Heliot Ramos had an up and down season in 2025. What most remember is his down offensive season and horrendous defensive performance. He discusses when it went downhill in an interview with the Chronicle (Subscription required), noting a play in the July 20th game against Toronto. I thought I would look into before and after, to get a picture of what we might expect in 2026.
ogc thoughts
On July 20, 2025, Ramos had been hitting much as he did in his 2024 breakout season, hitting .267/.338/.431/.769, and bouncing around .700’s and .800’s OPS, up and down, through hot streaks and cold. Baseball Reference only has standard fielding game log stats, but his seasonal error rate up to that game was 6.8, for reference.
After that date, he was okay for about a month offensively, hitting .309/.407/.338/.746 in the next 17 games, but then from August 10th to the end of the season, he only hit .213/.271/.356/.628 in the last 42 games. Which corroborates what he said in the article about it eventually affecting his offense. His error rate doubled (assists stayed roughly the same seasonal rate) to 13.7, showing how badly he played after that game.
He was especially bad in that first 21 game period, the error rate went to 23.1, more than tripling. He had 3 in those 21 games, vs 4 in the 95 games to start the season. It went down to 8.5 for the rest of the season, 38 games (total of 2 errors), which is roughly what it was to start the season, but the damage was done. He had a very bad middle section, making the season look really bad defensively.
Jung Hoo Lee Confusion
And that’s not representative of what he did in 2024. Because, in 2024, in 112 games, he only had 1error for a 1.4 errors seasonal rate. One single error! There was something else bad going on that the Toronto game that broke the dam, but he was already struggling all season long.
I have been mentioning here and there that I believe that there was some sort of communication problem between JHL and Ramos, and these error stats seem to confirm it. He had 1 error in all of 2024, 112 games. He already had 4 in the first 95 games of 2025, then the dam broke and he had 3 more in 21 games, then 2 in the final stretch. That’s a total of 9 errors vs 1 the season before.
Perhaps that early video of Jung Hoo taking out Yaz and Matos out for a Korean meal was more telling, since it didn’t include Ramos. And JHL mentioned at some point last year that he needed to do a better job as the CF in taking charge.
2026 Ramos
So, what does the above say?
It looks like his hitting was the same as in 2024 until he, as he put it back then, got into his head. He hit .792 OPS in 2024 and was bouncing around that midpoint during the first part of 2025 until that Toronto game. Plus ZiPS projects .748, Steamer .751, and The Bat X .764. It seems reasonable to say that he should be better than his 2025 .728 OPS, somewhere in the mid to high 700’s. Given his wide swings of hit and cold, I wouldn’t bet against higher, he could run out of games in the season in the middle of a heater.
On top of that, he appears to have cleared his mind of his fielding difficulties last season. It has to help a lot that Harrison Bader was signed to play CF, pushing JHL to RF, and Bader is a gold glove caliber CF. Ramos won’t have to deal with whatever issues he had last season.
Ramos produced at roughly a 3 WAR seasonal rate in 2024, if he can duplicate in 2026 what he has mostly done so far in his short MLB career, which is almost 2 WAR better than 2025. Even producing average 2 WAR would be double and add a WAR. It looks pretty likely that Ramos will produce more this season than in 2025.
No comments:
Post a Comment