In Luis Arraez, the Padres have found the spiritual heir to Tony Gwynn, Rod Carew

SAN DIEGO — Luis Arraez arrived in the majors on a Saturday in May 2019, entering a blowout of the Seattle Mariners as a defensive replacement. Three innings later, he doubled for his first hit with the Minnesota Twins. Then, over the ensuing weeks and months, he kept on hitting. Comparisons with a pair of Hall of Famers soon followed him wherever he went.

“One of my friends called me ‘Little Tony Gwynn,’” Arraez said. “And then, especially the fans from Minnesota called me ‘Little Rod Carew.’ That’s amazing for me.”

As Arraez spoke outside the San Diego Padres’ clubhouse this week, those connections felt as relevant as ever. On a Saturday last month, hours after being traded by the Miami Marlins, the infielder debuted for the same franchise that built a statue of Gwynn. Arraez, the only player to win a batting title in the American and National leagues across consecutive seasons, doubled in his first at-bat. In a blowout of the Arizona Diamondbacks, he went on to collect three more hits. And he later learned that Carew, his mentor, was once a mentor to Gwynn.

“Tony and I were great friends,” Carew said in a recent phone interview.

Now, the knowledge of that relationship is inspiring a spiritual successor.

“It’s big, big for me,” Arraez said.

When Gwynn debuted for the Padres in 1982, he and Carew resided in different stratospheres. Gwynn was a rookie not far removed from a two-sport career at San Diego State University. Carew, a Twins icon who had joined the California Angels, was in the midst of a 16th consecutive All-Star season.

Still, in a fellow left-handed hitter, Gwynn saw a blueprint.

“He patterned his game after him early in his career, for sure,” said Padres broadcaster Tony Gwynn Jr., the late Hall of Famer’s son. “He was like, ‘That’s who I can be.’”

Tony Gwynn in 1987. (Owen C. Shaw / Getty Images)

Gwynn would win a batting title in his third season, just as Carew had. The two men ultimately combined for 15 batting titles — eight for Gwynn, seven for Carew — cementing their legacies as two of the best pure hitters in history.

Along the way, they went from strangers to regular conversation partners. They bonded over lunches in Southern California and hospital visits to young cancer patients. Of course, they also developed a rapport because of shared expertise.

“The great thing I think that we had is the quietness about us and the way we approached hitting,” Carew, 78, said. “It wasn’t a do-or-die thing for us. I’ve told many people this: God blessed us with the ability to do something that nobody else can do. And do we give those secrets away?”

He laughed.

“But, you know, that’s what it’s like,” Carew continued. “I feel that Tony was a great hitter. He could do things a lot of guys couldn’t do, and I feel the same way about myself.”

In a sport that has increasingly valued power production over contact ability, Carew seldom felt that way about anyone else after Gwynn’s retirement. Then, during a 2016 visit to the Twins’ affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Carew met a teenager who finished that season hitting .347. A few years later, they reconnected during big-league spring training.

Carew began to share his secrets.

“He’s like my grandfather,” Arraez said. “He’s taught me a lot of good things, especially for the game.”

Some of Carew’s secrets are more lost art than encrypted code. The league-wide batting average this season is .240, the worst mark since 1968 — the year before the mound was lowered to 10 inches and the strike zone was shrunk to its modern size. Arraez, a career .326 hitter who is leading the majors with that exact average, swears by such antiquated practices as using the whole field and letting the ball travel.

“He’s really learned how to track the ball,” Carew said. “No one can throw a pitch by you, because you know to look at where the ball is coming from and track it all the way until you get ready to hit. It’s rare to see a guy that can do that. And he’s one of the few kids in today’s game that tries to track the ball all the way.”

Arraez is among a dwindling collection of players who pay little attention to metrics like launch angle and exit velocity. He owns the slowest average swing in the majors but also the highest squared-up rate. (“They wish to be like me,” Arraez said of his outlier bat-tracking profile.) He has just 25 career home runs and, already, 67 games of three or more hits.

“I got power, too, but it’s not my game,” Arraez, 27, said. “My game is just getting base hits and getting on base.”

Luis Arraez, then a member of the Twins, speaks with Tony Oliva, left, and Rod Carew, right, before a spring game in 2020. (Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)

For teammates and coaches, the leadoff man’s seeming ability to do so at will is a constant source of amazement.

“I think if more guys could do it, they would,” said starter Dylan Cease, who faced Arraez when they were members of the American League Central. “Like, anyone would love to hit .340. But there’s one that can do it.”

“You don’t do much,” hitting coach Victor Rodriguez said of his approach to instructing Arraez. “That’s the best coaching with guys like that. Not coaching them at all, because they know what they’re doing.”

“It’s fun seeing hits all the time,” said rookie center fielder Jackson Merrill, who recorded the first multi-homer game of his career in Wednesday’s walk-off victory over the Oakland A’s. “I just feel like there’s a really high standard and he really lives up to it almost every single day.”

