Arraez's pursuit of history amazes Orioles

BALTIMORE -- Twice over the past month, Luis Arraez has let his batting average slip to .380 or lower. Each time, Arraez responded with five-hit games, reviving his chances at history in dramatic fashion. .380 isn’t an official threshold, but if you are trying to hit .400, eventually, it is probably an insurmountable one. At some point not too far on the calendar, anything below .380 could effectively erase Arraez’s quest to achieve what no player has over a full season since Ted Williams in 1941.

So it was notable how Arraez woke up Saturday hitting .380, dragging his lowest batting average since June 15 into the Marlins' eventual 6-5 loss to the Orioles. How did he respond? Not with another five-hit game, right? Almost.

Arraez led off the game by flying out to center field, then recorded four straight hits, raising his average back up to .386 with his sixth four-hit game of the season. That’s tops in the Majors this year and already establishes a new Marlins record for a full season_,_ with Arraez besting Hanley Ramirez’s previous mark from 2007 in only Miami’s 94th game of 2023.

Meanwhile, the Orioles became the latest team to marvel at Arraez’s ability from the opposing dugout.

“What a hitter,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “He’s a really, really good player. We have our hands full with him, and we need to pitch him extremely well.”

Baltimore pitchers kept Arraez hitless in Friday’s series opener, the Marlins’ second baseman’s second consecutive hitless game stretching back before the All-Star break (he went 2-for-2, on two pitches, in the All-Star Game). They had no such luck Saturday. Arraez’s first-inning flyout made him hitless in his last eight official at-bats dating back to June 9. Then he singled home a run against Kyle Gibson in the second, singled again in the fourth and sixth off Gibson, and punched an opposite-field double down the left-field line off Yennier Cano in the eighth.

Arraez’s 36 multi-hit games this season are second-most in MLB, behind only Ronald Acuña Jr.’s 38. Arraez’s 130 hits are five more than anyone in the Majors, and his .386 average is 54 points higher than the next qualified hitter. His .437 on-base percentagealso leads the Majors by 17 points.

“The bat-to-ball skills, the barrel control,” Hyde said. “He’s not going to light the charts up from an exit velocity [standpoint] and all those things people look at. But he can flat-out hit, and he hits the ball everywhere.”

Said Gibson: “I played with him in 2019, and for a rookie, sitting next to him on the bench, it’s one of the only guys that I’ve seen so locked into a game that he can tell you if the pitch is going to be a ball or strike when it is just out of the pitcher’s hand. Sitting next to him, he’s legitimately verbally saying, ‘Ball. Strike. Ball.’ And he was right every time.”

Arraez is on pace to set a Marlins record with 224 hits. Only three players -- Jose Altuve (2014), Ichiro Suzuki (5 times), and Darin Erstad (2000) -- have that many hits in a season this century.

“He’s a really good hitter, and he’s a guy that you really don’t want to face in any situation,” Gibson said. “My plan was really to try to not let him get eight- or nine-pitch at-bats, because he will. Make him put the ball in play, and hope he hits it at somebody.”

Said Marlins manager Skip Schumaker: “I think .400 is a possibility but it’s hard. It’s hard to hit .300. The fact that we’re even talking about .400 is pretty crazy.”