There's an awful lot you can learn from the way that a player gets pitched. Often, you could just look at the player's statistics, I suppose, but let's make believe we live in a world without publicly-accessible performance statistics. All right, so, now we're imagining. Last year, no regular player saw a higher rate of fastballs than Ben Revere. Why would that be? No regular player saw a lower rate of fastballs than Josh Hamilton. Why would that be? First basemen saw far, far fewer fastballs than American League pitchers. If all we had was this information, we could still interpret it, figuring out clues as to how the hitters are perceived.
Of course, it's not just about fastball rate. You can look at fastballs, or you can look at pitches in the zone, or you can look at types of pitches in particular parts of the zone -- there's a lot you can examine. Players get pitched according to the scouting reports that teams have on those players, and since we can't look at those scouting reports, we can use the information we have to examine them indirectly.
One thing you can do is look at a guy's pitch patterns. Yet another powerful indicator of something can be a change in a guy's pitch patterns. What that would suggest is a change in a guy's ability level or approach. Yasiel Puig, for example, was pitched differently in 2014 from how he was pitched as a rookie. That's because Puig evidently corrected a weakness against inside fastballs. If we look at drop in rate of fastballs seen, no hitter saw a bigger drop between 2013 and 2014 than J.D. Martinez. There's a pretty simple explanation: Martinez changed his swing mechanics and became an out-of-nowhere slugger. So pitchers found themselves having to be more careful.
At the other end, Mike Trout saw an increase in his fastball rate. Opponents tried to seize a perceived weakness against high heat. Allen Craig saw an increase in his fastball rate. Opponents identified that he was missing bat speed and couldn't get around on hard pitches in. And yet, of all the players, no one saw a bigger year-to-year fastball-rate increase than Hanley Ramirez. Ramirez was productive, and Ramirez just signed a big contract with the Red Sox, but clearly, pitchers saw him differently in the season recently completed.
Ramirez's fastball rate increased by 7.5 percentage points. Technically, by the FanGraphs data, his increase was tied with Jarrod Saltalamacchia's, but according to Brooks Baseball, Ramirez edged Saltalamacchia out. Relative to the rest of the players, Ramirez's fastball rate increased by just about three full standard deviations, so we're not talking about something insignificant, here. Maybe 7.5 percentage points seems trivial, but it's quite a substantial bump.
This might help. Out of 316 players who batted at least 250 times in 2013, Ramirez ranked 295th in fastball rate, putting him in the seventh percentile. Yet, out of 311 players who batted at least 250 times in 2014, Ramirez ranked 93rd in fastball rate, putting him in the 70th percentile. That's a leap, and not the sort of leap that just happens by accident.
Using information from Baseball Savant, let's look at how Ramirez was pitched between years, by location. Check out this gif.
There's nothing as dramatic as the change in fastball rate, but you see a bit of a shift away from the inside. Pitchers were frequently trying to beat Ramirez with fastballs over the outer half, and right-handed pitchers in particular threw Ramirez a lot more fastballs than he'd gotten used to seeing. In 2013, when Ramirez was slugging like a superstar, pitchers tried to disrupt his timing, and they tried to keep him off the fastballs. In 2014, it would appear pitchers were less concerned with Ramirez's bat speed.
Clearly, Ramirez wasn't as good a hitter in 2014 as he was the year before. Most significantly, Ramirez didn't show the same power. Out of those 316 batters in 2013, Ramirez ranked 16th in home runs per fly ball, putting him in the 95th percentile. Out of the 311 batters in 2014, he ranked 123rd, putting him in the 60th percentile. So you could say Ramirez was pitched pretty intuitively. Pitchers more frequently avoided the fastball in 2013, as they tend to do against power hitters. In 2014, they pitched Ramirez as if they figured he had slider bat speed.
Here's an interesting thing about this: this new book on Hanley Ramirez? It looks a lot like the old book on Hanley Ramirez. While Ramirez's fastball rate surged north between the last two years, it actually returned to where it used to be earlier in his career. It's the big dip in 2013, and the smaller dip in 2012, that now stand out in retrospect. Ramirez's fastball rate in 2014 was basically the same as it was in 2011, and 2010, and 2009, and so on.
Which doesn't mean he has the same scouting report as he used to. It's just that pitchers have settled on the same ratios. According to Ramirez's opponents, he doesn't have the same ability he had in 2013. And according to his opponents, he also has a different approach from what he had in 2012.
There's some stuff of additional interest, that might or might not be related. Ramirez in 2014 was seeing more fastballs from the get-go. Through June 10, he was hitting just .256, but he was slugging .457. Then he missed a start due to a bit of shoulder discomfort. Ramirez is always hurting somewhere, but the shoulder's pretty important for swinging, and from that point forward, Ramirez hit just three more home runs. He became less of a power hitter and more of an effective singles hitter. His respective spray charts are displayed here.
After the middle of June, the hits just weren't as deep. Ramirez was still hitting, but he was hitting differently, in a way he hadn't hit before. Pitchers made an adjustment to the adjustment they had already made at the start of the year. Check out this gif.
The fastball rate increased a little more. Pitchers got more willing to go inside, and they were also more willing to just stay in the zone. Already pitching more aggressively against Ramirez, they pitched only more aggressively, with diminished fear of a four-base hit. Ramirez in 2014 fought through a seemingly endless list of physical maladies, and so while on one hand it would be easy to assume Ramirez will get back to himself in Boston, we don't know what "himself" means, plus the last live version we saw of Ramirez wasn't hitting for power. He wound up with the second-lowest homer total of his career, and the one time he hit just ten homers, he played in only 92 games.
But the point isn't to make too much of Ramirez's 2014 post-June power drop-off. It's interesting, but the Red Sox have also examined Ramirez and concluded he's in well-enough shape. So we'll see how much power he's able to hit for in Boston. The bigger thing is just that pitchers grew so much more willing to throw Ramirez heat, even before his shoulder started acting up. It took very little time for opponents to conclude that 2013 Hanley Ramirez was no longer a thing. I'm not sure exactly what they saw, but the data clearly shows they saw something, and sure enough, Ramirez hit well below his 2013 level. Maybe we'll never know what fueled such a torrid offensive pace. But Ramirez isn't being pitched like that anymore. He's being pitched more like the old Hanley Ramirez. So in a few ways, the Red Sox can say, welcome back.
