What will be the key for the SF Giants to get Luis Arráez back to his pre-2024 form?

The SF Giants have reportedly added three-time batting champion Luis Arráez on a one-year deal. He remains one of the best hitters in the game, but his numbers have declined over the past couple of seasons. Making better swing decisions will be a key to getting back to his pre-2024 form.

What will be the key for the SF Giants to get Luis Arráez back to his pre-2024 form?

Arráez does not rely on raw physical tools, and he is a bit of a throwback in that regard. His bat speed, average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and barrel rate are typically among the lowest in baseball.

For a lot of hitters, those would be concerning indicators. However, Arráez squares up pitches at an elite rate, leading to a lot of line drives. That said, his raw power marked have slipped even further over the past couple of years.

Not surprisingly, this has coincided with the left-handed hitter putting up some of the worst numbers of his career. For example, that led to a .289 babip in 2025, which was the lowest mark of his career. In the past, it would be easy to write that off as due to bad luck, but part of the reason is that he was hitting the ball worse than he has previously.

The big change Arráez needs to make has to do with swing decisions. This also ties into his elite contact skills. When he was at his best, the left-handed bat does a nice job at staying in the strike zone.

That has not been the case over the past few seasons. His chase rate ballooned to 34.1 percent in 2025. That is a sharp contrast to where he was earlier in his career, when he would post above-average chase rates.

The problem with Arráez chasing is relatively unique to the type of hitter he is. The average contact rate on offering at pitches outside of the strike zone was 55.3 percent in 2025. For Arráez, that rate was 92.3 percent.

Hitting is hard enough as is. The numbers overwhelmingly show that hitters put up better numbers when they stay in the strike zone. The strike zone is the strike zone for a reason. Contact hitters can get into trouble when they chase out of the zone because they put the ball in play more often than not. Oftentimes, swinging through these pitches would be a better outcome.

Arráez has elite contact skills, but there is a downside. To maintain an extremely low strikeout rate, he is seemingly sacrificing quality of contact for contact. That is not a great tradeoff, and one of the reasons his numbers have declined over the past couple of years. The Giants will want him to get back to the hitter he was, and part of that involved making better swing decisions.