Luis Arráez is putting up video game numbers in his first season with the Miami Marlins. Entering Sunday, Arráez led MLB with a .402 batting average and a .452 on-base percentage in 60 games while racing toward his second All-Star appearance.
Back in Minnesota, Arráez’s former team is putting up its own kind of video game numbers – the ones when you put the difficulty too high and want to throw your controller.
Before scoring nine runs in Saturday’s win over the Blue Jays, the Twins had scored nine runs in the previous seven games (June 3-9) and are hanging onto first place in the American League Central with a record just above .500 (33-32 entering Sunday).
Anybody who watches can tell that Arráez has been pretty good and the Twins have been pretty bad. But what’s even more depressing is that Arraez produced the equivalent of the entire Twins lineup June 3-9.
In that week, Arraez hit .600/.615/.760. Those numbers are enough to outproduce most lineups but it completely dwarfs the Twins, who hit .172/.227/.286 over the same time frame.
Even more staggering is that Arraez had more power and run production than the Twins’ entire lineup. Arráez didn’t hit a home run last week – and has just one home run this season – but he posted a .160 ISO average, which only takes extra-base hits when compiling an average.
By comparison, the Twins posted a .115 ISO average June 3-9.
Of course, the biggest difference is the strikeouts. The Twins struck out in 29.3% of their at-bats from June 3-9 while Arraez didn’t record a single strikeout in 25 at-bats. Even in the Twins’ victory on Saturday, they fanned 17 times before an eighth-inning rally helped them beat the Blue Jays.
Want more? Arráez was a more effective run producer with nine RBIs over this sample size, the same number of runs the Twins scored June 3-9. Talk about a brutal seven games for Minnesota.
All of these are impressive in isolation, but when listed side-by-side, it shows just how great Arráez has been and how putrid the Twins’ bats have been.
It’s irrational to believe that keeping Arráez in Minnesota would have completely solved the Twins’ problems at the plate. It’s also ignoring that the player he was traded for, Pablo López, has helped give the Twins one of the best starting rotations in baseball.
However, it’s not a good look for a team that’s struggling to score runs. The Twins will need to pick it up at the plate in order to win the division and even then, it may not be enough to end their 18-game postseason losing streak.
