You have to see Hanley Ramirez finish his home run swings. The guy’s gotta be working on it. He hit two into the left field seats Thursday night at Chase Field, both screaming line drives that went very, very far—394 feet on the first, 409 on the second as the Dodgers clinched the NL West for the first time since 2009. But it’s the finish that makes it. When Ramirez knows he’s really crushed a ball, he over-embellishes the follow-through, extending his right arm in front of him like he’s pointing at it while slicing the bat behind his back as if he’s trying to decapitate the umpire. Then he brings the bat back in front of him, his arm still fully extended, and gently drops the twig in front of home plate, like, yeah, thanks but I don’t need this anymore. It’s first-ballot, hall-of-fame swag.
You can do those sort of things when you’re having a season like Ramirez is; in a place like Hollywood and on a team like the Dodgers that has rediscovered its cockiness since it began winning all of the games about halfway through June. This is baseball’s hottest team and Ramirez is one of baseball’s hottest hitters. But if you’ve only been paying casual attention to the National League you could have likely missed both those points entirely. After being very awful for a very long time, the Dodgers are a little underappreciated for just how good they’ve been in the back half of this season. Likewise, after two years of trying to find his swing in the baseball wilderness, Ramirez’s name doesn’t immediately come up when you think of baseball’s best players. The man and the team are a nice little match like that.
It seems that somewhere along the line we forgot that Hanley Ramirez is really, really good. Like .351/.403/.656 in 320 plate appearances this year good. If he were to keep that production up over a full season—he missed almost all of April and May with a torn thumb ligament and a wonky hamstring—they would be engraving his name onto an MVP plaque right about now. When Ramirez entered the league at 22 with the Marlins—we’re not counting the two plate appearances with Boston in 2005—a lot of people thought he’d have at least one MVP, if not a few, by now. He was the rookie of the year that season, triple slashing .292/.353/.480 and stealing 51 bases. He took it to the next level the year after that, putting up .332/.386/.562 and swiping another 51 bags. At shortstop, you can’t really do better. And the Marlins knew it, locking Ramirez up for six years and $70 million before he turned 25.
Two more years of all-world numbers—.940 OPS in 2008, .954 in 2009—made it look like an insanely savvy investment. But in 2010 Ramirez’s numbers took a dip before bottoming out in 2011 when he hit just .243 and missed much of the season with a shoulder injury that eventually required surgery to correct. That bled into 2012 when Ramirez—now making $15 million, mind you—was miserable again, getting on base at just a .322 clip through the first 93 games of the season. That’s when the Marlins sold him at the nadir of his value to the Dodgers who were more than happy to take on his salary, a mere pittance to a team with a $7-billion local television contract.
And in Hollywood, Hanley became Hanley again. He finished 2012 decently and has gone absolutely HAM since. His 1.059 OPS is Pujolsian. His .306 isolated power is scary. He seems to have forgotten how to take a walk but that might not matter when your line drive rate is over 20 percent and you’re making contact on more than 93 percent of the pitches in the strike zone you swing at. He’s next level.
Ramirez just gets a little bit forgotten in the NL West. Most do. It’s a division with three losing teams and the truly mediocre Diamondbacks who are teetering on the ledge of .500. Outside of Troy Tulowitzki and Buster Posey, stars are few and far between. The games are on late for east coasters. It’s easy to forget the competition exists. But every year one of those NL West teams gets to bypass a play-in game and go straight to the postseason, regardless off how deft the competition in the division is. And this year it’s the Dodgers—not entirely by default.
Clayton Kershaw’s sub-2.00 ERA is remarkable. Yasiel Puig is a ceaseless, berserk entertainment machine. Juan Uribe can be a lot of fun to watch, in an Adrian-Beltre-but-not-as-good kind of way. It’s an enjoyable team and they just added Matt Kemp back to the mix. It also helps that the Dodgers pitch incredibly well and have weapons up and down the lineup, the benefit of a seemingly limitless payroll. Really, the race in the division wouldn’t have even been interesting a month ago if not for the Dodgers starting the season in a 30-42 funk. They’ve gone 58-23 since. Kemp—who hit 39 homers in 2011—has been hitting fifth for crying out loud.
It’s a solid team that caught fire in mid-June and has burned strong since. Then you remember that they have Hanley Ramirez rediscovering his otherworldly ability and it gets a little silly. The 29-year-old will be playing in the postseason for the first time in his career, with a cast of talented, entertaining characters in tow. You have to see it.