Randy Arozarena is having a great start to the season coming off his electric World Baseball Classic appearance. Arozarena is one of the better upcoming players in the league. His story involves him leaving his original home country of Cuba to play baseball in Mexico. He plays baseball good enough to be scouted by Major league scouts and eventually gets to the Major leagues. He has a breakout performance in the 2020 season playoffs. In the World Baseball Classic, Arozarena showed off his personality. He played for Team Mexico because he DM’d the Mexican President asking if he could play for them. The President saw to it that Arozarena and his family were able to get citizenship in Mexico and in return Arozarena would represent Mexico. Arozarena showed off his clutch hitting and amazing glove. Now let’s see what he’s done this season so far.
Before we get too deep, let me just note that it’s 17 games into the season. So all his averages are slightly higher than his career averages. However, when you see his counting stats, 3 doubles, 4 homeruns, 18 RBI and 2 stolen bases, it confirms what the inflated averages are telling you. Arozarena is absolutely raking. It’s too early to say it’s his year but if he keeps this up, he’s on track for a better season than last year.
When looking at his ratios, you can see that Arozarena has just been mashing the ball like no tomorrow. This is evidenced by his significantly lower walk rate and homerun rate. Nearly 2 percent down and 5 percent down on his career averages. Once again the small sample size should be noted here, and his ratios should creep back to near his career average.
In this run value chart from Baseball Savant, I’ve highlighted the top four pitches he sees the most. You can get a feel for how he’s handling each pitch this year compared to 2022. For example, the fastball is by far his best pitch to hit. This was the case last year as well. Another example of a minor but still early on change is the sinker. Last year, he had -1 Run value on the sinker and this year it’s 1. He’s only seen 51 sinkers in 2023 so far compared to 425 last year. But the change seems to be the 4 percent whiff percentage and 15 percent K percentage. It means that he’s not swinging over/under this pitch as much as last year. Obviously still early, but it’s possible he’s just seeing the sinker better this year.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1udQhTzvoa3Z1_23hTaQSl9D6Cd52QV46/view?usp=share_link
Above is an example of Arozarena hitting a sinker from the bottom of the zone out of the park.
I think that Arozarena is one of the more electric players in the league. It’s also true and according to the percentile rankings by Baseball Savant that Arozarena is one of the best pure hitters in the league. I think Arozarena is set to have a great season and will definitely be leading the charge for the Tampa Bay Rays this season and beyond.
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Thanks to Baseball Reference and Baseball Savant for the charts and statistics!
Technically Analytics 