Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
“One of the best hitters in baseball – last three years, batting titles with three different teams.” That’s the first thing viewers heard about Luis Arraez this postseason, a quote from the bottom of the first inning of the Padres-Braves Wild Card series. Arraez singled and promptly scored on a Fernando Tatis Jr. home run. It was just how you’d draw it up, and San Diego won a 4-0 laugher. That’s the promise of Arraez – a near-automatic baserunner completely immune to strikeout pitching.
“He’s a tough dude to face… He could set the tone just like Ohtani could set the tone for their respective clubs.” That one comes from the last game Arraez played this postseason, as he was mired in a deep slump. After that first single, he went 2-for-8 with two more singles the rest of the Atlanta series. Then he went a desultory 4-for-22 (all singles) in the NLDS against Dodgers. He fulfilled plenty of the Arraez-ian promise we expect – just one strikeout in 31 plate appearances – but he simply couldn’t buy a hit. It’s hard to learn much from a down series like that. Obviously, Arraez wasn’t contributing to the Padres offense – no one contributes when they post a 27 wRC+. But hidden in that statement is an unstated counterfactual: When Arraez goes, it is implied, the Padres go. His single-hitting prowess is the straw that stirs the drink for a fantastic offense that ranked eighth in the majors in runs scored this year despite playing in one of the toughest offensive environments out there. There’s just one problem with that statement: It’s not true. Arraez didn’t stir the drink for the Padres this year, even as he cruised to his third straight batting title. That sounds crazy, but it’s true. There’s just something about that shiny batting average that messes with our ability to evaluate players.
What’s the point of hitting in baseball? It’s to score runs, obviously. There’s a wonderful statistic, RE24, that measures this directly. RE24 is quite simple. It takes the run expectancy of an inning before each plate appearance and compares it to the run expectancy afterward, with the difference credited or debited to the hitter. It’s context-dependent, which is clearly important when you’re talking about scoring runs. Men on second and third with two outs? A single is way better than a walk, and RE24 tells you that: A two-RBI single counts for 1.63 runs above average in that situation, while a walk counts for 0.22 runs. Bases empty to lead off the inning? A walk and a single are the same, 0.4 runs. Batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, even OPS+ and wRC+ — none of them really capture this. RE24 measures it quite well. It’s not perfect, of course. It doesn’t take team composition into account, so getting on base in front of Juan Soto and Aaron Judge is undervalued. That’s a mark in Arraez’s favor, for the record — his team has some really good hitters batting after him, so getting on base is worth a hair more than a league average measure would suggest. RE24 is also extremely noisy, because batters have little control over the situations they’re put in, so plenty of what we’re measuring is context rather than talent. But if you’re looking for hitters who helped their teams score more runs — not theoretical runs or “in the long run this skill set is preferred” runs, but actual runs — it’s a great metric. It even gives a bonus for outs that let runners advance, the cherished “productive out,” while subtracting points for hitting into double plays.
So who was the best hitter in baseball by RE24 this year? That would be Judge, and by a wide margin. He added a whopping 95.7 runs of value in 2024. Shohei Ohtani finished second with 79.6 runs, while Soto was third with 69; Tatis leads for playoff RE24. If you were explaining baseball to someone who had never heard of it before and had no concept of any statistics at all, you’d use something like this to point out who the best offensive players are. It’s simple: They’re the ones who help their teams score the most runs. The leaders of this list absolutely pass the intuition test. Watch their games, and you’ll sense how much they matter. They’re constantly either amping up the pressure or cashing in runners on base. They’re the highest-stress plate appearances for opponents. No one is getting a soda during their at-bat because the game might turn on what happens during it.
You can ascend to the top of this leaderboard in more ways than one. Jurickson Profar features highly on the chart without being a fearsome home run hitter; he gets on base frequently and also sends runners on the basepaths home with a boatful of singles and doubles. Jackson Chourio, Mookie Betts, and Jarren Duran are in the top 25. Power hitters, strike zone wizards, and doubles merchants all get their due.
Arraez’s RE24 clocked in at negative 3.34 this year. Now, that’s not as bad as it sounds. We calculate RE24 based on last year’s run scoring environment and true it up at year’s end (we update it after the conclusion of every season in our normal end-of-year updates). There were roughly 900 fewer runs scored this year than last, and league-wide RE24 checked in at -946 – this will balance out (we also have some extra-inning adjustments to make). You can assign each plate appearance a slight positive adjustment to make up for that and recenter it around zero. That would add 3.5 runs to Arraez’s total – and make him almost exactly average. Even wRC+, which has a lower opinion of Arraez than the batting average apologists singing his praises, thought of him as above average this year.
“A hit is better than a walk” is one of the central arguments that those folks make in advancing batting average over more holistic measures of offensive production. There’s a disconnect here somewhere. The thing is that Arraez, like all hitters, bats with the bases empty a good bit of the time. We can compare how Arraez does in those situations to the average hitter quite easily. The important numbers are on-base percentage (because here, a walk truly is as good as a single) and extra bases per plate appearance. With no runners to advance, it only matters where the batter ends up. In these situations, Arraez acquits himself well when it comes to reaching base. He posted a .328 OBP with the bases empty, meaningfully better than the league mark of .302.
What does that mean in terms of run expectancy? I wanted a more precise answer than a blanket adjustment, so I created my own run expectancy table using data from every regular season game this year (excluding the ninth inning and extra innings, where run scoring gets abbreviated thanks to walk-offs). Here’s that matrix, just for posterity’s sake:
Run Expectancy, 2024
Bases/Outs
0 1 2
— .491 .265 .096
1– .890 .533 .228
12- 1.487 .930 .447
123 2.324 1.612 .821
1-3 1.910 1.224 .514
-2- 1.125 .689 .346
-23 2.031 1.408 .601
–3 1.403 .960 .356
With that in hand, I plugged in the numbers, and shockingly, Arraez’s on-base skill doesn’t make him a valuable hitter with no one on base. That’s because Arraez is only ever getting you first base, more or less, and that’s just not as valuable as you’d think. With no one out, you could get on base at a .360 clip with no extra-base hits whatsoever and be value-neutral. I got that number by comparing the difference between what you gain by putting a runner on first with no one out (.399 runs) and what you lose by going from no outs to one out with the bases empty (-.226 runs). That breakeven on-base percentage gets higher as the outs tick up, naturally – a runner on first gets less valuable as the likelihood of driving him in before the inning ends goes down. It’s .387 with one out…
