How Luis Arraez defied gravity to become one of MLB's best trade deadline candidates

Luis Arraez has never really made any sense. But lately, he makes even less sense (which is a good thing), and it has him in his sixth All-Star Game. What’s going on here?

Arraez is one of MLB’s most interesting players: he never strikes out, he has an impossibly low eight percent whiff rate — you cannot miss his bat. But he also never walks, hits for approximately zero power and is one of those late-90s contact hitters whose on-base percentage is just their batting average with better PR. 

Arraez is not especially fast, and someone who needs to get a hit to get on base is just not an efficient baseball player in 2026. Frankly, I thought society had progressed past the need for Luis Arraez, and apparently the rest of MLB agreed. He was a free agent last offseason, and his market consisted of a one year, $12 million deal with the San Francisco Giants. This is a five-time All-Star with a career .318 average. One year for $12 million?!

Yet somehow, Arraez has defied gravity, continuing to resist the forces of contact quality and power hitting that try to pull him down. He’s become one of MLB’s best trade chips on the backs of a double improvement that nobody saw coming: defense and baserunning. And he looks poised to make a real impact on a playoff team. High contact is back baby!

Luis Arraez's most shocking improvement are his defensive numbers

Much of 2026 Arraez hype has come on the back of a meteoric improvement as a defensive second baseman. He is second only to JJ Wetherholt in Statcast’s Fielding Run Value, a legitimately impossible improvement after being one of the worst performers in that category for years.

MLB.com’s Mike Petriello made an effort to explain how and why this is happening, and noted how Arraez’s success rate, the difficulty of the plays he’s making and his really super-duper good April (followed by a less impressive May and June) probably means his defense has become a bit overrated. And that’s almost certainly true: MLB’s defensive analytics sickos are split on Arraez right down the middle, and it’s a good way to explain the absolute hellscape that is defensive analysis in baseball. Please keep your hands and feet inside the ride.

In terms of Fielding Run Value (FRV), Arraez is elite at a +9. In terms of Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), he’s pretty mediocre at -3. This is because DRS uses a calculation that does not rely on Outs Above Average (OAA), which is what FRV is based on. What exactly DRS is based on is … uh, a complicated question. The Fielding Bible, the organization responsible for calculating DRS, uses hit tracking from Baseball Info Solutions. However, when writing this piece, I found that the article explaining DRS’ calculation in detail had been taken down. This could be to protect proprietary formulas or simply because the page had not been updated in a decade. Whatever the reason, Arraez is probably converting a lot of outs (helping his FRV) but doing some sort of tracking/nebulous/unseeable thing that has reduced his DRS. Okay, everyone still with me?

One could argue that Arraez is just getting lucky with his OAA and that’s what’s jacking up his FRV, but we’re way too deep in the season to be talking about luck like that. And this is a notable shift from his horrendous FRV in previous years, so something is mechanically better — Arraez himself said so in February: “Footwork, glovework, everything is better.”

Defensive research in baseball is a touchy subject, because (obviously) the goal is to create outs. The fact that Arraez is good at that but failing some broader underlying performance metric is, honestly, a great metaphor for his entire career. He’s executing at a high level the actual things a baseball player is meant to do without much of the underlying data to support his impact. Speaking of which: baserunning!

Luis Arraez's baserunning and defense have turned him into a real asset

Arraez is not fast. He has also never been an above-average baserunner in terms of run value. All that changed this year, going from the 37th percentile in 2025 to the 88th percentile. His sprint speed has not increased because he’s, uh, the same human being, which means he’s just making better decisions on the basepaths and has become one of MLB’s most cerebral runners. He’s turning a lot of contact into extra-bases, with 19 doubles and seven triples, second only to the very-fast Corbin Carroll. He’s not stealing bags at any kind of elite level, but he’s impacting the game between the bases in addition to at home plate. That’s a real change.

Considering that every team in the league could have signed Arraez for nothing and didn’t tells you what his reputation is among front offices: he doesn’t really walk, he doesn’t really hit home runs. You better be Ichiro freaking Suzuki and hit .370 with 250 hits if you’re going to do that in 2026. But Arraez has figured out how to bring more to the table, becoming, at the very least, a good defensive second baseman and to stretch his weak contact into extra bases. For example, his .459 slugging percentage this year is higher than any number of Ichiro’s entire career.

Some team will be happy to take on Arraez because of his improvements, and the Giants will certainly trade him with their season well in shambles. I doubt a front office that did not want him before would give up a lot for him now, but the fact that he has turned into a real asset after signing a prove-it deal is impressive stuff. Impressive stuff indeed.

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