What is Jose Ramirez? You may answer “second round pick.” You wouldn’t be wrong.

But how did we get here? In 2015 you could read phrases like “not much upside,” “keeping the position warm for Lindor,” or “his best skill at the plate is his bunting ability.” So again, I’ll ask how did we get here?

If you’ve read any of my other articles this offseason, you’ll know I like to lean heavily on the Statcast data that’s available to us through Baseball Savant, as well as the data visualization I cooked up in Tableau to quickly get an idea of a player’s batted ball profile. Sure, you can see things like GB% and HR/FB% all over the internet, but I want to know the why.

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Batted Ball Profile

I’ll likely start any deep dive article on a player with an overview of his batted ball profile. Choppers, grounders, grinders, liners, fliners, fliers, floppers, and poppers are the general terms used to describe various launch angle, exit velocity and hang time combinations. For simplicity, I’ll break the launch angles up into the eight industry-standard bins and start looking for trends or a steady state for a given player.

Jose Ramirez, however, is a switch hitter, so he adds one more wrinkle to the analysis. We’ve got to examine him from both sides of the plate.

Before getting to that, what general descriptive statistics do we know about Jose Ramirez since the start of play in 2016? For starters, we know that Jose Ramirez hits ~22% of his batted balls at line drive launch angles which is good enough to rank him in the 75th percentile. He hits ~40% of his balls on the ground and the other ~38% in the air. We also know he rarely strikes out (~11%) and walks enough to keep his OBP in the .360-.370 neighborhood. With those baselines in mind let’s dive into the batted ball profile and see the evolution of Jose Ramirez.

The first thing to note is that Jose Ramirez takes a majority of his plate appearances from the left-hand side. His right-handed splits are going to be much smaller small sizes.

The first thing that sticks out about Jose Ramirez, and please note that I’ve added Joey Votto as a comparison, is he improved his right-handed strikeout rate and launch angle. This was done by eliminating low-value ground balls in exchange for more balls that have a chance to be home runs and doubles in the grey 16-32° bin.

The second thing you’ll want to notice is that he expanded the number of balls he hit in the black zone which is where most home runs are born. Third, you’ll see that Ramirez started to homer from both sides of the plate in the 32-40° launch angle bin. Players that routinely homer from those launch angles either have elite exit velocity on fly balls, a favorable home park or both.

We’ll get to the exit velocity piece momentarily, but I can tell you that Progressive Field in Cleveland doesn’t play favorably for home runs to left field due to the little Green Monster they built out there. However, on the flip-side, it is very approachable for lefties pulling the ball down the rightfield line and into the power alley. I have it ranked as the third best park for home runs in right field for left-handed hitters behind only Yankee Stadium and Great American Ballpark.

Exit Velocity & Spray Angle Distribution

Let’s examine the fly balls that Jose Ramirez has hit in the two home run zone bins. We want to look for top-end, elite exit velocity which I’m considering balls hit at 97+ mph as well as looking at the average exit velocity on balls that are pulled, hit to centerfield and hit to the opposite field. In 2015, Jose Ramirez wasn’t hitting the ball hard when he hit it in the air.

Of the approximately 60 balls he hit between 16-32° only one out of every five balls was hit hard enough (97+ mph) to occasionally be a home run. He did manage to homer six times that year but this is why you got more phrases like “average regular if he got the playing time.”

Study the darker blue and green boxes, and they’ll show you the secret to Jose Ramirez’ success in 2016 and his continued improvement as a hitter in 2017. Jose Ramirez added two MPH on average to the fly balls he pulled in 2016 and carried those gains over into 2017.

The amount of batted balls he pulled at 97+ mph doubled from 30% in 2015 to 60% in 2016 and settled at ~50% in 2017. You also see another change in his batted ball profile in 2017 – he pulled the ball more frequently.

As a left-handed hitter in 2015, he had a relatively neutral spray distribution between Pull/Center/Oppo at 29/39/32. This is where the progression begins for Ramirez.

Over the next two years, you can see his spray percentages move from 29/39/32 to 40/32/28. He had gradually shifted from using the entire field frequently at those launch angles to pulling it 40% of the time.

In the good scenario, a hitter will continue to square the ball up consistently and produce more well-struck pulled liners and air balls. In the bad scenario, he’ll roll over and generate more weakly hit grounders which can bring down a hitter’s BABIP.

Luckily for Jose Ramirez, he was able to hit fewer ground balls in total in 2017 than he did in 2016 though he did pull a slightly higher percentage (64.6% to 61.1%) as a left-handed hitter. As a right-handed hitter, he managed to produce a higher BABIP on ground balls in 2017 by hitting the ball hard back up the middle more frequently. In total, he’s kept his BABIP on ground balls at ~.290 the last two seasons which represents a 50 point advantage over someone as skilled as Joey Votto.

Balls Launched Over 32 Degrees

I also mentioned that Ramirez was able to gain some HR/FB% improvements by homering at steeper launch angles. This was a by-product of Ramirez hitting the ball harder and developing a more extreme pull-profile.

Over half the balls he hit at these launch angles were hit down the line while in previous seasons his median horizontal spray angle to right field as a left-handed hitter still incorporated more of these fly balls over toward the power alley in right-center. The same goes for his extreme pull approach as a right-handed hitter as well, where he was able to homer three times at these higher launch angles each time he hit the ball over 97mph. You can see the outcome of this in his spray chart when you check out his HRs.

Who is Jose Ramirez?

An outstanding baseball player apparently. I can’t speak to what training he did to square up more baseballs and hit them harder and farther, but he’s certainly put in the work to turn himself into an All-Star caliber player.

In terms of fantasy baseball evaluations, all the projection systems want to regress his HR totals downward and strip him of the BABIP skill I’ve shown him to possess. I don’t think there’s any reason to presume Jose Ramirez won’t hit 25 home runs this year or bat over .300 while posting a .360+ on-base percentage.

While his BABIP could fall slightly on ground balls, it’s not anything I assume or plan for. He hits the ball pretty damn hard on the ground, and his speed carries him out of the box quickly from both sides of the plate. Because he’s such a high contact player, I presume his barrel control on the bat is elite, and I wouldn’t expect many fluctuations in his batted ball profile.

If he had one area to improve on it would be limiting the balls he hits at 40+ degrees. It’s what separates him from being Joey Votto with bat control. I’m very excited to monitor the 2018 Jose Ramirez campaign, and you should be very happy to own him in your fantasy baseball leagues.

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Jim Melichar is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Jim, check out his archive and follow him @JimMelichar7.