Yandy Díaz is the most perfect hitter in the Series

The World Series — our annual signifier of another season smoking at its peak — is the pinnacle of the sport’s all-time beauty. Role players claim compensation for game-winning baseball throughout October, managers claim credit for all the micro-actions that got them there, and front offices can rest their heads easy at night, knowing their systems and philosophies haven’t been completely abandoned.

But it’s more apparent to everyone – and the thing that gives his humanity a smile among so many numbers, figures, and entropy beyond the players’ control – that the veteran seemed happier to finally get a chance to get his own Ray Bourque moment. For the Tampa Bay Rays, who stand just four wins away from their first franchise title, the man can literally pass. his arms are surrounded by an eclipse of the sun whenever he raises them. Its physical composition is probably best described in the terms used for quartzite. He is Yandy Díaz, the 35-year-old fiery stone at the top of Tampa Bay’s lineup, who, despite all the hallmarks of a home run mashing slugger, is also the best pure Caesar in this World Series.

Díaz, who has hit safely in all but one of his nine career Rays games, is above average in almost every at-bat. He rarely turns and misses, which leads to very few strikeouts. Again, he squares the ball at the 85th-percentile clip, and can do so while peppering it to right field. When he plays the ball, he will go to the opposite field 29.9% of the time, a skill he shares with teammates Chandler Simpson and Jonathan Aranda, who are also among the five most frequent outfield hitters in the American League. Díaz isn’t going to get many walks — 8.2 BB%, a good 37 percent — but hitting .293 still helps him behind a .359 on-base percentage, placing him in the top 20 AL qualified batters.