On Sunday, Mario began our series of reviewing the seasons that Guardians’ players had in 2025 by examining David Fry. Today, we turn our attention to Cleveland’s primary shortstop of 2025: Gabriel Arias.
Gabriel Arias put up a 77 wRC+, a 34.4/5.7 K/BB%, and 6.8 wins above average in Defense (3 Outs Above Average, and 3 Defensive Runs Saved). Arias also had a 7 wRC+ in his brief time in the playoffs, hitting two singles in 10 plate appearances. He had a 79 wRC+ vs. LHP and a 76 wRC+ in 2025. He put up 1.2
FanGraphs Wins Above Replacement (the average major league player puts up about 2.5 fWAR).
At the plate, Arias had one good month. In March/April, he put up a 115 wRC+. Through May 15th, he was playing good defense and had a 102 wRC+ and even I, who have been out on Arias for a while, began to hope that maybe he had turned a corner and could manage a 100 wRC+ while playing excellent shortstop defense. His strikeout percentage was a high but elevated 26.7%. But, from that point on, Arias struck out 38% of the time and put up a 65 wRC+.
Arias is tantalizing and hard for a front office like Cleveland’s to resist. He had a 90.2 mph average exit velocity (6th best on the team), a 43.3% hard-hit rate (fourth best on the team), and an 11.3% barrel rate (third best on the team). He always seems like he’s about to launch a ball effortlessly over the fence and erase a week of golden sombrero games. But, we need to come to grips with the reality that Gabriel Arias is not an everyday hitter in the major leagues.
Why can’t hitting the ball hard work for Arias? Arias’s contact rate and zone-contact rates declined in 2025, and they were already unsustainably low. He makes contact only 62.4% of the time and only 71.3% of the time on pitches in the zone. When he does make contact, he hits the ball of the ground 50% of the time. If Arias was getting more of his hard hits in the air, he could compensate for more of his lack of contact. Conversely, if he was making more contact, he’d have a greater chance of getting more hard-hits through the infield. The combination of these two dominant realities of his hitting approach is too much for any hitter to overcome, which is why Arias has a 76 wRC+ for his career, now in over 1,000 plate appearances for a Cleveland team that has been very patient with a player who will turn 26 before the 2026 season begins.
The final nail in the coffin for Arias is he has a career wRC+ against LHP of 50. He’s not even a good platoon option. All of this is a true shame because Arias was good as a shortstop, especially with an arm that can compensate for almost any other qualities lacking in the field. However, he also isn’t a Gold Glove level talent there, valuable enough where you are tempted to keep him there if you can imagine him being an 85 wRC+.
I understand why the Cleveland front office stuck with Arias. I understand why they gave him every last chance to overcome his limitations. But, the experiment has failed. If they trade Arias (for next to nothing) as they should, and he figures it out with another team, it will be an indictment of the Cleveland hitting instruction team, but that’s a risk they have to take at this point. Arias isn’t figuring it out here and he is not a major league player. The Guardians should prioritize other players over Arias both internally and externally and emerge with better options by the time we reach Spring Training.
