The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Ramirez shows lineup value against Yankees
Jose Ramirez showed his value to the American League champion Indians’ lineup with a standout night on the big stage of the Big Apple. David S. Glasier shares thoughts on the former Captain.
In live theater and in sports, New York City offers the grandest of stages.
It’s the quintessential big city, the place immortalized in the late singer Frank Sinatra’s unforgettable version of the John Kander-Fred Ebb song, “New York, New York.”
Think of Sinatra belting out these lyrics, the horns of a big band underlining every syllable and pause:
“I wanna wake up in the city that never sleeps, And find I’m A-No. 1, Top of the list, King of the hill, A-No. 1.” Indians’ do-everything player Jose Ramirez woke up in the city that never sleeps on Aug. 28.
Ramirez and his teammates were there for three games against NYC’s glamour team, the New York Yankees, on one of those stages, Yankee Stadium.
By night’s end, Ramirez owned that stage and the Indians were 6-2 winners over the team wearing those distinctive pinstripes.
Facing right-hander Luis Severino — the Yankees’ young, hard-throwing right-hander — Ramirez slammed solo home runs in the first and sixth innings to keep his team even with the Bronx Bombers. The Indians’ other batters went to work late and made a winner of Tribe starter and American League Cy Young Award candidate Corey Kluber.
Ramirez, playing second base, also made a couple of standout plays with his glove and arm as the Indians notched their fifth straight vic- tory. They continue a surge that bodes well for the balance of the regular season and, potentially, another deep run in the playoffs.
Whatever the Indians achieve from here on out this season, Ramirez almost surely will be in the middle of it.
With his potent bat, uncanny knack of coming through in the clutch, relentless hustle and ability to play second base, third base and shortstop at Gold Glove level, Ramirez is his team’s most indispensable position player.
Going into the middle game of this series, the 24-year-old native of the Dominican Republic was batting .300 with careerhigh totals of 20 home runs and 62 RBI. His 84 runs scored equals his total from last season, his first full season in the big leagues. With 32 regularseason games remaining, he will soon pass that mark.
Ramirez has a teamhigh 147 hits, Based on his track record this season — he’s averaging 1.16 hits per game played — he will surpass last season’s total of 176 hits.
It isn’t as if Ramirez needed to have a big game against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium to be recognized as one of the game’s rising stars. He was the starting third baseman for the American League in this year’s All-Star Game, installed there in online voting by the fans.
But doing what he did in that situation, in that place, in a game with pennant race implications for both teams, with the baseball world watching, was noteworthy.
Fox Sports Ohio on-field reporter Andre Knott brought out Ramirez for a postgame interview. He asked a smiling Ramirez if he dreamed of hitting 20 home runs in the big leagues when he and Tribe shortstop Francisco Lindor were teammates on the Single-A Lake County Captains in 2012.
Rebounding smartly from a mid-season lull at the plate, Lindor is batting .268 with a careerhigh 24 home runs and 25 RBI.
“Lindor has always been the kind of guy with that potential,” Ramirez said through team interpreter Anna Bolton. “He has a good swing. He’s always had great contact and been good at putting the ball into play. So it doesn’t surprise me he has 20 home runs. But I never thought I would have gotten 20 home runs.”
The careers of Ramirez and Lindor have been intertwined since 2012.
Ramirez signed with the Indians as an undrafted free agent in November 2009. For the next 2 ½ years, he was one of dozens of free agents from the Dominican Republic trying to stand out in the Indians’ farm system.
Lindor, the Indians’ first-round pick in the June 2011 draft, was the team’s top-rated prospect in 2012. It was more or less assumed that after honing his skills in the mi- nor leagues, he would be a star in the big leagues.
Ramirez, on the other hand, was so lightly regarded he was left behind in extended spring training in April 2012. He didn’t join the Captains until late June 2012, at the start of the second half of the Midwest League season.
It took only a few weeks with the Captains for the 5-foot-9 Ramirez to prove he could excel at every phase of the game. Playing second base and batting leadoff, he combined with Lindor to give the Captains a dynamic duo that triggered a second-half surge to earn a spot in the playoffs.
Fast-forward five years, and these two young men are driving forces on the Indians as they try to duplicate last season’s exciting run to the AL Central Division title, AL championship and Game 7 of the World Series.
At the end of the postgame interview, Knott asked Ramirez if he enjoyed playing in New York.
This time, Ramirez didn’t need to wait for a translation by Bolton.
“I like. I like playing in New York,” Ramirez said, again flashing the smile that breaks through even more these days.
As he parted company from Knott, Ramirez added, “Thank you, sir.”
With that, he headed to the dugout with the head-bopping bounce in his step that is his trademark.
“He has a good swing. He’s always had great contact and been good at putting the ball into play. So it doesn’t surprise me he has 20 home runs. But I never thought I would have gotten 20 home runs.” Jose Ramirez, on his current Indians and former Captains teammate Francisco Lindor