Jose Ramirez is about as close to a perfect baseball player as you could possibly hope to create. He can play three or four positions with great skill and natural grace, he can hit for power, average, work walks, steal bases when needed, and carry an offense for weeks at a time when he turns it on. In this era of ever-increasing velocity, he's got no problem turning high 90's around.
But for the last week, Jose has looked quite pedestrian against the New York Yankees. Not even a good pedestrian, like New York City Businessman type, More Big Dumb Tourist type. Irritating, seemingly baffled by everything he’s experiencing, and probably hungry. The Yankees may have found something.
Remember last year, when everyone raved about the Cleveland Indians going so breaking ball heavy? It worked so well because the teams they were facing were brilliant fastball hitters but bad at hitting curves in particular. It appears, at least in a micro sense, that this has come back to bite the Indians, and specifically Ramirez. While the Tribe as a whole are the second best slider hitting team in baseball by FanGraphs' Pitch Value, at 10.9 runs above average, this is driven in large part by Edwin Encarnacion's plus-16 rating. He’s literally the best in baseball at hitting them.
Ramirez is 3.2 runs below average on sliders this year (though he was plus-4.3 last year, because pitch value is a finicky thing and can be contextual, but stick with me) and plus-28.3 on fastballs. It works out to a .270 wOBA facing sliders, compared to his .396 wOBA this year. For comparison, Encarnacion owns a .434 wOBA facing sliders. In short, Ramirez seems to have committed to fastball hunting. It's a good strategy. The fastball is the most-thrown pitch. But that's in the regular season. It's shifted for Ramirez in October:
This is what adjustments look like. In hunting fastballs, Ramirez may have dug a hole for himself. This chart compiles all breaking pitches into one heap, but Ramirez's pitch breakdown for the year went like this:
He saw a lot of hard pitches, because they get thrown a lot. A bare 13.8 percent of the time, it was a slider. But this October, the Yankees have thrown Ramirez a slider a stunning 27.9 percent of the time according to TexasLeaguers.com. He’s seen them more than any other pitch, including four-seam fastballs at 24 percent. For the season his swinging strike rate is 5.9 percent, but on only sliders this October it's nearly twice that — 10.3 percent. That's actually nearly a point lower than his season rate on sliders, but the sheer rate of them is crushing Ramirez's production.
The slider isn't the only thing that's killing Ramirez. He's whiffing on 23.1 percent of sinkers thrown to him, nearly 20 points above his season rate. Though Brooks Baseball and TexasLeaguers disagree on classifying them, which makes me think Brooks calls Tanaka's splitter as a sinker sometimes. Either way, he's not seeing sinkers or splitters or what have you nearly as much. This is the case of a team in the Yankees leaning heavily on one of their own strengths — the slider — and having success against a normally good hitter. Plainly baseball learned something from the Indians a year ago. With Encarnacion out, this has been thrown into stark relief.
Ramirez has a shot at redemption on Wednesday, against a pitcher in CC Sabathia that throws his slider more than any other pitch this year at 31.5 percent, and threw it 37.7 percent of the time in Cleveland last week. Never mind that bullpen lurking behind him. If Ramirez is going to be a hero, or even a net positive in the lineup, he's got his work cut out for him.