Number Crunch: GOAT’s Back

Jose’s slow start was merely a bump in the road in getting back to prime form, and here’s how he did it

It’s April 19. José Ramírez is embarking on one of the worst 20 game stretches of his career. He can’t catch up to fastballs, he’s running the highest chase rate of his career, and he’s sitting at a 79 wRC+. Safe to say, this was the worst we’d seen José look since 2019, and overall, he hadn’t really felt the same since the hand injury in 2022. Concerns were setting in. Was he past his prime? Were we set to see the gradual decline of the face of our team just two years into his extension?

No.

How foolish.

This is José Ramírez, bro.

Welcome to the first edition of Number Crunch, and our first piece will start with a bang. After hitting another home run against the Mets on Tuesday, José Ramírez responded to his slow start, silencing any doubters with a stretch of baseball that has lifted this offense to sustainable heights.

That slow start saw all kinds of weird, un-José trends. From his swing tendencies to his abnormally low walk rate, something wasn’t fully right. Ramírez was posting a 2.2% walk rate, nearly 8% below his career walk rate. He was struggling from the left side, historically his strong side. Since 2017, Ramírez’s slash line against right handed pitchers was .280/.370/.537, good for a 142 wRC+. That was not the case early on, however, as he was slashing .239/.239/.403 for an 80 wRC+. Again though, luck was not on José’s side, and that 0% walk rate as a lefty was never going to stay that way.

Despite his struggles, Ramírez’s barrel rate sat at 7.7%, a solid mark, but of his six barrels, just three wound up as hits. For reference, that .500 average on barrels was 187 points lower than the league’s average of .687. Thank you for that, Wilyer Abreu.

Slowly but surely, things started to turn around for Ramírez. From April 20 to May 5, the approach we’re used to seeing from JRam started to show up, though the results slowly began to progress with it. His xwOBA went from .273 in his slump to .318 over the next 13 games, but more importantly, his walk rate climbed to 12.5% over this span. If you want to pinpoint an exact moment it all started to turn around for Ramírez, look no further than the afternoon of April 25.

From this moment on, it really felt like José was putting it all together, and the team badly needed him to. On May 6, Steven Kwan hit the injured list with a hamstring strain. Kwan had been the team’s best player and tops in the Majors in batting average, so his loss was excruciating. Between the struggles at shortstop, and finding any consistent footing in the outfield beyond Steven Kwan, his absence left more than just one hole in the lineup. it threatened to create a handful.

From that day forward, three players broke out for the Guardians: David Fry, Tyler Freeman, and José Ramírez. Over the next two weeks, JRam went scorched earth on the poor pitchers in Major League Baseball. Ramírez slashed .322/.365/.678 over those two weeks with an xwOBA of , carrying the Guardians through their two worst series of the season against Detroit and the White Sox before spearheading a series win at Texas against the reigning World Champs and a sweep against the Twins where he mashed two homers, including a back breaker off the previously untouchable Jhoan Duran. He then had a homer and RBI double in a 7-6 win over the Mets for another series win.

The GOAT was back. But how?

José’s hard hit rate was virtually the same throughout these stretches, and his barrel rate even went down slightly. The first quick glance change is that José cut his chase rate by 7% from 36.1% to 29.1%. From there, his swing selection has gotten substantially better. Through April 19, Ramírez was offering at 53.5% of pitches thrown to him. His career mark had hovered around 42% before the season began. Between the continued breakout of Josh Naylor early in the season and José settling in, his swing decisions became more selective, taking his walks and driving the ball more. Since April 20, Ramírez’s swing rate dropped over 5% to 48.3%.

However, the one major “change” that José made is one that reverberates throughout the Guardians clubhouse: pulled flyballs and line drives.

I put change in quotations because it’s not exactly a change for José. He’s been very proficient in elevating the ball to the pull side since 2017. That being said, during José’s early season struggles, he was pulling 23% of his balls in play as line drives or fly balls. It’s a mark better than league average, but it’s down a touch from his 24.8% career rate since 2017 when he really made approach changes. Ramírez was a good hitter on the cusp of breaking out in 2016, and that breakout came in 2017, largely due to Ramírez improving his pulled flyball/line drive rate by nearly 5% from 15.6% to 20.2%. The power numbers followed that as JRam mashed 29 home runs in 645 PAs compared to just 11 in 2016 in 618 PAs, and he did it without sacrificing his identity as a hitter as his strikeout rate went up a negligible amount. José is an unbelievably rare breed of baseball talent, and this highlights that.

From April 20 and on this season, that rate went up to 28.3%, and since May 6, that number is all the way up to 32%. It’s quite a change, but why is this so important? The answer is simple: it’s the most efficient way to impact the ball. As you’ll see below, driving and elevating the ball for impact sees its most optimal results when pulling the ball. The barrel and hard hit rates spike significantly compared to hits to the opposite field and are still vastly more economical than driving the ball back where it came from.

This is José Ramírez from 2017 through 2023:

This is José Ramírez in 2024:

The adjustment of this team’s approach as a whole has been to pull the ball in the air more. Here is last season’s flyball/line drive rates and expected stats versus this season’s through May 21:

The 3.6% year over improvement on pull rate is a major sign of new philosophy within the organization as both Stephen Vogt and Chris Valaika had said before the season. It’s less about just trying to hit the ball for the sake of it and more about maximizing the result when the ball is put in play. It’s less new philosophy and more just Cleveland catching up with the modern offensive style, but you can see it clearly within players like Tyler Freeman, but also José Ramírez.

The Guardians are a fascinating team as they’re the only team in baseball with an xwOBA under .600 on pulled liners and flyballs in 2024 — which in it of itself is a story for another day — but they are second in the league in wOBA to xwOBA differential (.783 wOBA to .585 xwOBA), but that’s also very emblematic of José, whose .342 wOBA is outperforming his .300 xwOBA by 42 points. Pulling flyballs and line drives despite not being a huge exit velocity guy largely can lead to differences like that. Ramírez is in the 38th percentile in bat speed and 50th percentile in average exit velocity which is very similar to the star pupil of modern offense: Isaac Paredes.

Both Ramírez and Paredes are smaller guys — José being 5-foot-9, 190 pounds and Paredes being 5-foot-10, 210 pounds — and Paredes is in the ninth percentile exit velocity and third percentile bat speed. However, he is running a wRC+ north of 160 this season despite outperforming his xwOBA by over 70 points. Why? Because he makes great swing decisions and pulls the ball a TON. Sound familiar?

Since the start of 2023, seven qualified hitters have pulled line drives and flyballs north of 25%: Ozzie Albies, Michael Massey, Max Muncy, Kyle Schwarber, Cal Raleigh, and of course, José Ramírez and Isaac Paredes. Paredes’s mark of 29.7% leads the way, and of those seven hitters, just Albies, Ramírez, and Paredes have strikeout rates under 20%. There’s a reason these guys are All-Star caliber players.

While typing this, Ramírez drove an RBI double into the left center gap against a right handed pitcher against the Mets, a vintage sign that he is firing on all cylinders. In May, Ramírez’s chase rate has dwindled down to 27.6%, roughly 3% better than league average, while running a strikeout rate 10.5% under league average with a 9.5% walk rate. The elevation of Tyler Freeman’s bat as well as David Fry being unleashed on the league have made this lineup feel legitimately formidable, but the one piece missing was José being José again, and folks, he’s all the way back.