Friday Rewind: The Luis Arráez Watch is On!

OK, so it’s late June, and I’m calling it: The Luis Arráez .400 watch is officially on.

Arráez went 1 for 3 on Thursday, so his batting average is now .397. The Marlins have played 76 games, so we’re almost at the halfway point. This is getting real!

The highest batting averages at this point since Ted Williams hit .400 in 1941:

1. Larry Walker, 1997: .411.

2. Rod Carew, 1977, .408

3. John Olerud, 1993, .405

4. Stan Musial, 1948, .403

5. Tony Fernandez, 1999, .402

6. Tony Gwynn, 1997, .398

7. Luis Arráez, 2023, .397

8. Tommy Holmes, 1945, .394

9. Wade Boggs, 1987, .391

10. Todd Helton, 2000, .390

I was obviously not born for the Musial and Holmes years, but I have powerful memories of all of the rest … except for the Tony Fernandez one. Why do I have so little memory of Fernandez — who was actually hitting .400 on June 28 of that year? I guess it was because the story was so absurdly unlikely; Fernandez was 37 at the time and it was obvious that he wasn’t going to hit .400.*

*You know, Fernandez was not QUITE a Hall of Famer, but he was a really, really good player. He was a defensive maestro at short when he was young, and then he turned himself into something of a hitting machine — the last four seasons of his career he hit .311 with a .380 on-base. If he’d not gotten hurt, he absolutely might be in Cooperstown.

Is this the new face of .400? (Jasen Vinlove/Miami Marlins/Getty Images)

And now it’s Arráez. This probably goes without saying, but: If Arráez could somehow hit .400, it would be the most incredible batting average season, well, ever. I don’t think anything else would even be close.

Why do I say that? Well, Arráez’s batting style and the era in which he plays make him just about the least likely guy in the world to hit .400.

1. Arráez doesn’t walk, so he’s going to have a ton of at-bats — the more at-bats you get, naturally, the harder it is to hit .400. When Ted Williams hit .400, he walked 147 times.

2. Arráez hits with no power, so he won’t get those 15 or 20 or 30 free hits. When Ted Williams hit .400, he banged 37 home runs. When George Brett challenged .400, he hit 24 home runs in 117 games. Rod Carew, who didn’t hit homers, banged a career-high 14 of them when he challenged .400 in 1977. Tony Gwynn in 1994 was on a career-high home run pace, too.

3. The MLB-wide batting average this year is .247. When Ted Williams did it, it was .262. When George Brett came close, it was .265. With the proliferation of 100-mph relief pitchers coming at you in swarms, the idea of anyone hitting .400 feels absurd. Even hitting .300 feels like an improbability.

4. In years past — say, 2022 — Miami’s Loan Depot Park has been the worst batting average park in the National League.

5. Arráez is not fast. At all. He ranks bottom-quarter across baseball in sprint speed, which means he’s not getting too many infield hits.

6. Arráez doesn’t hit the ball hard. At all. His hard-hit rate this year — as impossible as this is to believe — is just 24%, among the very lowest in baseball.

So how does he do it? Well, incredibly in this day and age, he doesn’t strike out (15 Ks in 295 PAs this year). And he has just proven to be an absolute genius at putting the ball into those hit zones — hitting them where they ain’t, as Willie Keeler famously said. It defies logic, it defies explanation, but here we are.

Here’s an interesting fact: Arráez’s expected batting average is .339. Yes, that’s almost 60 points lower than his actual batting average, but it is still at the top of baseball; Statcast™ is definitely picking up on his genius for getting hits.

Anyway, some things defy explanation — I don’t just mean they can’t be explained, I mean they shouldn’t be explained, This Arráez run at .400 is a wonderful gift, and I check in on it every single day.

Hey, if you feel like it, I’d love if you’d share this post with your friends!

“JUST FOR US”

I cannot even BEGIN to tell you how proud I am of my friend Alex Edelman, whose one-person show “JUST FOR US” opened on BROADWAY Thursday night. I have seen the show twice, only because I haven’t been able to see it three times or four times or 27 times, and I fully intend to see it again now that it’s at the historic Hudson Theatre, which really does spell “theater” that way.

The show is funny, it’s touching, it’s uplifting and thought-provoking all at once, and if you are in New York or plan to be there any time over the next nine weeks, I couldn’t give it a higher recommendation.

Alex also happens to be a ginormous baseball fan who began working for the Red Sox when, and I could have this wrong, he was 6 months old.

WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL Update

Lots of little updates this week on WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, which comes out on Sept. 5.

Update 1: As I mentioned last week, I am going to be reading the audiobook myself! Crazy, right? It could be a complete disaster, but as I also mentioned, I will have a co-reader who will help save me. Who is it? Well, I’m happy to announce here that my co-reader will be the incredible Ellen Adair! How about that?

