Sometimes You Gotta Strike Out

1. A player does a lot with a little and 2. A player does a little with a lot.

Day 69 Of The 2025 MLB Season
How do I put this? Okay let me try—

A player hits a home run. That’s performance that we count on the player’s ledger. A player races down the line to try to beat out a double play. That’s performance, we stir it into his Sprint Speed. A pitcher throws a wild slider for ball four. That’s performance and we log it, put it in a whole bunch of his stats, draw some conclusions about his ability. Games turn on these things.

But what percentage of a baseball game’s events—of the game’s outcome, even—has nothing to do with performance at all, but is based on reputation?

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Here’s an example:

I saw a slide from a presentation at Saberseminar in Chicago last weekend. It was a visual of what the researcher, Zach Borowiak, called “indirect framing runs.” When a catcher is a good framer, Borowiak seems to have found, batters expect more pitches to be called strikes, and they respond by further expanding their swing range. So you have this situation:

Batter A, knows the catcher’s work, knows the catcher’s reputation: Swings at strikes and also at balls he knows are just off the plate. Hits .250.

Control Batter B, never seen the catcher before, knows nothing except his own abilities. Swings only at strikes. Hits .260.

Crucially, on these extra swings from Batter A, the catcher didn’t do anything. He never touched the ball, didn’t frame the pitch, might not have gotten the strike if the batter hadn’t swung, might not have even caught the pitch cleanly. But his reputation changed the play. Specifically, in this case, it caused the batter to make himself a worse batter.

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The most direct way this shows up is intentional walks. With exactly one exception¹, a walk is never a positive outcome for the defense, at least by Win Probability Added. But the hitter’s reputation might be so robust that the defense simply gives in to him, lets the hitter take down the small pot rather than risk contributing to a bigger one.

Aaron Judge has a .440 on-base percentage this year. Take out his 29 intentional walks and it drops 30 points, and his WAR drops by ~ half a win. (At Baseball Reference he leads the majors in WAR by about ~ half a win, over Pete Crow-Armstrong, who has zero IBB). For all we know Judge would have hit into 29 double plays if they’d pitched to him, but they didn’t/he didn’t. Those 29 Yankees games were affected to some degree not by performance but by reputation.

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A batter who is so good at hitting a certain pitch, or pitches in certain locations, that he forces the pitcher to abandon those pitches or locations, narrowing the pitcher’s repertoire. He’s made the pitcher worse.

A pitcher whose two-strike putaway pitches are so unhittable that batters expand the range of pitches they’re willing to swing at early in counts. He’s made the batter worse.

An outfielder whose arm is so good that runners dare not challenge it. He needn’t actually make a good throw for his team to get the benefit of a good throw. He’s made the baserunner slower.

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Anyway, here’s probably my favorite baserunning of the year, by Pete Crow-Armstrong, on a grounder Carson Kelly hit on Day 69 of the season:

One of the fastest players in baseball doesn’t break for home, doesn’t outrun anybody, doesn’t show off the wheels, just basically stands perfectly still, being. The major league third baseman knows that Crow-Armstrong is so fast that he’ll probably run home and score on a throw to first. He also knows that Crow-Armstrong is so fast that, in a race back to third base, Crow-Armstrong will win. So the major league third baseman stands there, his brain just glitching, thwarted by an opponent’s essence. Eventually, there’s no play at first left, so a half-hearted attempt to tag Crow-Armstrong is pathetically pursued and abandoned.

The next batter drove Crow-Armstrong home. The one after that drove home Carson Kelly, who should never have reached first base. Kelly’s run tied the game; the Cubs went on to win.

No replay showed PCA’s face. I’d like to think he was giving the third baseman a big, smirking grin throughout the play.

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Day 70 Of The 2025 MLB Season
When Statcast introduced the Barrel metric back in 2016, a barrel was defined as any batted ball with an expected batting average of .500 and an expected slugging percentage of 1.500². Entering play on June 4, 70 days into the season, there were 444 major leaguers who’d hit at least one ball that met those two thresholds. Luis Arráez, the Padres’ starting DH that night, wasn’t one of them.

He came to the plate in the ninth inning representing the go-ahead run. If ever there was a time to air out his swing and sell out for power, that would be the time, and he did. His swings early in the plate appearance were, by his own modest swing-speed standards, 90th percentile bat speed, 85th percentile, and 55th percentile. Then he got a middle-middle 1-2 pitch, swung hard, stayed in his legs, and drove one deep into the gap. Unfortunately for the Padres, it was the Oracle Park gap, where defenders overshade to prevent triples. Arráez was out on a nice running catch.

