Life In The Cell

There’s Nothing Quite Like a Foreign Born Second Baseman: Part 2

See Part 1 for the introductory information about Alexei Ramirez as well as a slight narrative about his career with the Sox so far.

His spectacular play has Sox fans everywhere asking two questions: What can we expect from him in the second half? and What can we expect from him in the future?

The Second Half

First let’s take a look at the near future, rather than the distant future. The first thing to look at is his BABIP. For the season it is at .324. Under normal circumstances you would use this as an indicator that his average would fall by a fair amount since a standard BABIP is close to .300. Another way to judge where his BABIP should be is to add .120 to his LD% which is at 16.9% That gives him a hypothetical BABIP of .289. I think it’s safe to say his BABIP and therefore his regular batting average will fall a little bit, but it’s impossible to make a fair assessment on how much. Some players have traditionally high BABIP such as Ichiro and Derek Jeter, and Alexei seems to fit that mold. So with regards to this season, I would expect his average to fall a little bit. Best case scenario I say he hits around .300 and will likely hit around .280 or so. Or, of course, he could continue to improve each month and prove me horribly wrong.

Another tool to use is prOPS which is a tool that predicts future OPS. His prOPS is .749, which is .050 points lower than his current .799. This suggests that his future results in terms of OPS will fall a little bit. I think we can temper those results a bit though. If we take away his initial 33 AB in April which was spent entirely as a sub (and at this point in the season is still a significant amount of data) I’m sure his prOPS would increase. His slugging may drop off a little bit, and if we’re already predicting a drop in his batting average that would explain away part of his potential drop in OPS, so let’s just say he’ll have a .030 drop in OPS, which is a very conservative estimate, I think.

The interesting thing about Alexei is it looks like he’s just flying by the seat of his pants, meaning that it looks like he’s going out there with no plan, but he really does seem to learn from each and every AB. He may not make the AB to AB adjustment that Quentin makes, but he does seem to be picking up the game incredibly fast, which can be seen by his ever improving numbers. This fact is something that gives me pause for concern when trying to predict his future output, but it’s something I want to do so I’ll soldier on. I think this may be the peak of Alexei’s powers at this point. Something like .320/.340/.480 could be expected of him during his good runs, but we have nothing to base what his rough patches would look like. The fella has just not slumped at any point this season since becoming a starter. Everyone is prone to a slump (unless Alexei is really superhuman) so we’ll have to learn about it as it happens. Since we don’t know how severely to temper the good for when Alexei eventually hits some rough patches, I’m really going out on a limb here in predicting his stats, but by the end of the year it wouldn’t surprise me to see Alexei close with a line of .287/.307/.462/.769. Just for the sake of comparison Tadahito’s career line is .273/.344/.410/.754, so we should all be happy if Alexei were to finish with the line I have predictedish. The ish is because, there’s so little data to go off of when predicting his success. Even with rookies, you normally have years of minor league data, but with Alexei you have nothing.

One random stat I want to draw attention to, before I forget, is his ability to hit in the clutch. I know people say there’s no such thing as clutch, and I do lean toward that thought, though not completely. Anyway, Alexei bats a very tidy .409 with runners in scoring position. That’s something to keep tabs on.

The Future

Alexei is reportedly 26 years old. He came from the Caribbean region, so it’s impossible to say whether this number is accurate or if he’s pulling a Miguel Tejada on everyone. Usually someone around Alexei’s age, I’d say more around age 28, has reached the peak of their prime. You won’t see sweeping improvements, small ones yes, but no large jumps and if anything drops. As I’ve said plenty of times, Alexei is a unique case; he’s on a different timetable and he learns at a different rate than your typical ball player. You could look at him as a rookie and assume in the next 3-4 years he will consistently improve upon his last season. You could also look at him as a 26-year old and assume that he’s around his peak. He’ll improve his next two years or so, but not by leaps and bounds and then level off. It’s again best case scenario vs not so good scenario and naturally because I am who I am, an optimist but not a complete blind fan boy, I’ll take the higher end of the middle road.

The first thing to look at as his career progresses is his OBP. At this point, his OBP is almost entirely dependent upon his ability to hit for a high average. Looking at those split stats (see below) that’s the one stat that hasn’t improved as the season has worn on. Yes his OBP has gone up, but that’s due to his batting average going up. His OBP has been pretty consistently around .020 higher than his batting average. His walk totals by month are 1, 1, 4, 1. It’s impossible whether to say if that 4 and third 1 are a sign that he’s walking more or just a blip. On the season he’s averaging 3.1 pitches per plate appearance which is not a lot at all. He’s making AJ Pierzyski look patient by comparison whose career low is 3.1 P/PA. I expect as Alexei plays longer in the league he’ll get a better command of the strike zone and a better eye, but the question is whether or not it will actually turn into walks or not. Some players, like AJ whom I mentioned, just don’t walk that often. He obviously has good command of the strike zone, but his career high is 26 walks; Frank Thomas he is not. If Ramirez could improve to the point that he walks at a rate similar to AJ, he would be a far more valuable player. The separation between his average and OBP would be closer to .045 rather than the current .020. That bump would be extra helpful because he won’t clog the bases up. Ok, obviously I’m kidding, but there’s some truth to that. He is a good base runner. He can steal bases and he is smart on the base paths, which depending on who hits behind him, would lead to an increase (maybe small, but still an increase) over your average player all things similar save for speed and base running acumen.

I also think there will be an uptick in Alexei’s power. He is rail thin, probably thinner than Soriano was when he came up. He still is wiry strong as they would say in England. Give him a dietician and a personal trainer and you can expect him to get stronger, and hopefully, increase his slugging.

Before, I said that when he runs well, he could probably put up a line of .320/.340/.480. I meant that to be based solely on his performance this season. If you adjust for potential improvements, I would have no problem seeing him put up a line of .315/.350/.500 over the course of the season, which is roughly what Brian Roberts is doing this year, but with more walks and less hits. That line ended up being a bit more optimistic than I had planned, but honestly, at this point one maybe two seasons of that type of production would not surprise me. If we can apply his ability to improve in-season and apply it to his season-to-season improvements, it no longer seems like an outrageous high water mark.

Of course, there’s always the chance that since Alexei is a 26-year old, he won’t improve that much and the best we’ll see from him is .300/.330/.450, which is still pretty damn good considering that’s better than Tadahito’s career mark for OPS.

I have reproduced his split stats at the bottom here for reference’s sake.