edge of his seat to watch Gwynn make his run, but the bat was removed from his hand by a baseball strike, and the season would end right there. Gwynn won the National League batting champion for the fifth time, and he would win it again each of the next three seasons.

If there is something involving a bat and a baseball that George Brett, Rod Carew and Tony Gwynn can’t do, it probably can’t be done. At their very best, those Hall of Famers could not hit .400.

So it’s not terribly realistic, at the season’s midpoint, to think Luis Arraez of the Miami Marlins can do so. But it’s refreshing to watch him try.

On the morning of June 30, Arraez was hitting .392. Any time a hitter nudges above the .400 mark after June 1, the historians among us are going to stir. Arraez was at .402 on June 23.

Then he went 5-for-20 and lost 10 points. That’s the nature of this beast. You don’t have to have a slump to be thrown off the scent. You just have to quit being hot. If you’re at .400 and you have a 2-for-5 night, you don’t gain ground,

You stay right there. And when the at-bats get to 400 and beyond, the process of gaining batting-average points is excruciating.

We might not have pitchers like Sandy Koufax, Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux among us, but we have more good ones, with much more velocity, pitch variety and science, than ever before.

To keep this going, Arraez will often have to figure out three pitchers in four plate appearances. He can’t afford line-drive outs. He has a better chance now that the shifts are illegal, but fielders are still better positioned than ever.

But it is a glorious quest because Arraez is doing it alone. He has a 56-point lead on Ronald Acuna Jr., who has the second-best average in baseball. He is 74 points ahead of Bo Bichette and Austin Hayes tied for the AL lead at .316.

Arraez has struck out 17 times in his first 326 plate appearances, yet he is not serving wiffle balls into the outfield. His slugging percentage of .481 is 24th in the NL, and his .442 on-base percentage is 16 points ahead of runnerup Juan Soto. Thus, Arraez’s OPS ranks tied for fifth with Mookie Betts behind Acuna, Freddie Freeman, Corgin Carroll and Olson. They have 20, 14 17 and 26. Betts has 22. Arraez has three.

Because the national cable networks have not weaned themselves off the Yankees, Red Sox and Mets, and because they harrdly ever showcase teams like the Marlins, you might not know Arraez well enough to pronounce his name (uh-RISE). They know him in Minnesota, where he won the AL batting title last year (.316) and still got traded to Florida for pitcher Pablo Lopez.

Arraez is 5-foot-10 and 175, an incongruous-looking fellow in the general manner of Kirby Puckett, and the Twins fans prized him.

In Miami he is the centerpiece of a much larger story. With first-year manager Skip Schumaker, the Marlins are 48-34, tied for the second-best record in the league, even though Sandy Alcantara, last year’s Cy Young Award winner, has scuffled, and dynamic outfielder/infielder Jazz Chisholm has been hurt.

Miami’s pitching ranks third in the league in runs allowed, leads in strikeouts and is tied for fifth-best in walk avoidance. Eury Perez, arrestingly talented at 6-foot-8 and 20 years old, has an OPS of 0.979 and has struck out 54 in 47 innings. A.J. Puk, formerly a first-round draft pick of the Athletics who came to Miami in exchange for outfielder J.J. Bleday, has saved 13 games in 15 chances.

If this keeps up, Schumaker might become the league’s Manager of the Year. Better yet, general manager Kim Ng might become the first woman to win Executive of the Year.

Arraez, from Venezuela, has that mysterious, Gwynnish knack of actually deciding where to hit the ball, then hitting it there. This is heresy to analytics fans, who consider batting average a tool of the devil, instead of taking it into consideration with the same perspective everyone else has used for 100 years. But Arraez notices if the second baseman has moved into the hole, or whether the shortstop has moved closer to the bag, and he tries his best to drive the ball into that space.

His exit velocity isn’t much, and he hits a lot of grounders. It’s not all bad. If a hitter doesn’t make contact, runners don’t move and fielders don’t have chances to make errors. There are such things as productive outs, as tired as we are of hearing it.

Arraez learned to hit when his father took a baseball and tied it to a mango tree in the backyard. With the Twins he caught the eye of Carew, who still visits spring training. They still talk by phone during the season. Former teammate Martin Perez calls him “the Tony Gwynn of Venezuela,” and Cleveland manager Terry Francona told Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Chip Scoggins that he’d willing to “take $100 and go to Vegas and put it on Arraez winning a batting title, somewhere down the road.” He said that when Arraez was 22.

But if a single nestles into the outfield, does it make a sound in Miami? The Marlins are averaging 12,131 despite all this promise, an increase of 574 per game. South Floridians are resourceful when it comes to inventing reasons not to watch baseball, although they came out in force for the World Baseball Classic games. Maybe Arraez shouldn’t waste a run at history on so many empty seats.

Then again, it’s inspiring to see a guy churn his way against the current, rowing with his bat.