This article is part of our Collette Calls series.
As he came to plate for his second at bat of the game, Dave O'Brien noted that Ramirez was overdue for a home run. Then, this happened:
This awesomeness too happened in the dugout shortly after that home run:
The awesomeness does not stop there. After the game, Ramirez spoke to my heart when he invoked a Rocky-like speech involving airline lingo:
"Get ready," Ramirez said after the game. "Get your ticket. First class, whatever, coach. It's about to get hot."A coach seat is not good enough for what we're seeing from Hanley Ramirez these days. Since that picture, Ramirez has batted .300/.375/.601 with a .407 wOBA and 153 wRC+. However, you would like to parse the numbers, HanRam has been smashing the baseball this summer and is a big reason why Boston is where it is now.
Ramirez cited a few things in that post-game speech that he had been working on:
"I've been working on my timing and trying
As he came to plate for his second at bat of the game, Dave O'Brien noted that Ramirez was overdue for a home run. Then, this happened:
This awesomeness too happened in the dugout shortly after that home run:
The awesomeness does not stop there. After the game, Ramirez spoke to my heart when he invoked a Rocky-like speech involving airline lingo:
"Get ready," Ramirez said after the game. "Get your ticket. First class, whatever, coach. It's about to get hot."A coach seat is not good enough for what we're seeing from Hanley Ramirez these days. Since that picture, Ramirez has batted .300/.375/.601 with a .407 wOBA and 153 wRC+. However, you would like to parse the numbers, HanRam has been smashing the baseball this summer and is a big reason why Boston is where it is now.
Ramirez cited a few things in that post-game speech that he had been working on:
"I've been working on my timing and trying to stay back and just move my hands," Ramirez said. "… (My) hands were coming out quick and short. That's it. That's hitting, as a hitter, you know even one swing is like, 'Wow, I felt something right there.' And you just go from there."His coaches saw a little more. Manager John Farrell said, "He's got some moving parts in his swing … we're just seeing a more consistent timing and swing path probably in the past few days."
Renowned hitting coach Chili Davis had more to say in a separate article:
"I think he's making an adjustment," Davis said. "He's got his hands up a little higher today and when his hands are high ...
"If you look at him in 2014 with the Dodgers, he had a leg kick but his hands were higher and they were freer and the leg kick didn't matter then. I think he's moved his hands and the leg kick now is kind of getting in the way of the hands, so now they're freer."Batters tinkering with swings is nothing new, and you could probably find 10 snapshots of Hanley Ramirez over the years to show how he has tinkered with his swing. To that point, the two images below are both from home runs; one was from May 11 and the other was from September 15. Despite what Chili Davis said, the location of HanRam's hands looks and everything else is practically identical:
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What is noticeably different is something that MLB.com's Mike Petriello noted nearly two weeks ago – HanRam's launch angle.
Using the awesome tools at StatCast, we can get a visual of the before and after for launch angle for HanRam. The first image is the pre June 15th, keeping in mind that line drives do not begin until the launch angle is at least 10 degrees. The red area of the image are hits while the gray areas are all batted balls. The further out the color cluster is, the higher the frequency of those instances.
Now, compare that image to what Ramirez has done since imploring us all to buy first class seats to enjoy the trip he was going to take us on:
Elevate the ball and good things happen. Pre-change, Ramirez was putting too many balls into the ground against shifted defenses and was achieving suboptimal results. Nowadays, he is getting more loft to the baseball and hitting line drives or deep fly balls through and over defenders that are achieving the type of results fantasy owners expected when they paid for the bounceback year this season.
We last saw HanRam perform at this level in 2013 when he hit .345/.402/.638 in 86 games for the Dodgers. We've been waiting a long time for that guy to come back and over the course of this summer, he finally has. Both he and Justin Upton (wow!!) are crushing of late as their real teams and fantasy owners are trying to win pennants. Given HanRam's tendencies to tinker, who knows what the future holds for him, given the fact he has not put together back to back strong steason s since the 00's. It is just nice to see him rediscovering what made him a great fantasy asset in 2016.