Or, as right fielder and No. 2 hitter Fernando Tatis Jr. put it: “Seeing him in front of me, it reminds me every single at-bat of the right approach.”

Since Arraez joined the team on May 4, the Padres have led the majors in average (.272) and ranked second in on-base percentage (.335). Tatis, surging again after a May malaise, has put together a career-best 17-game hitting streak (and the first 17-game hitting streak by a Padres player since Adrián González in 2006). And Arraez has batted .351 in 35 games, trailing only New York Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge while continuing to impress a distant observer.

“I try to stay out of his way,” said Carew, who has not spoken with his protégé as often since the Twins traded Arraez last year. “I want him to feel that he has accomplished a lot of this by being a good student and learning and understanding what it takes to get up there and be a good hitter.”

Yet Arraez remains a polarizing figure in this era. Unlike Judge, he does not possess mammoth power or play a premium position. He is not a speedster, and although he has held his own at first base with San Diego, the metrics cast Arraez as one of the weakest defenders in the league. FanGraphs values the two-time All-Star’s contributions this season at a mere 0.8 wins above replacement, the kind of dissonance that can lead to pointed observations about the state of the industry.

“It’s a shame how many amateur and lower-level professional hitters have been excluded from continuing to play because they don’t meet a measurable,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said recently. “They don’t meet an exit velocity or a bat speed or a launch angle or any of those things that this game is now basically recruiting and monetizing blindly. They’re just getting hits. And somehow that became out of vogue in our industry in general.”

When watching Arraez go about his daily work, certain flashes of recognition come to the son of an all-time great. The habit of scanning the defense before digging into the left-handed batter’s box. The patented opposite-field stroke. The casual conversations about hitting that take place around the ballpark.

“There was a time when Juan Pierre first came up,” Gywnn Jr. said. “I remember my dad telling me, ‘They say this guy’s got my game.’ And I never saw that in Juan. As good of a player as he was … I couldn’t put those two together. But when I watch Luis, I can see the ’82-to-’91 version of my dad. And I can see the clips I’ve seen of Rod (Carew). I can see a lot of those in him.”

For Arraez, it is a thrill to be likened to both Hall of Famers. As an overlooked amateur player in Venezuela, Arraez once thought he was destined to become a P.E. teacher. Years later, he found himself receiving special attention each spring from Carew and Tony Oliva, another Twins icon.

More recently, Gwynn Jr. has told him about Carew’s indirect influence in San Diego. It was just two weeks ago that Gwynn Jr. served as Arraez’s tour guide for a visit to Gwynn Sr.’s statue at Petco Park.

Batman Forever 🤎#MrPadre pic.twitter.com/7qDybREiRF

— San Diego Padres (@Padres) May 29, 2024

“Just watching him walk through the tunnel, there’s an admiration there that makes it easy to want to root for him to have his best success here,” Gwynn Jr. said.

In more ways than one, it feels fitting that Arraez has landed in this city. There are the eerie statistical juxtapositions between the newcomer and “Mr. Padre.” Then there is the opinion of a man who mentored both players. Who, Carew was asked, does he think Arraez is more similar to — himself or Gwynn?

“I think Tony,” Carew said. “Because he tries to show some pop every now and then. And Tony showed some pop. I didn’t. I could have, but I didn’t.”

That Carew would even entertain such a question is a testament to Arraez’s unique yet familiar style. Gwynn Jr. believes he has never seen a hitter more closely resemble his father. Rodriguez, who played with Gwynn Sr. and Wade Boggs more than 40 years ago in the Puerto Rican winter league, says Arraez and Cleveland Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan are the modern-day hitters who remind him most of Gwynn.

“Steven Kwan, being around him, he worries about hitting the ball hard,” added Rodriguez, a former Guardians assistant hitting coach. “Arraez doesn’t worry about how hard he hits the ball. He worries about getting hits.”

Arraez, for his part, agrees with Carew that he is a bit more like Gwynn, although Carew and private hitting coach Frank Valdez have trained him to never over-swing in search of power. As his heady play on the field suggests, he has long been aware of his strengths and weaknesses.

“(Carew) bunted a lot, too,” Arraez said. “He was fast. I’m not fast.”

Still, no one nowadays pays tribute to Carew and Gwynn like he does. This season, Arraez could become the first major leaguer in the Modern Era to win three batting titles with three different teams.

“Talking to Luis about hitting,” Gwynn Jr. said, “a lot of the same keywords come up. ‘Hit a hard ground ball to shortstop.’ ‘Hit the ball the other way.’ That’s exciting. Because you don’t hear anybody talking about it anymore. It’s so technical. You’re talking launch angle. You’re talking all the new kind of words that we have in the lexicon of hitting. It’s fun to talk to somebody who has the foundation that he has. The basics are the basics I grew up with.”