A little over a month ago, we looked at the good start of Alexei Ramirez, and tried our best to divine how he might perform going forward. The task was complicated by the dearth of available stats for the Cuban emigre, and so I wanted to check again on his progress to see if he has kept up the good hitting or faltered. Yesterday’s game, in which Ramirez hit his first American grand slam and eighth home run of the season, provided a quick, spectacular answer that yes, perhaps he has kept it up (As we can see here, he’s also apparently a good dancer). But what do the numbers say?

First, his batting line: he’s hitting .308/.328/.794 on the season, and he is cruising along with a contact rate of 87%. Thats right in line with the 88% contact rate he was posting a month ago, which was also when he passed the plate-appearances threshold at which we can start saying with confidence what a player’s contact rate should be going forward. It looks like time and Ramirez’s skills have borne out the assumption that he could maintain that contact rate through the year, which helps the case that he could keep up the high batting average, as well.

Likewise, his strikeout rate is 13.0%, just a bit off from the 12.4% he was at last month, and his line drive rate is 16.8%, compared to last month’s 15.9%. So these three stats look to be stabilizing at a certain skill level for the year, which also bodes well for his batting line for the rest of the year. What doesn’t look so good is his walk rate (as you may have guessed from seeing the .328 OBP), which at 3.1% puts him among the lowest in the league, with such company as Carlos Gomez (3.6%), Tony Pena (2.6%), and Yuniesky Betancourt (1.7%). What’s more, Ramirez, with 277 PA, has passed the threshold (200 PA) at which a player’s walk rate tends to stabilize for the season, so there’s not much indication this number could improve. (We can see this rate remain nearly constant in the following graph, grabbed from Fangraphs.)

Last time around (on June 18th), we looked at graphs of his strikeout and batted ball rates and noted that they seemed to show certain possible trends in their movement since he became an everyday player at second base. Let’s take another look at those graphs, with the added knowledge that all these rates have passed their threshold of stability for the season:

As we can see, his strikeout rate looks to have been fairly constant, while, just like last time, his line drive rate has trended upward, and his ground ball rate has trended downward, each somewhat steadily. His line drive rate is now 16.8%; if we use the quick rule of thumb to calculate BABIP by adding .120 to this, we see that his BABIP “should” be .288. Right now it’s .329. If we look at a graph of his season BABIP, we may also detect a certain trend here:

What does all this mean for the rest of the season? Right away, his BABIP looks to be supported by some luck, and it’s possible Ramirez’s luck could turn sour the second half of the season. However, as his line drive rate has steadily improved, the gap between his “expected” BABIP and actual BABIP has closed a bit, suggesting that any deflation won’t be as disastrous as it might have been. Without being very certain about it, it is worth suggesting that Ramirez could continue to improve–as we saw last time, he established himself in Cuba as a good hitter with quite a bit of power in a league that tended toward high averages and low power. It’s possible he could be emerging as a similar kind of player here as he adjusts to the major leagues.

However, let’s not conjecture too much and instead stay close to the (short) track record we have. Ramirez’s walk rate and strikeout rate show that he isn’t likely to improve much in OBP, though he will have a fair chance at maintaining his high average. His BABIP suggests that he’s been somewhat lucky in hitting, so there’s also a chance his average could drop, though it would likely stay above league average. His power and home run rates have remained rather constant, as well, so he seems on track to hit somewhere around 6-8 home runs the rest of the year. Finally, while he has good speed, and has stolen seven bases on the year (including four in the last two weeks), he’s been caught stealing four times, so he may not be the most reliable steals-producer. In all, Alexei Ramirez is shaping up to prove a reliable hitter at second base for the rest of the year, and if you haven’t noticed already, certainly a good pickup in deeper leagues.