Tag Archives: Alex Ramirez

Baseball, Commentary, News, Paid Content, Research

Ramichanalytics Part I

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When it comes to making use of analytics, DeNA BayStars manager Alex Ramirez may not be on the cutting edge, but he does his homework. He may not know lots of percentages but he does pay rigorous attention to his splits and other parts of the game, and that’s more than a lot of managers can say.

Although I missed out on asking him about his “Put the cleanup hitter in the No. 2 hole magic trick,” he is still using his pitchers to bat eighth again, and I was curious if he was aware of one rationale for putting your worst hitter eighth.

To cut to the chase, Tango, Lichtman, and Dolphin concluded that flipping a position player into the No. 9 spot and having the pitcher bat eighth can increase an average lineup’s production over a 162-game season by 2.47 runs per season. Not much, but not zero. The idea is that the No. 9 hitter does more than just create outs with runners on base ahead of him from the bottom of the order. He also gets on base for the 1-2-3 hitters, something most pitchers not named Shohei Ohtani are really, really bad at doing.

Nobody in professional baseball has used his pitchers to bat eighth as much as Ramirez. He originally started the practice in 2017 and used it throughout the 2018 season before abandoning it over the winter. On Wednesday in Yokohama, I asked Ramirez if he was familiar with the analytical advantage of batting the pitcher eighth.

He didn’t answer the question but did explain his rationale for using his pitcher’s in the No. 8 hole, and it has zero to do with the idea of using No. 9 as a “second leadoff hitter.” Instead, it has to do with what happens when the No. 8 hitter comes up with a runner on first base.

“The reason why it has been working, is when I use the pitcher as an eighth hitter and I bunt, I have a chance to score, a better chance to score in that situation (instead of having the No. 8 hitter swing away and leave the pitcher to clean up),” Ramirez said. “But that being said, you need to use somebody who is good batting with runners in scoring position as the ninth hitter. It cannot be just anybody.”

“Sometimes you have to think whether you want to go with a straight No. 8 hitter or have the pitcher in there and have him bunt for the ninth hitter. It depends on the situation.”

Baseball, Commentary, Paid Content, Research

Points of order

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A little more than three months after Alex Ramirez told that he would not bat his pitchers eighth this year, as BayStars, he slipped lefty Haruhiro Hamaguchi into the No. 8 hole on Wednesday against Hiroshima’s Kris Johnson.

Ramirez told reporters before the game that the timing was right. Before the season, several journalists wrote that Ramirez’s policy of pitchers’ batting eighth had been severely criticized by Japan’s legion of former-player talking heads. Ironically, the move came in the wake of a move that still has the old farts reeling, moving Japan cleanup hitter Yoshitomo Tsutsugo into the No. 2 slot, a spot traditionally reserved in Japan for batters who could bunt and punch at the ball and rarely hit home runs.

On Tuesday night, former slugger Yoshiaki Kanemura, speaking on Fuji TV’s Pro Yakyu News, said, “Frankly, I think moving the Japan national team cleanup hitter into the No. 2 spot is a slap in the face.”

On Thursday, pitcher Shota Imanaga was in the eighth spot as DeNA began the day in second place, playing the third-place Chunichi Dragons.

From April 14, 2017 to Oct. 10, 2018, Ramirez had his starting pitcher bat eighth 252 times, starting with Joe Wieland, who had been a good-hitting infielder who chose pitching as a pro because he felt it would get him to the majors faster. After 15 more games with his pitchers batting ninth, Ramirez switched to the No. 8 spot until the end of the 2018 season.

Some speculate that finishing out of the playoffs for the first time since he took over the club in 2016 forced him to give up a very defensible choice. The choice is whether a position player can do more damage finishing off the heart of the order in the No. 8 spot or setting the table for the top of the order in the No. 9 spot.

Although Ramirez has been far and away the biggest recent user of pitchers in the eighth spot, he is far from a precedent setter. I have 29,811 digitized box scores in my data base in which the starting pitcher was in the batting order. Of those, roughly 95 percent batted ninth.

Shohei Ohtani, Japan’s most famous hitting pitcher, batted in the starting lineup 15 times, and never batted ninth. He is the only pitcher in my spotty records to bat first, cleanup or fifth — where he started five times. Ironically, the only spot, where I haven’t found a pitcher in the starting lineup is second.

Even with Ramirez’s eighth-place renaissance, neither 2017 nor 2018 stands as the season with the most starting pitchers batting out of the No. 9 spot. That honor goes to the first year I have records for. In 1958, NPB managers started their pitcher out of the No. 9 spot 248 times. The next year, that figure was down to 45. There were also 145 games started by a pitcher batting higher than ninth in 1970. I’ll know more if I ever get around to sorting through the digital records of the other eight or nine seasons I have floating around.

And just when it seemed that people would get tired of talking about Tsutsugo batting second, former BayStar Hitoshi Tamura discussed the issue during Thursday’s broadcast, saying that while it was OK for a DH league like the AL, putting a big hitter in the No. 2 spot when the pitcher is in the lineup is counter productive. Mind you, he didn’t mention that Ramirez is now using Maeda as a second leadoff man at the bottom of the BayStars lineup.