Hanley Ramirez Is Unstoppable and Totally Unsustainable

The most interesting thing about Hanley Ramirez is that he has 10 home runs and no doubles. Or it’s that seemingly every time he swings his helmet falls off. There is something wholesome and wonderful about a good healthy cut, and which is why it’s impossible not to adore Hanley’s homers. But if faced with a choice between those homers and his helmet falling off every damn time, good gosh I think I have to go falling helmet. One of the best and happiest things of this new season is how much opportunity Hanley Ramirez has given us to consider and re-consider this important question. That he is hitting as well as anyone in baseball is, contextually, a mere detail.

No matter how much various hitting coaches try to beat it out of players on the way up the ladder, each hitter looks a little bit different, and each stance and swing is unique. Each player faces the near-impossible task of trying to hit a baseball that is traveling quickly and moving unpredictably; every one approaches this losing battle differently. From the stance, to the extension, to the follow through, no two are alike. We love Yasiel Puig for his bat flips, and David Ortiz for his back swing, and on and on, mostly because these little things are so thoroughly theirs. No other sport allows players to write their signature during games.

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So it is with Hanley Ramirez. Ramirez’s swing is pure power. His arms extend and his body leans back like he’s swinging a giant steel ball on a chain. Characteristically, Ramirez adds a flourish. Not every time, but sometimes, when the moment is right, he jerks his head just a touch at the end of his swing and his helmet takes the cue and leaps from his head. This has lead to helmetless home run trots and a fair number of robust swing-and-misses with accidental punctuation. There’s something awe-inspiring about the power of such a swing, but at the same time there’s something funny, like the guy who swings so hard the buttons in his pants pop and he finds himself penguin-shuffling towards first, underoos ablaze.

None of this matters, or is quite as charming, if Ramirez is terrible though. We care because it’s funny, but we notice because Ramirez is good. On-pace-for-85-homers good. Last year’s leader in home runs was Nelson Cruz with 40, for instance, so you can see that 85 is a nice number. Truth be told, if he stopped at 80, 70, or even the aforementioned 40 I doubt he’d get a lot of guff. Which is fine, given the limited demand for guff today. You just store it in your baseman until your neighbor cuts your gardenias with a hedge clipper “by accident” and then you pass it on to him.

The other thing about Hanley’s 85 homer pace and his skydiving helmet—by June, hopefully someone will get that helmet a helmet—is that last season Ramirez hit 13 homers. All year. The astute reader will note that 13 is less than 85. It’s less than 40 and it’s also almost less than 10, although it should be noted that it isn’t. We know things about baseball that make us think that, as the season progresses, this won’t last. Ten homers and no doubles isn’t the kind of thing that a player can keep doing. Some of those homers will turn into doubles and others will turn into outs, or fouls, or singles, or something else. Players don’t go through seasons where 45 percent of their fly balls go over the wall.

Among qualified batters last season, the leaders in home runs/fly ball were Jose Abreu and Giancarlo Stanton at 26.9 percent and 25.5 percent, respectively. The season before it was Chris Davis at 29.6 percent and the season before that it was Adam Dunn at 29.3 percent. So 45 percent ain’t happening, which means that 85 isn’t happening either. Somewhere in a dark corner of the Red Sox clubhouse a batting helmet smiles.

All that isn’t to say that Ramirez’s performance has been fluky, though. ESPN’s Hit Tracker categorizes home runs as Lucky, Just Enough, Plenty, and No Doubt. Of Ramirez’s 10 homers, only one has been Just Enough. The rest were Plenty or No Doubt. This is backed up by the fact that Ramirez is, pardon the jargon, hitting the snot out of the ball.

This is evidenced by two things. First, pick up any baseball. You’ll notice it has no snot. Like, not any. Second, as of this writing, the ball has come off Ramirez’s bat harder than anyone else’s on average this season. The new StatCast data isn’t complete, as it isn’t in every park covering every player, but at least with Ramirez we are receiving data. StatCast has data from 54 different Ramirez at-bats and the average velocity of Ramirez’s batted balls is 98.94. Nobody with more than 10 recorded data points has a higher average velocity. Ninety-nine mph off the bat means you’re not getting fooled very often. Ramirez also has the sixth highest individual velocity this season with a Sidd Finchian 116 mph.

StatCast doesn’t yet measure the speed at which a helmet leaps from a player’s noggin towards certain doom. Nor does it measure the speed at which Ramirez learns to play his new position of left field after an entire career at shortstop. Which is fortunate for Ramirez, because he has been awful out there. But the season is young and Hanley’s homers are flying far and deep over outfield walls around the American League. For now that looks and feels like enough.