Luis Arraez Probably Won’t Hit .400... But He Can Still Surpass Ted Williams
The Marlins 2B has a good chance of beating the league’s batting average by a wider margin this season than Williams did in 1941, when he hit .406.
The Miami Marlins have been one of the surprise success stories of the 2023 MLB season, and second baseman Luis Arraez is the biggest reason why. Already an All-Star and a batting champ last year, the 26-year-old joined the Marlins from the Minnesota Twins in an offseason trade and has continued to improve, tracking for the best OPS+ and most Wins Above Replacement of his career by a considerable margin.
But those are new-school side statistics for Arraez. His number getting the most attention is the oldest in the scorebook: batting average, a category where Arraez leads all hitters with a .369 mark. It’s the highest through a team’s first 116 games of a season since Joe Mauer hit .378 in 2009.
The big question is whether Arraez can hone in on a .400 average, which has seemed unreachable in either the American or National League ever since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. (We say AL or NL because, pending the inclusion of the Negro Leagues in MLB’s records, the last major leaguer to hit .400 in a season was possibly Arte Wilson of the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons. Either way, it has been a long time since we’ve seen a .400 hitter!)
At this point, the chances of Arraez hitting .400 are a longshot. But it’s not impossible. Here’s what would need to happen for him to make history.
We looked at all of Arraez’s games in 2023 through Wednesday night, recording the frequency at which he got a given number of at-bats in any given contest. We then set up a simulation of how many at-bats he would see in each of Miami’s remaining games, also simulating how many hits he would get in those at-bats using a binomial distribution based on his .369 average to date. Re-running those simulations 10,000 times, we found that Arraez finished the season hitting .400 or better in 0.23% of them — giving him about a 1 in 435 chance.
Admittedly, those odds aren’t anything you’d bet the farm on. Arraez had a comparatively stronger — if still remote — chance at the feat just a few days ago, but a 1-for-9 series against Cincinnati has made his path to .400 much tougher.
To get there, Arraez now probably needs to hit at least .470 — if not .485 or higher — over the rest of the schedule, depending on how many at-bats he gets during that span. (Amazingly, there were three simulations out of 10,000 in which he hit .470 but still missed on a .400 season because he didn’t get enough at-bats to raise his overall average past .399.) On average, the difference between Arraez hitting .400 and not came down to about 0.46 extra hits per game, or 2.9 extra hits per week, for the rest of the season.
But while the dream of a .400 season is getting increasingly implausible, Arraez has a much higher chance of achieving a different goal: Posting one of the best batting averages in MLB history, relative to the league’s average.
When Williams hit .406 in 1941, the MLB average was .262, or 14 points higher than it is this season. To account for these kinds of changes to the hitting environment over time, FanGraphs has a statistic called AVG+, which scales batting average relative to a league norm of 100. Williams’s .406, then, becomes an AVG+ of 147, or 47% better than league average.
According to AVG+, Arraez is actually outhitting the league in 2023 to a greater degree than Williams did in 1941 — his AVG+ is 148, or 48% better than average. Among seasons with at least 450 plate appearances since 1901, that’s on track for the 10th-best batting average season in modern history.
Just a handful of days ago, Arraez’s AVG+ was at 150 (or 50% better than average), a level of batting proficiency that hadn’t been achieved in a season since Cobb did it in 1917. Among our group of qualified hitters, only seven seasons saw somebody break the 150 AVG+ barrier — making that a more rarified accomplishment for Arraez to target than the raw .400 season (which was done 13 times).
And although he is currently below that level, according to our simulations from above, there’s a 43.9% chance Arraez will finish the season with an AVG+ of at least 150, and a 62.6% chance of beating Williams’ 147 mark from 1941.
It may not be as storied as the hallowed .400 average, but given the context, it would still be one of the greatest seasons in MLB history.
Filed under: Baseball
That's wild that there have only been 2 people to have over 146 AVG+ since 1950. 3 if Arraez keeps this up. And that almost half of that list was just Ty Cobb. Cool stuff.