Digging in on Heliot Ramos

Looking deeper into Heliot Ramos' year

Heliot Ramos’ season has been something of a constant puzzlement — and a topic of much content here at There R Giants. Just yesterday, I wrote at length about how important this swing of the bat from Ramos might have been:

MLB Pipeline @MLBPipeline

Step 1: Demolish baseball. Step 2: Deliver epic bat flip. No. 5 @SFGiants prospect Heliot Ramos comes through on both fronts for the @RiverCats:

The topic of why Ramos’ hard contact hasn’t led to better results this season has been a regular part of the roundup, making almost daily appearances in my posts, but I wanted to dig into the data and see if I could move from the mere anecdotal to something deeper and more meaningful. So I turned to my Substack colleague Scott Van Lenten over at Down on the Farm to help me visualize what exactly is going on with Ramos this year.

If you’ve been reading There R Giants every day this season, you know that I’ve harped on two things about Ramos’ hit data that I think are undermining his hard contact (in addition to just a lot of old fashioned bad luck): 1) an extreme proclivity for ground balls, and 2) a lot of opposite field contact.

I thought the time had come to actually look at the data, and see how well- or ill-founded that supposition is.