He may miss the ball (13 and 12 percentile for whiff % and strikeout %) a lot, but he has a good eye (74 percentile for walks), so he’s patient, waiting for something to hit. When he connects, whew! All in the 90 percentile, meaning he is in the top 10% of players in: Expected Slugging, Average Exit Velocity, Bat Speed, Barrel % Hard-Hit %. He fields well (85 percentile in range) and can run (72) in sprint speed but is mediocre in actual baserunning (45 percentile).
I’m all in on the the Heliot Ramos bandwagon. I’ve decided he’s my favorite baseball player and we’ll see how his career pans out. Right now, however, he’s on fire! (Note: the fun featured image for this blog post was generated by DALL-E/ChatGPT from text prompts)
Even though his BABIP (.414) is unsustainably high, his strikeout rate isn’t pretty (28.7%), and he’s had an up and down minor league career, here’s why I believe:
His WRC+ (offensive production compared to peers and leveled across playing environment) is 172, or 72% better than the average player. If he had enough plate appearances to officially qualify among league leaders, he would rank 8th in MLB.
Speaking of qualifying, it takes roughly 350 plate appearances for WRC/WRC+ to stabilize – basically if he’s still producing after 350, you can reasonably say, this is real. Today, he’s at 160 after 37 games.
He was a top talent, drafted 19th overall in 2017 – he’s not coming out of nowhere. He has also had a WRC+ of 130 this year in AAA before getting promoted (and staying) to the big club. I’ve gotten to see him play both in Sacramento and San Francisco.
His walk rate is solid at over 10%. His strikeout rate is 30% worse than average, but his walk rate is 26% better than average. In general, he’ll walk, strike out, or hit it hard.
He is a positive offensive and defensive player. He’s a good athlete – can run, throw, hit, hit for power.
He’s young (25 later in the season) and perhaps there are big holes in his swing that pitchers will start to pounce on. But I believe that because he’s had to earn his time through ups and downs (7 years in the minors), he should be mentally mature enough to figure it out.
Anyhoo, let’s move beyond self-justification and onto collecting! I started my collection of 37 Ramos baseball cards and a signed baseball, including 2 low serial number jersey cards, an autograph card, and 1 rookie card rated PSA9, for under $100 and all purchased in the last week.
I Spit Hot Fire 