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No one deserves a .414 BABIP. That’s just not how things work. Hit the ball as hard as you want, spray line drives to all fields with reckless abandon, secretly slather grease on your opponents’ gloves – none of those things can keep your batting average on balls in play at such a lofty level. It’s a good marker of small samples. If someone is BABIP’ing .414, it’s too early to believe their stats.
Let’s use Heliot Ramos as an example. Ramos is on fire so far this year. He’s hitting a ridiculous .319/.394/.560, and doing it while striking out nearly 30% of the time. It doesn’t make sense. No one hits .300 while striking out that often. No one runs a .400 OBP with a strikeout rate that high unless they’re walking like Barry Bonds. Ramos is doing neither.
I can keep listing the things that don’t make sense here. Ramos isn’t exactly a launch-and-crush kind of guy – he’s hitting 1.7 grounders per fly ball, with the league average around 1.4. But it’s working out for him – he’s batting a scalding .367 on those grounders with a .411 slugging percentage. That’s the 11th-best mark (minimum 40 grounders) in baseball for average, and the 15th best for slugging percentage.
Normally, this is where I’d tell you that you should temper your enthusiasm for Ramos. Yes, he’s putting up a 172 wRC+. Yes, he’s been the most valuable hitter on the Giants so far this year. Yes, he’s 13th in WAR among all major league outfielders. But he’s doing it in a weird way, so we shouldn’t believe it… right?
To some extent, sure. No one keeps hitting like this. It’s just gravity. But Ramos is doing a number of things incredibly well, and in these enlightened days, we don’t have to throw someone’s early performance out just because it comes with a little bit of unsustainable luck. So let’s dive in, shall we?
The Giants might just have found the outfielder they’ve been searching for fruitlessly for years. The same way the most important meal of the day is breakfast, the most important pitch to excel against is the first. Every single plate appearance has one, and what happens there has a lot to say about the rest of the at-bat. There’s no one correct first-pitch approach, but doing well on it is crucial. Whether you’re hunting cheap fastballs or trying to avoid falling behind in the count, succeeding on 0-0 sets up everything else.
Ramos gets pitched like an unknown with power, which is to say that pitchers approach him much like an average major leaguer. He sees strikes on just over half of his first pitches. Most of those strikes are fastballs. He swings at them about as much as everyone else. None of this is striking, and that in itself is a good sign.
When you’re evaluating someone with massive raw power and huge minor league strikeout totals, there’s always a chance that they can’t adapt to major league pitching. That’s clearly not the case here. One way you can get ahead is by avoiding bad swings. Ramos does that – he’s swinging at only 11% of pitches outside the zone on first pitches, better than league average.
The other way to get ahead is better, though: smashing the living daylights out of a weak 0-0 offering. I’d rather be back in the dugout celebrating with my friends than ahead 1-0 in the count any day. For a lot of hitters, that means hunting fastballs. Ramos is no slouch at that, but his real standout skill is attacking pitchers who come at him backwards.
“Pitching backwards” is just jargon for spotting secondary pitches for strikes early in the count. It’s a clever counter to hitters who are sitting on fastballs early. They see spin and lay off, the pitch is in the strike zone, and the pitcher gets all the benefits of an in-zone fastball with none of the potential for damage. That’s the theory, anyway. So far, it hasn’t worked out for Ramos’ opponents.
He’s in the top 20% of the league for swing rate when pitchers give him hittable secondaries to start at-bats. For comparison, he’s in the bottom third for swing rate on in-zone fastballs in the same situation. Most hitters swing more frequently at fastballs than breaking balls, but not Ramos. And he isn’t taking defensive swings, either. He takes full rips; he’s one of the 20 hardest swingers on these cookie breaking balls. He goes up there with bad intentions, in other words.
If you try to float something over the plate, he’s going to try to destroy it. To say it’s working would be an understatement. No other hitter in the majors has combined Ramos’ swing frequency with his damage rate. No one who swings as often swings as hard, and pretty much no one does as much damage. He’s fourth in the majors in run value added by attacking these get-me-over first pitches, with half the at-bats of the three guys in front of him.
On a rate basis, Ramos attacking a first-pitch breaking ball creates one of the best expected outcomes in the game. I think that pitchers might have noticed. On June 3, he sent a Ryne Nelson slider 420 feet to right center. On June 8, Andrew Heaney looped one in there and got the same message: Since that pitch, Ramos has seen two breaking balls in the strike zone to start at-bats. He swung at one of them and tattooed it 98 mph, though straight into the ground. If you give him a hittable breaking ball, he’ll do his utmost to destroy it.
Pitchers have reacted quite reasonably, by excising that pitch from their arsenals against him. This turns into a math exercise. Pitchers aren’t trying to get some of their first strikes with big looping curves or middle-middle sliders against Ramos the same way they do against others. But they aren’t replacing those breaking balls one for one with dead red fastballs. They’re trying to entice him to chase breaking balls some of the time, or elevating fastballs, or just starting him off with a changeup or splitter if he has the platoon advantage. Accordingly, he’s getting ahead in the count more frequently: That’s a huge part of Ramos’ recent emergence.
Broadly speaking, he belongs to an archetype of hitter that you’ve encountered before: the high-slug/low-contact masher. More than that, he’s in the “good but not overwhelming plate discipline” group. Maybe I’m being charitable – scouts generally disliked his plate discipline as a prospect – but in 2024 action, he’s at least passable in that category. When you have a decent sense of the strike zone but struggle with contact, getting behind in the count is the worst thing that could happen.
You can picture Joey Gallo if you’d like, or Aaron Judge if you’re looking for a high-end version. If a hitter has top-shelf power and acceptable pitch recognition, counts where they start ahead 1-0 tend to go pretty well. Pitchers have to venture into the strike zone several times to avoid a walk, and you never know when one of those pitches will get sent to the bleachers. Flip the script to 0-1, and things go very differently.
Hitters have to swing more willingly after falling behind in the count, because the cost of a taken strike rises. Pitchers leave the strike zone with secondary pitches more frequently. Sometimes, hitters with average discipline get back into the count by taking a few tough pitches. With great regularity, however, they swing at one of those pitches or take a strike, and then the bind only tightens with two strikes. Judge’s wOBA…
