Nobody deserves a .414 BABIP. That's just not how things work. Hit the ball the way you want, spray line drives all over the field with reckless abandon, secretly oil your opponents' gloves – none of those things can keep your batting average on balls in play at such a high level. It is a good marker for small samples. If someone is BABIP'ing .414, it's too early to believe his stats.
Let's use Heliot Ramos as an example. Ramos is on fire this year. He's hitting a ridiculous .319/.394/.560, and he's doing it while striking out about 30% of the time. It doesn't make sense. No one hits .300 while hitting consistently. No one sports a .400 OBP with that high of a strikeout rate unless he's pitching like Barry Bonds. Ramos does nothing.
I keep listing nonsense here. Ramos isn't exactly the start-and-crush type — he's hitting 1.7 ground balls per fly ball, a league average of 1.4. But it's working for him – he's hitting a scalding .367 on those grounders with a .411 slugging percentage. That's the 11th best mark (minimum 40 grounders) in baseball in average, and the 15th best in slugging percentage.
There's not much skill in that, just being honest. Ramos hits his bottoms hard, but not really. He cuts them straight down; among BA's top hitters, Bobby Witt Jr. he only has an average launch angle, and he uses a high strikeout rate on grounders because he's the fastest player in baseball, not because of anything special about grounders.
Normally, this is where I would tell you to tone down your enthusiasm for Ramos. Yes, he puts up a 172 wRC+. Yes, he has been the most important hitter for the Giants so far this year. Yes, he is 13th in the LIFE among all major league outfielders. But he acts in a strange way, so we shouldn't believe it… right?
To some extent, sure. No one keeps hitting like this. It's just gravity. But Ramos does a lot of things very well, and in these enlightened days, there's no need to throw away someone's early performance just because a little luck comes along. So let's dive in, shall we? The Giants may have just landed the outfielder they have been searching for for years without fruit.
In the same way that the most important meal of the day is breakfast, the most important pitch to succeed in is the first. Every single plate appearance is unique, and what happens has a lot to say about the rest of the at-bat. There is no right way to start, but getting good at it is important. Whether you're hunting for cheap quick balls or trying to avoid falling behind in the count, a 0-0 draw sets everything else up.
Ramos is pitched as a powerful unknown, meaning pitchers approach him like a big leaguer. He sees strikes on just over half of his first pitches. Most of those are fastball strikes. He throws them almost like everyone else. None of this stands out, and that alone is a good sign. When you're scouting a guy with a lot of raw power and a lot of minor league hitters, there's always a chance he can't adapt to big league play. That is clearly not the case here.
Another way to get ahead is to avoid bad swings. Ramos does that – he's swinging at just 11% of the pitches out of the zone on first pitches, better than the league average. Another way forward is better, though: smashing the living sunshine with a weak 0-0 offering. I'd rather be back in the dugout celebrating with my friends than a 1-0 lead any day.
For most hitters, that means hunting fastballs. Ramos doesn't give up on that, but his real skill is attacking strikers who come at him from behind. “Throwing back” is just jargon for scoring second strikes early in the count. It's a smart counter for hitters who sit on early fastballs. They see the spin and stop, the pitch is in the strike zone, and the pitcher gets all the benefits of an in-zone fastball without the potential injury.
That's the theory, anyway. So far, it has not been good for Ramos' opponents. He's in the top 20% of the league in swing rate when ball mills give him outfielders who can't start at bats. Comparatively, he ranks third lowest in swing rate on fastballs in the same situation. Most hitters swing more often at fastballs than breaking balls, but not Ramos. And he doesn't take defensive swings, either. You take full rips; You are one of the 20 strongest bowlers in this cookie smashing ball game. He goes up there with bad intentions, in other words. If you try to float something on the plate, you will try to destroy it.
To say it works would be an understatement. No other hitter in the majors has matched Ramos' swing frequency and damage rate. No one swings that often turns hard, and ideally no one does that much damage. He's fourth in the majors in run value added by hitting these get-me-over first pitches, with three guys in at-bats ahead of him. On average, Ramos attacking the ball across the first pitch creates one of the most anticipated results in the game.
I think the pitchers may have noticed. On June 3, he sent Ryne Nelson's 420-foot slider to right. On June 8, Andrew Heaney connected one there and received 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 clocked 98 mph, though it went straight into the ground. If you give him a hitable breaking ball, he will do everything he can to destroy it. The pitchers responded logically, by taking that pitch out of the arsenal they faced.
This turns into a math task. Pitchers don't try to get some of their first strikes with big looping curves or middle-of-the-middle sliders against Ramos the same way they do against others. But they don't replace each other's wrecking balls with dead red balls. They try to entice him to chase breaking balls at times, or lift fastballs, or just start him with a changeup or split when he has a chance to play. So, you go ahead and count multiple times:
That's a big part of Ramos' recent emergence. Broadly speaking, he belongs to the archetype of batters you've faced before: the high-slug/low-contact masher. In addition, he is in the “good but not excessive” category. Maybe I'm giving away — scouts generally didn't like his plate training as a prospect — but with the 2024 action, he's at least succeeding in that category.
If you have a decent feel for the strike zone but struggle with contact, falling back in the count is the worst thing that can happen. You can shoot Joey Gallo if you'd like, or Aaron Judge if you want a classic version. If a hitter has top-shelf power and acceptable pitch recognition, pitches in a 1-0 lead tend to go very well. Pitchers have to get into the strike zone several times to avoid walks, and you never know when one of those pitches will be sent to the bleachers.
Flip the script to 0-1, and things go very differently. Batsmen should turn more willingly after falling behind on the pitch, because the cost of a strike taken increases. Pitchers leave the strike zone with second gaps more often. Sometimes, hitters with average discipline get back into the count by taking a few hard pitches. However, with great practice, they swing into one of those fields or strike, and the bond is strengthened by a double strike.
Judge's wOBA is 1.45 times higher after going 1-0 than when falling behind 0-1. Gallo is 1.54 times higher. Pete Alonso? His is 1.42 times higher. The league is only improving at a rate of 1.32. There are two ways to look at it, both of which amount to one thing: Either these are the types of hitters who improve the most when they're in the lead, or they're the type who get hurt the most when they're in the back.
To be clear, you don't see these types of splits in a few games, or even a season. Classification based on counting is noisy. I compare Ramos to those who beat the process, not the results. But why is his breakup not as visible as those guys? When he hits the ball, it goes a mile. He's near the top of the league in broad contact power stats: barrel rate, hard-hit rate, EV50 (exit velocity of the top half of his batted balls), xwOBACON, whatever floats your boat. He's especially adept at punishing weak fastballs, which makes sense: If you're doing the hard work of getting ahead in the count, you should take advantage of the easy ones.
If you're looking for one reason for Heliot Ramos to play well this year, it's BABIP. If you're looking for other reasons, though, you'll find them. He smashes the ball and looks forward in the count with other bullies trying to pull an easy one on him early in the count. You get lucky – at least partially. If he is going to be a great big league hitter, it will be after exactly this path. For a guy who seemed to have lost his momentum over the years, it's a remarkable recovery.
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