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Luis Arraez has fought his way into an everyday role on one of the best offenses in baseball history. This is no small feat, especially for a 22-year old rookie. Since he wasn’t a highly-ranked prospect, Arraez has surprised many fans with his professional approach at the plate. Could he surprise the rest of baseball and walk away with the American League Rookie of the Year Award?The Arraez Resume' Arraez entered play on Tuesday hitting .350/.421/.446 with 12 extra-base hits in just over 200 plate appearances. He has coaxed 22 walks and has struck out only 14 times. Among AL rookies with 200 plate appearances, he has the highest batting average by 50 points and the highest OBP by 40 points. His 6.9 K% is almost half as low as the second-place rookie on the leaderboard. One of Arraez’s biggest hurdles to winning the award will be his lack of plate appearances. He should finish with close to 370 plate appearances, but some other rookies already have over 300 plate appearances to their credit. Arraez will also be hurt because other rookies will be able to accrue more WAR because of their getting to the big leagues before him. According to FanGraphs, Arraez currently ranks fourth in WAR among AL rookie batters. Less than a week ago, he ranked sixth on this list. He currently trails Tampa’s Brandon Lowe (2.5 WAR), New York’s Mike Tauchman (2.5 WAR) and Seattle’s Daniel Vogelbach (2.2 WAR). None of these players are exactly household names but the real competition might come from other more well-known players. The Competition Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the big name in the AL ROY competition. So far this season, he has hit .274/.346/.459 with 34 extra-base hits in 367 plate appearances. FanGraphs has his WAR total as 0.5 and his total is low because of his negative value as a baserunner and a defender. He still had a ton of hype coming into the year and he has compiled a solid offensive resume. Some other former top prospects to consider are Chicago’s Eloy Jimenez and Toronto’s Cavan Biggio. Jimenez’ 19 home runs are second among AL rookies, but his other offensive numbers might make it tough to consider him a front-runner. He is hitting .237/.294/.453 with 27 extra-base hits and he has provided negative value on the defensive side. Biggio’s .205 batting average is tough to swallow, but he is getting on base a third of the time and he has 17 extra-base hits in 63 games. As far as pitchers, Spencer Turnbull has been worth 2.0 WAR on a bad Tigers team. He has a 3.68 ERA, a 1.32 WHIP, and a 98 to 42 strikeout to walk ratio in 107 2/3 innings. John Means represented the Orioles in the All-Star Game this season and he has a 3.36 ERA with a 1.16 WHIP to go along with an 83 to 28 strikeout to walk ratio. Both players have been decent, but neither will likely have a shot at the award. The Race Minnesota hasn’t had a top-three finisher for AL ROY since 2015 when Miguel Sano finished a distant third behind Carlos Correa and Francisco Lindor. During Minnesota’s last run to a division title in 2010, Danny Valencia earned enough votes to finish a distant third in the voting. One must go back all the way to the mid-90s to find Minnesota’s last AL ROY winner when Marty Cordova took home the hardware after beating out Garret Anderson and Andy Pettitte. Voting for the Rookie of the Year Awards is different than voting for other year-end honors. While most awards go to the player that had the best overall season, this isn’t always the case of the ROY. I’ve heard from voters that they approach voting for this award by looking at the candidates and voting for not only who had a good season, but also who will have a long-term impact on the game. Over the last seven years, some of the AL winners include Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Carlos Correa, Jose Abreu, Wil Myers and Mike Trout. All those batters had at least 88 games played at the big-league level with Myers having the fewest. He batted .293/.354/.478 that season and he was one of baseball’s top prospects. He only had to beat out Jose Iglesias and Chris Archer for the top spot. Does Arraez have a shot at the AL ROY? It seems more likely for Guerrero to finish on top but that still doesn’t take anything away from the impact Arraez has had on the Twins line-up. Click here to view the article

So I'm taking a lot of commenters advice and making a blog. I'm planning on moving my original forum post over to the blog and writing a few more entries as I've been to a bunch more games and it's playoff time here. But first, I figured I'd post this as it's relevant this week and it was such a cool thing to run into. So my parents came down to visit a week and a half ago. We spent a week where I'm living in Santiago and a weekend on the beach. We went to a ball game and have done a bunch of different touristy things. This weekend, we're hanging out in the capital, Santo Dominigo before they have to go home and I have to head back to work. Today we were walking around the Colonial Zone and seeing the classic sites: Columbus' house, the oldest road, church and settlement in the Americas, and some other