Cleveland Indians third baseman Jose Ramirez is making his case for 2020 AL MVP honors.
How do you define Most Valuable Player? Depending on who you ask, you are going to get a varied response and different set of criteria that lead to weeks of hotly contested debates leading up to the official announcement. As the 2020 season enters its final days, Cleveland Indians slugger Jose Ramirez is making a valid case to take home this year’s hardware.
The NL MVP race is coming down to a quartet of highly impressive candidates in Freddie Freeman, Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, and Mookie Betts. Each candidate has a notable resume and it’s hard to go wrong with either choice.
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The AL MVP race is a bit different. Cleveland Indians pitcher Shane Bieber has made his case and will make his final pitch (pun intended) for MVP honors on Wednesday night in his last regular-season start of the year, the White Sox have multiple candidates in Jose Abreu and Tim Anderson, Luke Voit, and Nelson Cruz have the numbers, and there’s always the greatest player in the game in Mike Trout.
But what about Jose Ramirez? This tightly contested race can be shaken up over the final five days of the season, but the Cleveland Indians third baseman is a serious candidate to win AL MVP honors and he’s making his best case at the most important time of the season.
In terms of providing the most value to your team, it’s hard to argue against what Ramirez and his bat have meant to the Indians. Beiber has been elite this year, is pitching his team into the playoffs, and is a sure-fire lock for the AL Cy Young Award, but there has always been hesitant about giving MVP honors to a pitcher.
Through 53 games this year, Ramirez is slashing .289/.376/.603 with 17 home runs, 11 doubles, 44 RBI, a 159 wRC+, and an AL-leading 3.2 Wins Above Replacement, per FanGraphs. He also ranks second in the AL in stolen bases with 10. According to Mike Freeman, the actual replacement to Jose Ramirez, he argues that his WAR is a bit low in one of the top tweets of the 2020 season.
I think his Wins Above Replacement should be higher.
— Mike Freeman (@MikeBFree5) September 22, 2020
Sincerely,
His replacement. https://t.co/LPUocI2fx1
During the month of September, Ramirez leads the American League in fWAR (1.7), home runs (10), wRC+ (245), and slugging percentage (.881). Getting hot down the stretch will certainly grab the attention of fans and voters.
Even if you include Ramirez and his MVP-quality offensive stats, the Cleveland Indians rank 12th out of 15 teams in team batting average (.228), 14th in slugging percentage (.370), 14th in wRC+, and 13th in runs scored (228).
The dominant pitching staff that hasn’t missed a beat since dealing Mike Clevinger has been fantastic, but you can’t win baseball games if you don’t score runs (mind-blowing analysis, right?) and if you remove Ramirez and his production, the Indians are not a playoff team, likely not even a .500 team in 2020.
To make sure you mention his name in the MVP race, Ramirez took a two-strike, 98 mph fastball in the bottom of the 10th inning on Tuesday night to hit a walk-off home run against the division-leading Chicago White Sox to clinch a playoff birth.
In an era of “what have you done for me lately”, Jose Ramirez has been one of the top bats in the American League at the most crucial point of the season, literally sending the Cleveland Indians to the playoffs with one swing of the bat. It’s going to extremely close, but Jose Ramirez has made his case for MVP honors.