Wilson Ramos Disappoints

Frankly, the best thing we can say about Wilson Ramo’s 2015 season is that he stayed healthy and managed over 500 PAs. He ended the season with a .231/.260/.360 line with 16 doubles and 15 home runs which were a decided disappointment for those of us who had invested in his offensive skills.

As a 23-year-old catcher in 2011, Ramos opened eyes with 15 bombs in 435 Plate Appearances to go with a .267 BA. His .177 ISO that season was encouraging and matched his 2010 mark in Triple A.  Ramos’s K rate of 17.5% was supported by his Minor League career numbers and was in line with a 22 game stint he had in 2010 in his introduction to the Majors. Sandwiched between the 2012 and 2014 seasons that were marred by injury, Ramos clubbed 16 HR’s and batted .272 in just 303 PAs in 2013 with an 81% contact rate and a 40.7% hard hit rate. No wonder he was considered a future hitting star at the catching position and some had predicted that he could approach 30 HRs with a full season of PAs.

At 28 years old at the start of the 2015 season, he was firmly in what should have been the prime hitting years of his career. Unfortunately, it was his defense in 2015, not his offense that has kept Ramos in the spotlight. He threw out 44% of the players who tried to steal on him and his fielding percentage was a stellar .995. Ramos was in the top three in preventing passed balls and wild pitches and he established himself as a catcher that Manager Matt Williams could love. But not much love for Ramos from us roto players, as we are left to ponder reasons for his failure to take the next step as a hitter.

So what went wrong for Ramos in 2015? A good place to start is his .233 BA against left-handed pitchers over 124 PA’s. In 75 PAs in 2013 he batted .282 against them. In fact for his career, Ramos has hit lefty pitching well to the tune of a .287 BA in 411 PAs. His hard-hit rate against lefties plunged 12% from 2013 t0 2015 which is an extraordinary decline.

After a relatively strong start to the season, Ramos swooned in July and that slump carried through the remainder of the season where he batted only .198 in his last 259 PAs. During this time, his K% spiked to 21.6% and his ISO dipped to .115. This slump coincided with his inability to hit the fastball consistently for the first time in his career.

Once pitchers caught on to this weakness, they pounded him with the fastball up in the zone in ever increasing numbers.  Fastballs peaked at 65% of the pitches thrown to him by the end of the season. This was up 8% over his August numbers. By comparison, in his last good hitting year in 2013, the number of fastballs thrown to him declined 8% from the start of the year to the end as he proved he could turn on this pitch with effectiveness. Although not anywhere as dramatic, he also sagged a bit against off-speed pitches. In 2015, his overall contact rate dipped to a career low of 77.4% and his O-Contact% dropped an alarming 11% from 2013.

A quick look at his exit bat speed of 93+mph on fastballs, 88 mph on off-speed pitches, and his overall spray charts did not look all that different from previous years. Checking on data for Ramos at the ESPN Home Run Tracker, here is a comparison for years 2013 and 2015…

Year	True HR Distance	HRs	Bat Speed on HR	Just Enough HRs
2013	405.9	16	103.4	5
2015	404.9	15	104.3	5

Really nothing here that should signal any concern. However, it is significant that Ramos was saddled with a .256 BABIP this season which is 25 points below his career average. We simply could conclude from the data that 2015 was just one of those outliers where Ramos was just not seeing the ball well and he was the victim of some really poor luck at the plate. Since he will turn only 29 in the middle of the 2016 season, and has logged a very light load of 454 games at this point in his career, I would consider Ramos a good rebound candidate in 2016.

As I wrote about Ramos in an article about Rebound Candidates in September, “it would seem reasonable to expect that he regains his stroke against the fastball and he returns to hitting lefties with his usual aplomb. If these two things happen he will bring his average back up closer to his career .269 mark and the power that he displayed in 2011 and 2013 could return. I think there is a 20 HR season in his future and it could be next season”. I stand by these comments.