Update 2: We’re just about ready — I’m pretty sure it will be this coming week — to announce the first dates on my WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL book tour, and I’m SO excited. We will not only announce dates, but each site (so far) will have a super-special guest star for a conversation; I’m telling you the lineup is absolutely killer. I may have already mentioned one or two of the guests in this post.

Update 3: OK, so we’re about 10 weeks out from the book release, and I’ve got some preorder news.

— At Rainy Day Books, we’re entering Phase 2 in our plan to break Mike Schur’s preorder record. The response to Phase 1 — where I am inscribing each book with your requests — was absolutely incredible. An example, from the thousands of books I’m signing:

I’m not saying this is THE 1970s Cubs team; like I said, I’m signing thousands of these books, so I can’t do deep research. But I feel pretty good about that team.

Because of various logistical things, we stopped the personal inscriptions on Father’s Day. But Phase 2 is super cool, too. If you preorder from Rainy Day books, you will get a signed book, along with what they’re calling a “random inscription.” What is a random inscription? All I can tell you is: It will be wonderfully random. It might be a piece of baseball-related inspiration. It might be a player with an overall ranking (example: No. 547: George Foster!). Who knows?

And Rainy Day will be randomly giving away amazing prizes as well — a bottle of barbecue sauce or a Negro Leagues hat or another autographed book or something else that’s super cool. Also, when you preorder the book, there’s a place for you to write why you love baseball … and I’ll be featuring some of those here at JoeBlogs.

We are closing in on Mike Schur, but we haven’t passed him yet. I’m still asking for your help … and the person who buys the record-breaking book will get a super-cool prize on top of everything else.

— The book is also available for preorder from, well, pretty much everywhere, including Bookshop.org, Amazon (obviously), Barnes & Noble (they have signed editions), Books-A-Million (also have a signed edition), Hudson Booksellers, Target, Walmart and a bunch of other places.

Wherever you preorder from, if you save your receipt, you will get a gift. We’re working on the orchestration of this, but every person who preorders will get a copy of MORE WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, a Director’s Cut extra with several moments that did not make it in the book for space reasons. I’m not sure yet if this will be a PDF or a secret link, but we’ll work out the details — I think you’ll like it a lot. It broke my heart to cut some of these moments out of the book. Anyway, more details to come, but save those receipts!

Happy Friday! The Rewind is free so everyone can enjoy it. Just a reminder that Joe Blogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support.

The Commissioner Keeps On Keeping On

Last Friday, I was pretty hard on Rob Manfred — not as hard as many people wanted me to be (I didn’t, for example, imprison him on a remote island with only a few moldy crusts of bread), but I did ask out loud why he’s so incredibly bad at, you know, talking in public.

Since then, I heard from three people who are relatively close to Manfred and all of them wanted to tell me two things:

1. They think Manfred is actually a good guy.

2. They also don’t know why he’s so bad at talking in public.

In late May, Manfred gave a comprehensive interview to Sean Gregory as part of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential Companies,” and the whole thing is worth reading, though it is specifically Manfred’s regrets about how he handled the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal that seem to be making the most news.

“I’m not sure that I would have approached it with giving players immunity,” he said if given a chance to do it over. “Once we gave players immunity, it puts you in a box as to what exactly you were going to do in terms of punishment. … Starting with ‘I’m not going to punish anybody” — maybe not my best decision ever.”

OK, on the one hand, I can appreciate that the commissioner can look back and admit his mistakes. We all should be able to do that.

But … I see absolutely no value in the commissioner coming out now, six years later, to publicly say that he wishes he could go back and punish the Astros players. Who does that serve? Best I can tell it:

1. Encourages opposing fans to boo the Astros even louder.

2. Ticks off Astros fans all over again when they just want to move on.

3. Gets Dodgers’ fans (and Yankees fans) all riled up again.

4. Makes our dear friend Molly Knight lose her mind.

5. Reopens the wounds of a team cheating to win the World Series.

And to what end? How does it help for the commissioner of baseball to say, “You ask me about my biggest regrets, well, damn, I really wish I could go back in time and punish some players. That would have been great!”

Let me say something here: There was no GOOD way to handle the Astros scandal or any other baseball scandal. They’re called “scandals” for a reason. No, I don’t think Manfred handled that scandal especially well, but even if he had handled it perfectly, it would have been a black eye for baseball. All you can do as a commissioner is your best to move the game forward. Going back to revisit it seems like the very last thing you should do as a commissioner.

You know: Manfred should be taking a big ol’ victory lap this year. The rule changes he pushed are wildly popular. The game is vibrant. Young stars are everywhere. Attendance is up. There’s no reason for the commissioner to take my advice, but if I could, I’d advise him to talk more about that (“My biggest regret is we didn’t try these new rules sooner!) and stop with the own goals.

