Behind the numbers: Jose Ramirez and his fast start

(Editor's note: Please welcome John Avsec, our newest writer, to the blog!)

It's no surprise to anyone who's watched the Tribe this year that Jose Ramirez is absolutely locked in at the plate. In fact, Jose Ramirez is off to the hottest start of his career. In this first edition of Behind the Numbers, I break down Jose's hot start and what underlying factors have led to it. So far Ramirez' numbers are incredible, he's slashing .365/.417/.654 (AVG/OBP/SLG%) to go along with 4 HR and 15 RBI. With such unprecedented numbers, I was very interested to see what went into them. The first big thing I noticed was that his pull rate was down from last season. Here's what his spray chart looked like in 2016: 39/32.7/28.3 (pull, center, opposite). As you can see, he was pulling the ball quite a bit, but he also squared up a lot of pitches, hitting nearly 33 percent of the time to center field. So far through 14 games this season I saw a drastic change. Here is Jose's 2017 spray chart: 34/46.8/19.2 now again this is a small sample size but it's still pretty impressive! His timing has been excellent, hitting the ball to the center of the field nearly 47 percent of the time. This is the first contributing factor to his great start.

Jose Ramirez hits a home run off of Justin Verlander.
Courtesy: Laredo Morning Times

The next contributing factor is his hard hit percentage. Very simply put, good things happen when a player hits the ball hard. Let's just say Ramirez has been hitting the ball hard more times than not. In his breakout 2016 campaign he had an impressive 26.8 hard hit percentage to go along with a 58.9 medium hit percentage. So far in 2017, he has a medium hit percentage of 51.1 percent and hard hit percentage of 40.4 percent. Yes, that's really, really good. How good? Better than Mike Trout's average hard hit percentage over the last three seasons (40.3 percent). His average exit velocity (via Statcast) is 89.82 MPH, which is 2.25 MPH faster than the league average (87.57 MPH). The final thing I looked at was Jose's hit distribution. There are four different classifications; they are LD percentage (line drive), GB percentage (ground ball), FB percentage (fly ball), and IFFB percentage (infield fly ball). His hit distribution is as follows: 29.8 percent LD, 23.4 percent GB, 46.8 percent FB, and 13.6 percent IFFB. Right off the bat, his line drive rate is really good; this is the main factor behind having a high batting average. The more line drives one hits, the more likely the player gets on base. Pretty simple right? 

Speaking of hard contact and home runs, one more fun stat I'd like to share is his average HR speed off the bat, an impressive 105.55 MPH. The quickest one came off of Yu Darvish, with an exit speed of 109.3 MPH, now that's fast! In large part, Jose's fast start can be attributed to hitting the ball much harder than we've seen in the past. In fact, his batted ball stats are up there with some of the best hitters in the game. As a Tribe fan, I'm hopeful that his numbers will continue to remain as good as they are now. However, as someone who follows stats very closely, I know that there will eventually be a regression to the norm...but hopefully not for a while.