stuff. On our way back to our AirBnb, we ran into a bunch of boys dressed up in their baseball uniforms standing on a corner. They all had hand fans and posters congratulating Vladimir Guerrero on being the third Dominican born player to get into the hall of fame. I asked one of the boys why they were standing there and he said there was going to be a parade soon. Luckily, my parents are baseball fans and are always down for spontaneous activities, so we decided to hang around and see what a Dominican Hall of Fame parade was all about. We stood on the corner with the boys for a ten or so minuets, but there was no sign of a parade of Vlad. I asked one of the boys when the parade was coming by. His reply of "ahora" represents one of the many quarks of Dominican culture. Ahora translates literally to "now" but after living in the Dominican Republic for three months, I've found that they use it much more liberally. In other Spanish speaking countries I've been to, ahora can be taken literally, and people use other words for soon, such as "pronto" and "un minuto". In the Dominican Republic, ahora can mean any amount of time from right now to weeks from now. It's especially scary when they add the ending -ita, as that literally indicates a short moment (ahorita). Here, that -ita usually means your now is even more extended. Anyways, that is all to say that I was worried we'd end up waiting on the street corner with these boys till late into the night for Vlad to show up, if he was going to at all. Once again, I found myself lucky that I have such an amazing family. We spotted a corner store (colmado), with the tell tale Presidente beer sign in front and decided to sit and have a cold one. Colmados are the best place to buy beer because it comes from a refrigerator/freezer hybrid. This is necessary because the beer here is nothing like the wonderfully bitter craft choices from home and much more like the Keystone Light you'd find in my frat basement. It's much better to freeze your mouth while drinking it than actually taste the beer itself. The other advantage of buying beer at a colmado is that they have plastic chairs they'll let you bring outside and sit on while you enjoy your beverage. While the DR doesn't have a lot of bars as we know them in the US, almost every block has the local colmado and it's common to see people sitting out till late, every night of the week. So, after buying a Jumbo Presidente and borrowing some chairs, we had a front row seat to a parade. As we waited, more and more people from the neighborhood came down to the street, so we felt better that there would actually be something to see. After about an hour, we saw the first lights on top of a police truck and heard music from down the street. As the parade got closer, we got an idea of just what a Dominican parade actually is. First came motorcycles, both police and civilian followed by and surrounding a half dozen police vehicles. Following those was a rag tag mix of nice cars, trucks, SUVs and any other kind of transportation you can think of. The third truck in line was the man of the hour, Vladimir Guerrero, sitting in the back of a huge pickup truck. Vlad looked like he was having a blast, smiling and waving to everyone. I figured that the parade would end soon after Vlad's car went by. Boy, was I wrong. Following him was a mix of vehicles in a huge line that took another 15 minutes to pass. Some of the highlights of this rag tag group: Vladimir Guerrero Jr., in a similar truck to his father's, with three friends wearing custom Blue Jays jerseys, multiple flat bed trucks hauling only huge stacks of speaks blasting merengue, bachata, and reggaetone and a mix of both some of the nicest cars I've seen here in the Dominican and some of the most beat up. What it takes to get your car into a parade like this, I don't know. It's possible you just have to turn onto the right street at the right time. One thing's for sure, everyone involved was having a great time. Almost every vehicle in the parade had someone hanging out of a sunroof or on top of the car itself. Most everyone also had a bottle of Presidente or a cup of rum in their hand as well. After leaving the parade, we decided to walk about a mile to a restaurant on the ocean for my parent's last night here before going back to the winter in MN. On the way, we ended up walking by the park where parade ended. Apparently, the parade was just the beginning of the party, because there was a stage with a huge crowd. On the stage was a band playing bachata, and off to the side was a VIP tent with Vlad and his family and friends. Flanking the stage were huge posters with Vlad in an Angles jersey that said "Vladimir Guerrero Juagador Immortal". I think that phrase, that translates to "Vladimir Guerrero, Immortal Player" captures the spirit of the day perfectly. In this country that is obsessed with baseball, they are overjoyed to see one of their own recognized in the Hall of Fame. I think I saw it on Vlad's face too when he passed by. In a country with so much pride, Vladimir Guerrero is the third of what will surely be many more to be recognized as an "Immortal" in the game they love so much.