How to hit over .500 without hitting the ball hard

Luis Arraez is baseball's most fun contradiction.

He leads the Majors in batting average ... even though he rarely hits the ball hard. He leads the National League in OPS ... even though he even more rarely barrels the ball. Arraez is an elite hitter without doing two of the fundamental things hitters want to do to be successful: make hard contact, and drive the ball in the air.

Arraez, fresh off his first career batting title, has a .511 batting average in 2023. He also has a 25.6% hard-hit rate -- only 11 of his 43 batted balls have been hit 95 mph or harder, Statcast's threshold for hard contact. He has a hit in over half of his at-bats, even though under a quarter of those at-bats have ended with a hard-hit ball.

Arraez has a 1.268 OPS. He's also barreled the ball exactly once this season -- which means hitting the ball with the perfect exit velocity and launch angle to get an extra-base hit or home run. That didn't stop Arraez from getting every single type of extra-base hit in the same game when he hit for the first cycle in Marlins history this week.

And this might be the craziest thing of all: Arraez has posted that .511 batting average and 1.268 OPS this season with a maximum exit velocity of 99.5 mph. Yes, one of the very best hitters in Major League Baseball in 2023 has not hit one single baseball 100 mph.

Two hundred and forty-six hitters on Statcast's exit velocity leaderboard hit the ball hard more often than Arraez. Two hundred and fourteen big league hitters have more than one barrel. Three hundred and ninety-four have hit a ball 100-plus mph at least once. Nearly all of them are lesser hitters than Arraez, and few have feats like a batting title or cycle to their name.

So how does he do it? How is Arraez such a great pure hitter without the hard contact to match the numbers on his stat sheet? Here are three reasons.

1) He sprays the ball all over the field

Arraez is a true all-fields hitter, and that is one of his most valuable skills.

The more of the field the defense has to cover against a hitter, the harder it is to take away outs. And Arraez makes opposing teams cover everything.

Arraez has one of the most symmetrical spray charts of any MLB hitter this season. He's pulled 15 of his batted balls; he's hit 14 balls to straightaway center; and he's hit 14 balls to the opposite field.

Very few hitters spread the ball around each third of the field like that. Arraez is in the company of players like Paul Goldschmidt, J.D. Martinez, Manny Machado and Randy Arozarena.

2) He doesn't give away outs

Arraez's all-fields approach is one way he puts pressure on opposing teams. Another way: He doesn't give them any free outs.

The first part of that is, he doesn't strike out. Arraez has just four K's in 53 plate appearances this season, a 7.5% strikeout rate that's the third-lowest in the Majors.

Lowest strikeout rate, 2023

1. José Ramírez: 7.0%
2. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: 7.1%
3. Luis Arraez: 7.5%
4. Brandon Nimmo: 8.1%
5. Will Smith: 8.3%

But the other part is just as important: Arraez doesn't hit into easy outs, either.

He hasn't popped up once this season. Popups are automatic outs -- they might as well be strikeouts. Zero popouts plus only four strikeouts means the defense almost always has to make a play on Arraez to get him out. The pitcher rarely beats him, and he doesn't beat himself.

Arraez finds the launch-angle sweet spot on nearly half of his contact -- that means he's hitting the ball with a launch angle between eight and 32 degrees, covering the most productive range of line drives and fly balls. Arraez's 46.5% sweet-spot rate is among the highest in the Majors.

3) He handles every pitch type

No matter what you throw at Arraez, he can hit it. He's just as productive against fastballs as he is against breaking balls or offspeed pitches.

Look at his 2023 numbers against different pitch types:

vs. fastballs: .484 AVG / .742 SLG
vs. breaking: .500 AVG / .625 SLG
vs. offspeed: .625 AVG / .625 SLG

He does his damage when he gets a hittable fastball, and he simply smacks base hits off secondary pitches. Plus, he rarely swings and misses no matter which pitch he sees.

All of this makes Arraez the type of hitter who must frustrate pitchers to no end. He makes it as hard as possible to get him out, and he doesn't need Aaron Judge's exit velocity to do it.