It was the Cubs’ lesser move of the day, and thanks to his absence from baseball in 2019 and 2020, nobody’s really going to be able to tell you much about what the A.J. Ramos signing really means for the Cubs.
Odds are good that a guy who was in decline and missed the entire 2019 season following shoulder surgery, and then was released by the Dodgers before getting a chance in the bigs, is not going to contribute. That’s just the way it goes.
But I did find at least one thing interesting in David Ross’s comments today about the signing.
“I know AJ,” Ross said, per Cubs.com. “He was working his way back. Talked to some of the Dodger guys – they liked what they saw. The changeup is as good as it gets. It’s kind of like a left-handed curveball. It’s got good, true depth. He’s a guy that’s been in the back end of a ‘pen. The moment’s not going to be too big for him. Hopefully he gets to South Bend, has a good showing and we’ll see what happens.”
For the most part, that’s just standard hopefulness and managerial platitudes. Fine. But that one part stood out to me: “The changeup is as good as it gets. It’s kind of like a left-handed curveball.”
For a righty, one of the best neutralizing weapons against lefties is a good changeup, especially if it’s got really good fade. So if it were the case that Ramos was currently rocking a dominant changeup, you might consider him a just-in-case option for the bullpen if the Cubs can’t pick up a lefty in trade by tomorrow. We keep mentioning “lefty” as a shorthand for what the Cubs need, but it’s true that if they could get a righty who was legitimately great against lefty batters, then, hey, same difference.
The question, though, is whether Ramos could actually be that guy in 2020.
For his career, Ramos has been pretty split-neutral, with great success against both lefties and righties. And before things went off the rails in 2018, he actually had indeed started to have even more success against lefties than righties. That tracks with the timeline of his increasing reliance on the changeup, too, though the pitch he REALLY ratcheted up was the slider:
Can’t help but wonder if the Cubs think they can tweak the slider slightly to give it more cutter action, since they’ve had a lot of success with that this year. That, too, would be a significant weapon against lefties.
Ultimately, there’s only so much we can do here when all the data and visuals on a guy for this year are from an alternate site where we have zero visibility. All we know for sure is that Ramos was really excellent several years ago, then broke down, then had shoulder surgery, and now is a black box that the Cubs were eager to pounce on when he became available.