He had his first barrel. But here’s the kooky part: Of all the balls that had xBA > .500 and xSLG > 1.500 this year, Arráez’ was literally the worst, or, at least, tied with a few other balls hit at the same exit velo + launch angle. More than 6,000 balls have been hit in the majors this year that meet that original barrel definition, and by expected wOBA Arráez’ was the worst. That concludes the story of Luis Arráez’ barrel.

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You might have heard of Goodhart’s Law, which says: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It can even become a harmful measure by driving counterproductive behavior. A classic example in a Tweet:

I can’t speak to what’s going on in Arráez’ heart, but circumstantially, his season shows signs of a Goodhart situation.

A few years ago Arráez—a genuine marvel in the modern game—was a very good hitter who rarely struck out, two details that seemed positively reinforcing. Over the past two seasons, he has struck out even less often. Five years ago he struck out in 10 percent of his plate appearances, and it has dropped each year since: to 7.1 percent, then 5.5 percent, then 4.3 percent, then this year 2.7 percent. The next best contact hitter in all of baseball strikes out almost three times as often as he does. He gets a lot of attention for these achievements—last year he went a whole month without a strikeout!—and he seems to value them: “Everybody hates strikeouts. But especially me,” he said last year.

But the less he strikes out, the worse he gets. As Dan Szymborski’s headline at FanGraphs put it this year, Arráez has “entered the contact rate death spiral.” Any adjustment for more contact means tradeoffs, and Arráez’ bat path has gotten flatter each of the past two years, which can be (though isn’t necessarily) bad; his swing has gotten slower each of the past two years, which can be (but isn’t necessarily) bad; and, most significantly, his contact rate on pitches outside the zone is up by a ton. That’s often bad, because pitches outside the zone are rarely hit well.

The sight of Arráez hitting pitches way outside the strike zone—and simultaneously putting up a legitimately historic strikeout rate, and perhaps simultaneously costing himself tens of millions of dollars as an impending free agent—will be one of my most memorable details of the 2025 season. Arráez doesn’t just put bad pitches in play; he puts every type of bad pitch in play.

Only five left-handed batters have put a pitch in play that was more inside than this:

Only two left-handers have put a pitch in play that was more outside than this:

Only nine left-handers have put a higher pitch in play (most or all of them much taller than Arráez):

And only three left-handers have put a lower pitch in play this year:

Here’s a bonus one, for kicks:

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His contact rate on pitches outside the zone this year is 92 percent. Only five hitters in all of baseball have a contact rate that high in the zone.

This has come as Arráez has chased far most pitches than he used to, which is probably not a coincidence. What I think we can theorize is that Arráez has simplified hitting for himself: Rather than going into each pitch (especially deeper in counts) with two questions—whether to swing and, if so, how to hit it—he has simply pre-approved the first question (yes, he’s swinging) so that he can focus singlemindedly on the second. There’s not much ambiguity, just a task. This, along with and thanks to his elite bat-to-ball skills, turns out to be a pretty great strategy for avoiding strikeouts.

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But the problem isn’t just that he’s ending at-bats on pitchers’ pitches a foot off the plate. Astoundingly, he actually gets a lot of his hits on those pitches. Astoundingly, he’s actually hitting better on pitches outside the zone than inside the zone this year. That seems like a point in his strategy’s favor, but it hints at the bigger problem: You can throw him a pitch right down the middle, and he’s no longer prepared to drive it.

Hitters will talk about how hard it is to cover the whole strike zone, to cover inner half and outer half at the same time. They deal with this by cutting the zone in half, trying to do damage on one half while merely fighting off the other. Arráez isn’t just trying to cover the whole strike zone, but the whole strike zone plus a foot in every direction. That’s the tradeoff: His brain is overextended. He’s just one lonely sheriff’s deputy trying to cover a county as big as Wyoming.

On pitches middle-middle, like the one you saw up above—his first barrel of the year, though literally the bottom of the barrels—that’s where the vacuum is. Until 2022, he had a .420 wOBA on those pitches. Since 2023, when his chase rate jumped from the low 20s to the low 30s, his wOBA on middle-middle pitches is .303. One of those numbers is pretty good, well ahead of league average; the other is about as bad as major leaguers get.

Anyway, Arráez hasn’t struck out in two weeks and 53 plate appearances. He might never strike out again. For now, it’s a bit of a conundrum.

Previously: Days 67 & 145 Of The 2025 MLB Season
Also Previously: Days 66 & 68 Of The 2025 MLB Season

1. Tie game in a walk-off situation, runners at second and third with one out. IBB sets up the double play and a force out at home, and increases defense’s win probability by about 1 percent.

2. That’s not the technical standard for Barrels anymore, but for Fun Fact reasons you’ll understand as we go on, it’s convenient for me to keep using the originally announced thresholds.