MLB trends: Luis Arraez won’t strike out, Ceddanne Rafaela levels up and how the Guardians failed José Ramírez

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We are more than halfway through the 2025 MLB regular season. The All-Star break is next week and the trade deadline is two weeks after that. Soon thereafter the dog days of summer will set in, then the postseason races will heat up. Fun times ahead. With that in mind, there are three trends worth keeping an eye on as we get deeper into the 2025 season.  

The un-strikeout-able Arraez

We are in July now. The All-Star break is a few days away. And, entering play Tuesday, Padres first baseman Luis Arraez had struck out nine times this season. Nine. It’s not like he’s missed time with injury either. Arraez has played in 84 of San Diego’s 90 games. His 368 plate appearances are top 30 in the league. Arraez is playing plenty and simply not striking out.

Not striking out is nothing new for Arraez, a reigning three-time batting champ who struck out 106 times total from 2022-24. Already five players this season have at least 106 strikeouts. Arraez’s struck out in only 2.4% of his plate appearances this year. No other qualified hitter is under 6.8%. Only six others are under 10%. In this high-strikeout era, no one gets the bat on the ball like Arraez.

The last qualified hitter with a 2.4% strikeout rate in a non-strike/non-pandemic season was Tim Foli in 1979. The last qualified hitter with a lower strikeout rate was Dave Cash in 1976 (1.8%). Straight strikeout rate lacks context, however. The league strikeout rate is 21.9% this season. It was 12.5% when Foli had a 2.4% strikeout rate in 1979. It was 12.7% for Cash’s season in 1976.

Relative to his era, Arraez’s lack of strikeouts this year is near-historic. We can use K%+ to put Arraez’s strikeout rate into proper context. Similar to OPS+ and ERA+, K%+ is strikeout rate relative to the league average, where 100 is exactly average. In this case, the higher the number, the worse your strikeout rate relative to league average. The lower the number, the better.

FanGraphs calculates K%+ dating back to 1913. Here are the top K%+ seasons by a qualified hitter:

Just to be clear, Arraez’s 11 K%+ means his strikeout rate is only 11% of the league average. Only seven other times has a qualified hitter had 15 K%+ or better and none of those seven have come since Cash in 1976 (Sewell in 1926 is one of the seven).

Sewell, a Hall of Famer, played 14 seasons mostly with Cleveland and also some with the Yankees from 1920-33, and he struck out 114 times in his career. That’s 114 strikeouts in 1,903 games and 8,333 plate appearances. Even by the standards of his era, that’s an extraordinary rate. No player in history struck out as infrequently as Sewell. Arraez is in Sewell’s range this year.

Ironically enough, Arraez’s lack of strikeouts has not led to an uptick in offensive production. He took a .292/.327/.401 batting line into Tuesday’s game and, if he continues at that pace, it would go down as the worst offensive season of his career. Arraez hit .314/.346/.392 last year. The batting average has long made up for the lack of slug. This year, though, his average is down a tad.

Arraez is such a special bat-to-ball guy. If you told me he will hit .375 from today through the end of the season, yeah, I could totally buy it. He’s probably the only player in baseball I could see doing that. The lack of strikeouts is remarkable though. Pitchers throw harder than ever with nastier stuff than ever, and hitters will face three or four different pitchers a night, yet there’s Arraez, striking out at a rate relative to the rest of the league that has not been seen in almost a century.

Rafaela finding another gear offensively

This has been an uneven season for the Red Sox, to put it mildly. They took a 47-45 record into Tuesday’s game and were 10-9 since the Rafael Devers trade. The offense feasted on Nationals pitching this past weekend and scored 27 runs in the three-game sweep. It has been a season of extremes for the BoSox. It seems every winning streak is followed by a two-week rough patch.

Boston’s roster is loaded with young talent and it’s easy to overlook center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela on a team that features Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer, two of the game’s 10 best prospects entering 2025. Rafaela, 24, took a .263/.306/.463 slash line and 12 home runs into Tuesday’s game. That’s on top of superlative defense and baserunning.

