The 2019 Foul Play-by-Play Baseball Awards began with the announcement of the Die Hard Award winner for excellence in anger, clutchness, and overcoming bad luck and injury despite lacking a single exceptional skill. Now we celebrate the exceptional skill and youthful exuberance of baseball’s Billy the Kid for the 2019 season.
To be clear, the Young Gun Award recognizes the athlete who best exemplifies the legend of Billy the Kid, not the actual man. Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney, was orphaned at 14 and was obviously a troubled young man as a result. He allegedly killed eight men before his reported death at 21. The stories told of him in newspapers, dime novels, songs, and cinema glorify the gunfighter and horsethief as a folk hero, and not necessarily for fighting corruption in Lincoln County, New Mexico. The kid became The Kid for being a young, skilled, good-looking nonconformist who couldn’t be contained.
2019 MLB Young Gun Award Eligibility Requirements
Specifically and statistically speaking, Young Gun Award nominees must fulfill the following requirements.
- They must be young and good-looking. The Kid rose to prominence after his first jailbreak at the age of 16. Given estimated life expectancies, baseball’s Billy the Kid should be 23 or younger in 2019.
- They don’t miss their target often. For hitters, that means a near-MLB-high contact percentage or near-MLB-low swinging strike percentage. For pitchers, that equates to a near-MLB-high percentage of pitches thrown in the strike zone or a near-MLB-low contact percentage allowed.
- They must be nonconforming. Whatever the majority of their peers do to find success in the game, they don’t do it.
- They lead jailbreaks. Attempts to contain them are futile. You can only hope they don’t inspire a riotous rally by their teammates.
- You can’t help but like them, even after they beat you. The Kid survived as a fugitive as long as he did because he had pals and was beloved by the people of the New Mexico Territory.
In short, baseball’s Billy the Kid is a handsome, young man you can’t help but love who plays the game his way because he’s so damn good at it he inspires others to play above their caliber.
And the 2019 MLB Young Gun Award goes to…
Luis Arraez, IF/OF, Minnesota Twins
This year’s winner of Foul Play-by-Play’s inaugural award for being baseball’s Billy the Kid is the Twins’ rookie hitting phenom, Luis Arraez. At 22 years old, he’s plenty young enough (and handsome enough) to qualify for the 2019 Young Gun Award. In fact, his rookie status will still be intact next season for the 2020 Young Gun Award. If he stays healthy, he could do the Ichiro: win the batting title and the Rookie of the Year Award in the same season. Had he gotten just a few more plate appearances, he might have done it in 2019.
Arraez’s .334 batting average in 2019 trailed only Howie Kendrick (.344) and American League Batting Champion Tim Anderson (.335) amongst players with at least 100 plate appearances. More impressive, though, is Arraez’s contact percentage relative to the rest of baseball. While almost everyone else in baseball employs an approach pursuing optimum launch angles and exit velocities to get the “juiced balls” in the air, Arraez finds success by simply making contact 93.3 percent of the time he swings. His nickname “La Regadera,” or “The Sprinkler,” was bestowed upon him by his native Venezuelan fans for how he sprays the ball around the field. In fact, the next best hitter of baseballs with at least 100 plate appearances in 2019 was Arraez’s own teammate, Willians Astudillo, with a contact percentage of 92 percent.
Arraez truly was baseball’s can’t-miss kid in 2019, swinging and missing just 2.8 percent of the time. To give you some perspective, long-time professional hitter Michael Brantley of the Houston Astros logged a swinging strike percentage of 4.0 in 2019. And you might be thinking Brantley’s World Series foe Juan Soto would be the obvious Young Gun Award winner given his youth (21) and performance. But the Washington Nationals outfielder, while young and good-looking, misses his target nine percent of the time. He also conforms to baseball norms, hitting 34 home runs to Arraez’s four in 2019. Arraez wins the Young Gun award for being a nonconformist and uncontainable.
Of the 92 games Arraez played in 2019, he failed to reach base in 14 of them. In half of those games he got one or fewer plate appearances. So he failed to reach base in full games he played 7.6 percent of the time. Soto failed to reach base in 20 games in which he got more than one plate appearance, or 13.3 percent of the time, meaning Soto was contained almost twice as often as Arraez.
Finally, pitchers don’t enjoy being beaten by Juan Soto. He’s known to grab his crotch after stepping toward the pitcher when taking a pitch. He says it’s a way to get in the minds of pitchers because “sometimes they get scared.” But Miles Mikolas returned the gesture upon striking out Soto, even though he said it was all in good fun.
There’s nothing not to love about Luis Arraez. When he was carried off the field late in the season after sustaining a gruesome ankle sprain, his Billy the Kid-like following offered their well-wishes and prayers on Twitter. He recovered fast enough to lead the Twins in hitting, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and OPS in their postseason series against the Yankees.
I’m overwhelmed and touched by all your kind messages, wishes and prayers. Situations like this are part of the game but I promise I’m going to work hard to be back soon and stronger. I have faith and I know God has everything under control. 🙏🏻❤️ pic.twitter.com/kefQbG34ZJ
— Luis Arraez (@Arraez_21) September 29, 2019
