Roderick Arias has a wide array of gaudy tools that make him easy to fawn over if you’re a Yankees fan, but there are still some massive concerns that have held him back. The one massive flaw in his game was exposed this season, and that was an extremely poor hit tool that saw the switch-hitting shortstop struggle to make much contact at all, making me question whether he should be in the Yankees’ top 10 following the trade deadline. With a 90 wRC+ and 34.9% strikeout rate over his first 77 games in Tampa, it looked grim for the future of Roderick Arias.
Over his last 39 games, the young infielder has turned things completely around, going from a whiff machine who couldn’t lift the ball to a legitimate offensive threat with a myriad of offensive tools he can use to terrorize pitchers. It’s not always smooth sailing when you make the trek through the Minor Leagues, and Arias’ struggles can spark a resurgence.
Roderick Arias Is Finally Looking Like the Yankees’ Top Shortstop Prospect
When a player’s OPS ticks up at the Minor League level, the underlying metrics matter a lot toward understanding if that’s a genuine improvement or a blip. As mentioned earlier, strikeouts and specifically in-zone whiffs were a massive problem for Roderick Arias, who couldn’t make enough contact to consistently generate any sort of production offensively. With six home runs in his first 77 games, not only were we seeing insanely high strikeout rates, but we were also seeing a lack of any game power.
A .142 ISO is considerably below-average for a hitter, and with a batting average teetering around the Mendoza Line, things looked grim for Roderick Arias. Multiple outlets rightfully dropped the teenager in their rankings, falling off of any top-100 lists and dropping outside of the top-10 for my most recent top 30 list. His hit tool was one of the worst in the Yankees’ organization, and unlike guys like Everson Pereira or even Spencer Jones, these whiff issues weren’t alarming at the upper-levels of Minor League Baseball; these were in Single-A.
Roderick Arias would get red-hot in mid-July, with one of the biggest improvements coming in the form of a decreasing strikeout rate. Since July 10th, the switch-hitting infielder is slashing .277/.388/.461 with a 24.1% strikeout rate, and everything from a contact standpoint has improved. His Whiff Rate has dropped to 27% over this stretch with an 84.2 Zone Contact Rate, and in comparison to what he was doing to start the year, he looks like a completely different hitter.
With a 144 wRC+ over that 39-game sample size, he’s been one of the top bats in the Florida State League for nearly two months, and the improvements haven’t just been in the contact department. He’s swinging in-zone 77.5% of the time and only chases 25.1% of the time, meaning he’s both super aggressive in-zone and passive-enough to recognize when to lay off of something out of zone.
Things only get better when you look at the quality of contact, as Roderick Arias is doing everything better on that front as well, a cherry on top of the massive improvements with his contact quantity.
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I’ve also observed a change in his batting stance that seemed to occur on August 6th, and he has a 140 wRC+ since that point with similar strikeout rates and quality of contact numbers. The tweak is with his pre-pitch set-up, as Roderick Arias stands and loads similary to Yankees’ top prospect Jasson Dominguez. It could just be a blip in the radar, a hot stretch that immediately fades in September and causes Arias to remain a puzzling presence in the Yankees’ farm system, or he could be making some serious improvements at the plate.
He’s turning 20 in less than two weeks, meaning that Roderick Arias is still an incredibly young prospect who might just need time to figure things out. We’re seeing him make great adjustments, which is definitely a step in the right direction, but now it’s a question of whether those can hold or not as he plays out the final weeks of the Single-A season. Perhaps the Yankees send him up to High-A for their playoff push as they look to be in prime position to claim the second-half title and bring playoff baseball to Hudson Valley once more.
My view of Roderick Arias hasn’t changed too much; he’s still a massive boom-or-bust prospect with the upside and pitfalls that come with such a contentious profile. That being said, the key there is boom or bust, and now we just have to wonder if these improvements at the plate could be the “boom” that the Yankees believe is inside of him.