JoeBlogs Weekly Awards

Batter of the Week: Eddie Rosario (.571/1.500/2.147) with four homers and 10 RBIs. Atlanta is so crazy loaded, do they really need Eddie Rosario to turn into Babe Ruth? Well, no, they don’t NEED it, but if you try sometimes, you find, that you get what you need AND what you want.

Pitcher of the Week: Blake Snell (2-0, 0.00 ERA, 23 strikeouts, 3 walks, 5 hits in 12 innings). It seems like every time I look up, some Padres player is doing something amazing. Juan Soto is going 5-for-5 or Fernando Tatis is doing something incredible or, this week, Blake Snell is doing his Sandy Koufax impersonation. But then I look in the standings and see the Padres are still below .500. It’s so weird.

Team of the Week: The Cincinnati Reds (6-0), obviously. In all, they’ve won 11 in a row and are 12-2 since calling up Elly De La Cruz, I cannot tell you how excited I am about a competitive and fun team in Cincinnati; the city just comes alive in so many ways when the Reds are good. Skyline Chili for everybody!*

*And don’t put anything negative in the comments about Skyline Chili. I’ve heard your views and I have firmly rejected them — Skyline Chili is the food of the gods.

Non-Team of the Week: The Pittsburgh Pirates have lost 10 in a row. You knew the start was too good to last, but couldn’t they have let us dream a little bit longer? They did call up Henry Davis, the first pick in the 2021 draft, and Thursday he hit his first big-league homer off Andrew Nardi.

Bottoms Up: The Reverse Power Rankings

1. Athletics (19-58). Eight losses in a row have solidified their top spot.

2. Royals (21-54). There’s just nothing good happening here.

3. Rockies (29-48). Pitcher ERA of 8.72 in their eight-game losing streak.

4. Nationals (28-46). Continue to be the least-interesting team in the game.

5. Cardinals (31-44). Am I surprised Oliver Marmol is still there? Yeah.

6. White Sox (32-44). Did you know their pitchers lead the AL in strikeouts?

7. Pirates (34-40). If you hear any noise, it sure ain’t the Pirates boppin.

8. Tigers (32-41). Is it never going to happen for Spencer Torkelson?

9. Mets (34-40). Highest payroll in baseball history … and it keeps going wrong.

10. Padres (36-39). Why can’t they get out of their own way? No idea.

11. Cubs (36-38). Marcus Stroman is making a Cy Young case for himself.

12. Mariners (36-37). They just keep struggling in the close games.

13. Guardians (36-38). Can you win without homers? Maybe in this division.

14. Twins (38-38). Byron Buxton hit two absolute bombs on Thursday.

15. Red Sox (39-37). How about Justin Turner? Crushing it at 38.

16. Phillies (38-36). Been better lately; Craig Kimbrel looking like his young self.

17. Brewers (38-36). Got to find a way to score runs. The Reds are coming!

18. Blue Jays (41-35). Alek Manoah’s collapse makes it so much harder.

19. Reds (40-35). Elly and Joey and all sorts of joy in the Queen City.

20. Yankees (41-34). So diminished without Judge, but they keep treading water.

21. Dodgers (41-33). After Kershaw and Gonsolin, this pitching staff is a mess.

22. Angels (41-35). Can we just rename Anaheim “Shohei-Time” already?

23. Astros (41-34). So diminished without Yordan, but they keep treading water.

24. Marlins (43-33). They’re doing this even with a struggling Sandy Alcantara.

25. Giants (42-33). I don’t know how they do it. Farhan Zaidi is a literal genius.

26. Diamondbacks (46-40). Corbin Carroll for MVP? Zac Gallen for Cy Young?

27. Orioles (45-28). Félix Bautista has 69 strikeouts in 34 2/3 innings. Wow.

28. Rangers (46-28). Even after getting robbed by a bad call, they keep rolling.

29. Braves (48-26). They’re FOURTEEN GAMES ahead of the Mets. Whew.

30. Rays (52-26). The Wander Franco benching is weird, but the Rays keep on.

This Week in JoeBlogs

Monday: Took a little trip around the sports world, celebrated Wyndham Clark, did not celebrate Paul Azinger, talked a bit about David Freese.

Tuesday: Made a Hall of Fame case for Joey Votto.

Wednesday: Introduced the Refer-a-Reader program, which has been going great — Congratulations to Brilliant Readers Jamison and Justin, who have already won a Refer-a-Reader prize! I hope you’ll help us grow the JoeBlogs community!

Thursday: Another epic set of Brilliant Reader Challenges — remember, you can issue your own challenge by emailing me here.