In every other baseball era, extraordinary bat control like that shown for years by current Padres newcomers Luis Arraez and Donovan Solano would’ve commanded respect in the MLB marketplace.
Today for singles hitters, it’s more of prove-it world.
That’s one big reason the Padres got Solano, 36, for a box of Cracker Jack in April.
What a prize they got in return, as further shown Wednesday, when the 5-foot-8 Colombian bashed a setup ace’s 98.7-mph fastball for a tying two-run home run in a game the Padres would win to earn their first series sweep.
The lukewarm market for even a great singles hitter explains why Arraez’s availability didn’t create a frenzy of trade suitors.
The Marlins tried to maximize their trade return by agreeing to pay all of the two-time batting champion’s salary. A month before the trade, The Athletic quoted an unidentified source that the Padres had made a “strong offer” to land Arraez in spring training.
That was the Marlins shouting to 29 clubs to pay up for a hitter who has batted .360 with men in scoring position for his career.
But the package that landed Arraez, who at 27 is in the prime, didn’t impress a big-league scout from a neutral club.
“A.J. Preller didn’t give up anyone who’ll come back to bite them,” the scout told me in early May, referring to three minor leaguers who went to Miami.
It was only last year that Arraez batted an NL-best .354 with 203 hits. It’s a sign of the times that such a hitter, one who has batted .339 against right-handers in his career, has been traded twice before his 28th birthday.
Unfazed, Arraez has batted .351 through 35 games with the Padres.
Tony Gwynn used to jokingly refer to himself as a “Judy” – a singles hitter.
Gwynn was far more than a Judy, but go back to when Gwynn was batting .394 three decades ago. Go back further to when baseball mortal Gene Richards, a career .290 batter, was spraying hits at San Diego Stadium.
In neither of those eras, I’d argue, would a hitter have gone unemployed into a season if he’d batted .296 over the previous five years and also collected enough walks to lift his on-base rate to .355 over the same span.
Those are Solano’s numbers for the five years entering this season.
Yet even with a decent .413 slugging percentage, Solano didn’t land a job until Preller signed him in mid-April.
Even then, it was a minor-league contract.
Were the front-office maestros throughout MLB remiss in not g Solano as their team’s 26th man entering the season?
Already, he has outperformed his base salary of $790,320 by batting .313 with a .385 on-base rate in 91 plate appearances. He’s 47 points above the big-league average in adjusted on-base plus slugging percentage.
No one in baseball should be surprised by it. Leaving opponents exasperated, Solano has gone on several heaters in his 30s.
In ‘19 the switch-hitter batted .330 in 81 games (42 starts) after the Giants promoted him in May 2019. He hit .394 on fastballs — tops in the majors among all players who saw at least 400 of them. He hit .402 on the road, becoming just the fourth player since 1950 and the first since Ichiro Suzuki in 2004 to accomplish that feat (minimum 100 at-bats), further reported Giants beat writer Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic.
Solano would bat .284 and .282 after his third consecutive season with the Giants. In runs created, a stat that tries to capture overall offense, he beat the MLB average in the aforementioned five seasons.
The Padres nonetheless are the fourth franchise to employ Solano in the past four years, ing the Giants, Reds and Twins.
Yes, neither Arraez nor Solano earns good marks as an infielder. Drop them down a grade for it. On the basepaths, they’re barely better than cloggers. Further reducing his value, Solano is out of minor-league options. Just to get the ball to the warning track, Arraez would need to eat extra bowls of Wheaties every day.
Understandably, front offices lust for slugging power, which is indisputably linked to winning games and trophies. Positional flexibility is a very big deal to every big-league manager, and it’s important as well to free up consistent playing time for younger big leaguers.
It’s nevertheless worth considering whether the MLB marketplace has been undervaluing “bat to ball” excellence for a number of years, including this one.
It was three years ago that a low-salaried Solano contributed a .280 batting average and C+ adjusted OPS to a Giants club that won 107 games. A season ago, Arraez reached base at a 39.3-percent rate for a Marlins team that, on a payroll $150 million less than a Padres club that would win 82 games, snatched a wild card.
In contrast to many hitters who ed the Padres in-season during the Petco Park era, Arraez and Solano have adapted fast to their new teams. For pennies on the payroll dollar at a time when the Padres have been desperate not to incur luxury-tax penalties, they’ve somewhat blunted the early season struggles of high-salary regulars Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts.
In today’s MLB-speak, perhaps a market inefficiency played into the Padres’ hands. For us geezers who get strikeout fatigue, it’s been fun to watch.
