Which Randy Arozarena are the Mariners getting? (Hint: The good one)

The Mariners swung the first blockbuster of this year’s Trade Deadline, acquiring Randy Arozarena from the Rays to reel in the bat they so desperately needed. We can’t say for sure if Arozarena will singularly rescue Seattle’s dreadful offense, but we can, at least, look at what sort of hitter the Mariners are getting (spoiler: a good one). 

Arozarena’s overall numbers (104 OPS+) aren’t indicative of a game-changer. His nightmare start to the season — he ran a .143/.220/.241 slashline through April — shrouds the fact that, for the better part of three months, Arozarena has looked like his typical potent self. 

We’ll start with why Arozarena struggled, and for that, we’ll head back to Spring Training, when Arozarena told the Tampa Bay Times that his focus was “to hit the ball hard to all fields,” rather than just “one area.” Three games into the season, Arozarena already had two opposite-field home runs. 

From that point on, the strategy stopped paying dividends. In March and April, he hit 63.6% of his fly balls the other way — a concerted effort, clearly. But Arozarena’s premise was flawed. It’s admirable that he wanted to use the entire field, as pure hitters should strive to do. For his career, though, Arozarena doesn’t hit the ball hard the other way; he runs a 30.4% soft contact rate to the opposite field. His two ideals, then, were inherent contradictions. Could he hit it to the other field consistently? Sure. But he could not do so with consistent hard contact. Instead, he wound up with a whole lot of balls that looked like this. 

In late April, Rays hitting coach Chad Mottola acknowledged the flaw, saying: “Part of growing and becoming a complete player is you explore things, and he wanted to use the right side of the field a little more often. It’s probably added length to his swing path. But you have to appreciate guys trying to get better and improve. You have to explore, and sometimes you go down the wrong road. Maybe that’s possibly what happened this time.” 

Since, Arozarena has seemingly eschewed his new approach in favor of his roots: His oppo-rate is 19% in both June and July. Meanwhile, his pull percentage has risen from 34% in March/April to 54% in July. 

That’s emblematic of Arozarena’s greater turnaround, in which he has embraced the basics. Remember Arozarena’s genesis in the 2020 postseason? He smashed fastballs up in the zone and hammered breaking balls in the zone. And while he’s strayed, at times, from both of those hallmarks in recent years, he’s gone back to them over the past few months. 

Let’s start with the fastballs. Mottola surmising that Arozarena’s opposite-field approach lengthened his swing path aligns with what we saw from Arozarena early in the season versus fastballs. Touting a career .497 SLG against fastballs up in the zone, Arozarena slugged just .143 against these pitches in March/April, and .278 in May. Furthermore,his March/April wOBA against high fastballs was just .226 — the second-lowest single-month mark of Arozarena’s career. 

The book was out, and word spread quickly. Arozarena is seeing fastballs 54.1% of the time, the second-highest single-season mark of his career — and the highest mark since the 2020 postseason. That figure rose steadily as the season progressed, peaking at 59.4% in June. 

But Arozarena began to tinker in May, and he changed more until he re-discovered his old self in June. 

Arozarena vs. Fastballs, 2024	March/April	May	June	July
Launch Angle	8 degrees	23 degrees	17 degrees	18 degrees
GB%	55.6%	28.6%	40.5%	38.1%
FB%	22.2%	60.7%	21.4%	33.3%
LD%	11.1%	7.1%	23.8%	28.6%
wOBA	.219	.321	.407	.395

At first, he rolled fastballs over, unable to elevate; in May, as a seeming over-correction, he got the fastball back in the air. Now, he’s ironed out his launch angle, resulting in more line drives. Success, unsurprisingly, followed. 

Look, too, where Arozarena is hitting fastballs. The last two months, 37% are going to the pull side; in March/April, 28% went to the pull side. Plus, through the season’s first month, Arozarena was running a 53% ground ball rate to the pull side. Going back to what Mottola said about the swing path, that pretty clearly suggests that Arozarena is able to catch up to velocity again, getting the barrel out in front and pulling the fastball in the air. 

Pulled Fastballs by Arozarena, 2024	March/April	May	June	July
wOBA	.219	.321	.395	.407

Take a look at these two pitches from Yankees’ left-hander Nestor Cortes — both fastballs over the heart of the plate. One is from May, the other is from July. The difference is stark. 

So he’s hitting fastballs — and high fastballs — again, and he’s also hammering non-fastball offerings low in the zone, another early-career staple. That hasn’t been as much of a constant throughout these past four years: Arozarena has just a career .261 wOBA and .305 SLG off non-fastball offerings at the bottom of the zone. But, in 2020, he posted a .329 wOBA on these pitches; finally, he’s back near that mark over the past two months of this season. 

Arozarena vs. non-Fastballs low-zone 2024	March/April	May	June	July
wOBA	.250	.180	.322	.324
SLG	.250	.258	.412	.500
Hard-Hit	21.1%	27.8%	18.2%	28.6%
Whiff	40.6%	50.8%	33.3%	27.1%

More broadly, Arozarena is punishing mistakes, in general. Against non-fastballs in the zone, he has a .437 wOBA and .706 SLG over the past three months, after posting a .205 wOBA and .286 SLG in March/April. The league, by comparison, has a .314 wOBA and .453 SLG against such offerings. This helps make Arozarena as dangerous as he is, at his peak — where he can do things like this.

And this success is generated from the pull side, too. On non-fastballs in the zone that he pulls, Arozarena has a wOBA well over .700 since the season’s opening weeks. 

Let’s offer one final visual here, just to hammer home how much of a difference a re-emphasis on the basics has made. Here, we take Arozarena’s 30-day rolling average (using 30 days to roughly demarcate a month) to show the inherent tie among Arozarena’s wOBA, pull-percentage, and oppo-percentage. As his pull-percentage increases and his oppo-percentage decreases, Arozarena’s wOBA increases. 

Hitting is hard. And as pitchers evolve — and grip the upper-hand in the pitcher-batter battle — there is a will, drive, and need for the hitter to evolve. But, when done right, evolution shouldn’t come at the expense of the backbone. Could Arozarena integrate the opposite field into his game, say, next year? Sure. He’s an uber-talented hitter. It just wasn’t working this year. Credit to Arozarena for righting the ship and ending — or temporarily delaying — his experiment in time to save his season.