NEWSLETTER
I hadn’t had an organic opportunity to throw some love Pedro Ramirez’s way, but I was very aware of his recent scorching hot streak.
So I appreciate that he just got a weekly award, so I have a natural reason to say this dude has been, you know, scorching hot:
Pedro Ramirez, who just turned 20, is currently hitting .365/.415/.482/150 wRC+ at High-A South Bend, with a 7.4% BB rate, and 16.0% K rate. Going back to April 19, Ramirez is hitting a whopping .472/.525/.642/225 wRC+.
You’d like to see a little more power coming (.118 ISO), and the .420 BABIP is doing a lot of the work (with an unsightly 62.9% groundball rate, which is hopefully not sustainable), but you do love that strikeout rate at such a young age in High-A. And as a solid 2B/3B who switch-hits and runs the bases well.
Ramirez, who raked in the DSL in 2021 and ACL in 2022, played last year at Low-A Myrtle Beach, and you may recall that he finished the year as one of the hottest hitters in the system. It’s looking like he’s carried that over into 2024, and although there won’t really be too much pressure to promote him to Double-A this year (as I said, he only just turned 20), you do wonder whether he’ll need a different kind of challenge at High-A (so that he can’t keep putting up ungodly numbers based primarily on BABIP).
We’ll see how the next couple months go, but you can’t argue that he hasn’t been blistering hot. And he’s got a weekly award to show for it now.
Ramirez, for what it’s worth, ranks 14th in the system at MLB Pipeline, but 26th in the updated top-30 over at Baseball America:
“Ramirez is a polished switch-hitter with an advanced feel for hitting. He’s a patient hitter with excellent strike-zone discipline and puts a short, fast swing on balls when he gets a pitch to hit. Ramirez is stronger batting lefthanded than righthanded, but he makes contact from both sides of the plate and has a chance to be an above-average hitter. He has started swinging harder to make more impactful contact and has a chance to reach 10-12 home runs. Ramirez is an above-average runner with average range and body control at second base and projects to be an average defender. He began playing third base but needs to improve his fringe-average arm strength to project there.”