Over the last six weeks Rafaela has elevated his game and performed like one of the best hitters in the sport. On the morning of May 26, he was hitting .221/.274/.331 with two home runs in 50 games, putting him firmly in “great glove/no bat” territory. In 37 games since, Rafaela is hitting .318/.348/.636 with 10 homers. He’s become an extra-base hit machine.

“We had a conversation with him about certain things that he could do better,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora told MLB.com on June 21. “His damage to the pull side and obviously at home hitting the ball in the air to right-center as a righty, that doesn’t play. And he started pulling the ball in Milwaukee. And he’s been outstanding.”

May 26 was the first game of that series in Milwaukee. Rafaela did not start that game (he came off the bench late to pinch-run), but the next day he went 1 for 4 with a double. The day after that, he went 3 for 5 with a homer. A week later, he went deep in three straight games. Since that Brewers series, Rafaela has been on a rampage at the plate and great in all aspects of the game.

Pulling the ball in the air is exactly what helped Rafaela level up. Before the Milwaukee series, only 9.6% of his batted balls were pulled in the air, well below the 16.6% league average. Since then it’s a 21.4% pulled fly ball rate. Pulling the ball in the air is the best way to do major damage. They are the most productive batted balls by a mile. Here are the MLB averages:

Rafaela has the added benefit of being a right-handed hitter who plays home games in Fenway Park, where would-be fly outs to left field are routinely turned into base hits by the Green Monster. That’s one reason Alex Bregman, a top pulled-fly ball righty hitter, was such a great fit for them. Now that Rafaela is pulling the ball in the air more often, he’s found another level with his offense.

A year ago, Rafaela slashed .246/.274/.390 but was still a 2.8 WAR player because his defense is so good. With improved offense this year, he’s already at 3.4 WAR, putting him among the top 10 outfielders in the game. Rafaela is essentially the AL’s answer to Pete Crow-Armstrong, albeit with less power. Great defense, great baserunning, few walks, and now power to boot.

Cleveland’s one-man army

Monday night, the Guardians exploded for seven runs in a win over the Astros. Normally I wouldn’t call seven runs an explosion — seven runs is a pretty good game but not an explosion, right? — but in Cleveland’s case, it qualifies. The win snapped a 10-game losing streak in which the Guardians scored 15 total runs, six of which came in one game. It was their first time scoring seven runs since an 11-run outburst on June 11.

The Guardians went into Tuesday’s game ranked 29th in batting average (.224), 29th in on-base percentage (.295), 28th in slugging percentage (.363), 26th in runs per game (3.58), and 23rd in homers (87). They’ve been one of the worst-hitting teams in baseball despite employing José Ramírez, one of the game’s great hitters and top all-around players. The offense surrounding Ramírez is so bad that I am mad on the behalf of Guardians’ fans. Look the numbers:

Ramírez has definitely had a sluggish last few weeks by his standards, but boy, if you’re blaming him for Cleveland’s troubles at the plate, you’re looking in the wrong place. The 12 players surrounding him (really more than that with promotions and demotions) have combined for a .586 OPS in over 1,000 plate appearances since June 1. That is unfathomably bad production.

I understand intentional walks are frowned upon these days, but why in the world would you pitch to Ramírez when that is the team around him? Put up four fingers, let him take his base, and take your chances with everyone else. That is beginning to happen a bit more. The Tigers intentionally walked Ramírez twice this past weekend and he’s been intentionally walked six times in his last 32 games. I would expect to see more intentional walks for J-Ram in the weeks ahead.

Even when they’ve been at their best over the last 10 years or so, the Guardians won with pitching more than offense. Their very best teams have only been a tick better than league average offensively in the last decade. This year’s offense, though, is appalling. Ramírez is propping up a lineup wholly undeserving of a postseason berth. Is any player more important to his team’s offense than this guy? The Guardians would have zero chance without him and, lately, they’ve had little chance with him.

This news was originally published on this post .

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