8:43pm: Outfielder Jakob Marsee is the final prospect in the deal, Mish reports (X link).
8:40pm: Reliever Woo-suk Go and prospects Dillon Head and Nathan Martorella are headed back to Miami, reports Craig Mish of SportsGrid (on X).
8:37pm: San Diego is acquiring Arraez, tweets Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic.
8:34pm: The Padres are nearing agreement on a trade for Marlins second baseman Luis Arraez, reports ESPN’s Jeff Passan (X link). Miami will acquire three prospects and a big league reliever, Passan adds.
Arraez’s tenure in Miami ends after a season and five weeks. The Fish swapped Pablo López to the Twins to acquire the defending AL batting champion over the 2022-23 offseason. Arraez played up to expectations in the first season. He flirted with .400 for a few months, and while he didn’t maintain that otherworldly pace, he cruised to another batting title. Arraez finished with a .354/.393/.469 line through 617 plate appearances.
As the batting titles would suggest, Arraez has developed into perhaps the game’s best pure contact hitter. He has walked more often than he’s struck out over the course of his career. The Venezuela native has punched out in only 7.5% of his plate appearances in the big leagues. That’s down to a meager 6.4% clip going back to the start of 2022. That leads qualified hitters by more than three percentage points. Guardians left fielder Steven Kwan is the only other player to strike out less than 10% of the time in that span.
Arraez has tallied 148 plate appearances over 33 games for Miami this season. His production is down slightly, as he’s hitting .299/.347/.372 without a home run. That’s not much of a concern for San Diego. Arraez is still making contact at an elite rate. He has never been a huge power threat, topping out at 10 longballs a year ago. It’s unlikely that the Padres front office feels differently about Arraez than they did during Spring Training, when they reportedly made a push for both him and starter Jesús Luzardo.
More to come.
