As part of the White Sox’s 16-3 blowout of the Pirates yesterday, Alexei Ramirez went two-for-five with two RBI, continuing a great season performance that currently has him batting .297/.327/.761, with a line of .412/.455/1.043 so far in June, capped by three home runs in the last three weeks.

Thanks partly a confluence of injuries to his teammates, Ramirez has become an everyday player in multiple positions for Chicago, and looks to continue to start for the foreseeable future. As an immigrant from Cuba’s baseball leagues, Ramirez doesn’t have an MLB record to compare this performance to, so how can we figure what to expect from him going forward?

After a blistering small-sample performance in spring training (.323 average, 2 HR, 17 RBI), Ramirez was kept out of regular playing time for much of April and the beginning of May. When Juan Uribe went down on May 16th with a hamstring strain, Ramirez took over at second base, and hasn’t slowed since. The extra playing time has brought Ramirez to 155 plate appearances, which means we can start to look at his contact, strikeout, and line drive rates with some confidence. So far they look pretty good; his contact rate is at 88%, his strikeout rate is 12.4%, about seven points below league average (if it helps give some context, Miguel Tejada and Brian McCann are both posting a similar rate this year), and his line drive rate is 15.9%.

A look at some of these numbers (courtesy of the invaluable FanGraphs) on a chart show that his K rate has been on a steady decline since he became an everyday player, and that his line drive rate has steadily climbed upward over the same span:

This could be partly explained by his hot hitting streak over the same period, since a span in which a player is hitting over .400 is sure to include plenty of line drives; however, it could also be a reflection of his batting performance stabilizing to his true skill levels.

Along the same lines, Ramirez’s BABIP is at .317 right now. If we use the THT-created rule of thumb that line drive rate tends to predict BABIP to the tune of line drive rate + .120, we would get an “expected” BABIP of .279. This isn’t to say that he can’t keep up a plus-.300 BABIP–I really couldn’t tell you for sure either way. But with the limited information we have, we can at least make some educated guesses, which so far tell us that there is probably a bit of luck involved in Ramirez’s current streak. On the other hand, as he’s reaching some of the plate appearance “milestones” for some of this data, the apparent trends of his strikeout and line drive rates seem to indicate he could continue to improve.

Okay. Let’s not get dizzy divining batted ball rates with what is still a small part of the season. To add to our Alexei-nalysis, let’s take a look at what little information we can find about his stats in Cuba. With some Internet sleuthing (and many thanks to the threads at Baseball Think Factory), I could come up with the following stats from his time in the Cuban national league, the Serie National, which has a 90 game season (I went ahead and calculated the strikeout rates and, their inverses, the contact rates):

His 2004-2005 average was enough to place him in the top ten of league hitters, while his 20 home runs in 2006-2007 led the league.

The grain of salt to be taken here is that Baseball Prospectus’ Clay Davenport estimates the Cuban leagues are at about an ‘A’ minor league level. Averages tend to be high there, and power low (the league-leading averages in the three above seasons were .385, .447, and .371, and home runs 27, 27, and 20). I don’t have the knowledge or ability to translate these numbers into anything like a MLB equivalent, so it might be best to take the long, hedged view on these numbers: they seem to support Ramirez’s current bid to be a high-average hitter with some power.

Going forward, it looks like the potential of picking up this MLB rookie is the production of a good hitter with some surprising power, and maybe a little bit of speed (he’s stolen three bases so far). Anyone who may have drafted him or, maybe, predicted him to be a Rookie of the Year, probably did so banking on some future upside to his youth and track record in Cuba. That upside may be manifesting itself right now.