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Twins’ Luis Arraez has always hit, but first-time all-star has never felt this good

John Shipley, Pioneer Press
·5 min read

Luis Arraez has always been a good hitter, at every level. The Twins infielder was a .331 career hitter in the minors, and entered this season with a .313 batting average in three major-league seasons.

But Arraez has never been as good as he’s been in 2022.

Set to play in his first All-Star Game on Tuesday in Los Angeles, Arraez leads all major-league hitters with a .338 batting average, and leads the American League with a .411 on-base percentage.

Why?

“My legs,” Arraez said last week. “My knees.”

Arraez has played 84 of the Twins’ 94 games this season and avoided the injury list, where he spent parts of his previous three major-league seasons — mostly because of knee injuries. And it’s not just that the left-handed hitting infielder hasn’t missed many games this season.

“I feel way different. I feel healthy. I can do a lot of things,” Arraez said. “This year, if I want to hit homers, I’ll hit homers. Last year, I didn’t hit homers because I didn’t feel that power that I feel right now.”

Arraez isn’t threatening any home run records in 2022, but his five homers this season — including a grand slam that erased a 3-0 deficit in a victory over Tampa Bay on June 16 — are a career high, and he’s on pace to play a career-high 144 games.

He credits time training with former teammate Nelson Cruz in the Dominican Republic last winter, part of an offseason workout regimen the Twins approved. Last year, on the IL with knee and shoulder injuries, he was limited to a career-high 121 games, and he played in just 32 games of the abridged 2020 season because of tendinitis in his left knee.

“It was something that Luis made known he was going to do and it was something we were fully in favor of when we heard that news,” manager Rocco Baldelli said of Arraez’s offseason training with Cruz. “He’s a guy that does take good care of his body, but also a guy who has dealt with some lower-half injuries over the course of his career. Staying strong and staying on the field and staying durable and being able to take his at-bats every day, it’s necessary for his career to get where he needs to be.”

And for the Twins.

Arraez skidded into the all-star break — 6 for 31 (.191) with three extra-base hits in his last nine games — but still leads the majors in batting because after his grand slam game on June 16, Arraez was hitting a robust .367. A fair amount of his outs are line drives hit right at a defender, or an outfielder charging to make a shoe-string catch.

Jim Kaat, who will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame with former teammate Tony Oliva on July 24, spent some time doing color for Twins games in the first half and gave Arraez perhaps the best compliment he could ever get.

“When I first saw Luis when I was doing games, there were a lot of similarities to Rod Carew, because Rodney moved all over the box,” Kaat said last Saturday after the Twins retired his No. 36 in a ceremony at Target Field.

Kaat called Carew, his former Twins teammate who was a seven-time American League batting champion, “a man of a thousand stances. Luis is a little more demonstrative, but there’s a lot of similarities. I just love watching a guy like that that can use all fields.”

These days, that’s the key for the game’s best hitters, Baldelli said. Defensive shifts have neutralized plenty of batters, especially left-handed hitters, who, according to mlb.com’s baseball savant, who were shifted for 57 percent of all plate appearances before the break.

“One of the keys to getting outs these days is putting your defenders right where the guys hit them,” Baldelli said, “and some guys are pretty reliable where they’re going to hit the ball most of the time and some of them are not. Luis is not. When you’ve got to cover twice as much territory, more balls are going to fall.”

Defenses have on Arraez in 2.6 percent of his 346 plate appearances, according to baseball savant. Only 10 players with at least 300 at-bats have been shifted less, and only one — Kansas City’s Nicky Lopez (2.3 percent) — is left-handed.

“He’s like all good hitters,” White Sox manager Tony La Russa said. “He doesn’t throw any at-bats away, he has a lot of pitches he gets to and he swings for the whole field. He’s tough to pitch to, he’s tough to defend.”

Asked whether he believed American League manager Dusty Baker would give at least one at-bat to the major-league batting leader, Arraez said, “I think one hundred percent yes? I want to hit there. I think yes. Maybe two at-bats.”

Whatever chances he gets, Arraez credits his offseason work with Cruz, whose everyday routine has become legendary because at age 42, he has 457 career home runs and has played 85 games for the Washington Nationals this season as the designated hitter.

“Nelson helped me with that. I want to appreciate him because he helped me with my body,” Arraez said. “I lost seven pounds there. Seven, eleven … something like that. I felt it. I can run around. I can hit homers. I can hit a lot of doubles. Not only line drives. I can hit homers, too. But it’s not me to hit homers. I feel strong because I worked hard, and I feel healthy.”

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