Michael Brantley and Jose Ramirez: The fast starters

Cleveland Indians stars Michael Brantley and Jose Ramirez are on fire to start the season. How much stock should Tribe fans take in the duo’s fast start?

April is a challenging time to be a baseball fan. On the one hand, April means baseball is back from its winter slumber, which is nothing short of a gift from the gods after five months of agonizing wait.

On the other hand, this enthusiasm inevitably leads to people jumping to conclusions about player performances over the first few weeks of the season. We can’t help it. It’s simply human nature to make rash judgments on every morsel of data we get after give months of nothingness.

We are fast approaching the one-month mark for the 2017 season, which means…that it’s still too early to rush to judgment. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try! Here is a look at the a pair of hot starters for the Tribe: Michael Brantley and Jose Ramirez.

Michael Brantley

Out of everything that’s happened in April, Brantley’s quick start is the most encouraging. Brantley has gone from guy who may never play again to the elite offensive player he used to be.

Brantley’s early season slash line of .300/.364/.529  says Brantley is back to being the same great hitter he was pre-injury. But Brantley’s path to that slash line has been a little different than in the past.

Brantley is striking out in 22.1 percent of his plate appearances, almost triple the rates he posted in 2014 and 2015. His walk rate hasn’t changed (7.8 percent in 2017, 7.8 percent career), but his batting average on balls in play is a sky-high .347.

Normally such a jump in strikeout rate masked by an unsustainable BABIP would be cause for concern. However, per FanGraphs, Brantley is posting a near-unfathomable 50.9 percent hard contact rate. In other words, half the balls Brantley has put in play have qualified as hard contact. That rate is second only to Nick Castellanos (57.6 percent) for second in baseball among qualified hitters.

Hitting the ball hard is great, but it’s especially promising for Brantley. There were two levels of concern for Brantley heading into this year. One was that he would simply never be healthy again. The other was that Brantley’s shoulder problems would prevent him from driving the ball with authority, that he would turn into a slap hitter akin to Dee Gordon or Ben Revere without the requisite speed to make such a profile work.

It’s possible Brantley is selling out in order to hit the ball hard. It’s possible he’s just been lucky to make hard contact on a handful of occasions and his increased strikeout rate is bound to bite him.

More likely, however, is that Brantley is still regaining his elite contact skills after missing nearly all of last season. It’s only a matter of time before Brantley starts to make more contact, and Brantley’s hard contact profile thus far is a great development.

Jose Ramirez

Ramirez was the most pleasant of pleasant surprises last season, and he’s kept right on rolling in 2017, posting a .342/.400/.595 slash line through 20 games.

The .595 slugging percentage leaps off the virtual page. Ramirez has a .436 career slugging percentage, and even at his best he’s never been someone people viewed as a big power producer at the big league level.

At this point it’s hard to doubt Ramirez’s ability to get the bat on the ball and to get on base. His strikeout rate is roughly the same this year compared to last, and he’s walking at a 10 percent clip, a big bump from the 7.1 percent rate he posted in 2016.

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The power jump remains an open question, although the early signs are positive. Like Brantley, Ramirez has bumped up his hard contact rate from 26.8 percent to 35.7 percent this year. That rate will likely regress towards his 25.8 percent career rate, but how much is uncertain.

The more surprising development is that Ramirez has become a big time fly ball hitter this season. Ramirez is currently putting 41.4 percent of his batted balls in the air, the kind of rate posted by big time power hitters like Bryce Harper and Yoenis Cespedes.

The increase in fly balls is a double-edged sword. If the balls hit in the air are hit with authority, that means more doubles and home runs. If the balls hit in the air are hit weakly, that means more outs.

As recently as seventh months ago one might say more fly balls would be a negative for Ramirez because he may not have the raw power to push those balls over outfielders’ heads and over the fence. But now, in 2017, Ramirez’s increased fly ball rate and hard hit rate have helped him hit five April home runs after hitting 11 all of last season. Ramirez has even hit a couple shots to center field and the opposite field that are reminiscent of a big home run hitter.

The safe bet is that Jose Ramirez’s power will fall back some, and that he has not turned into a 20-plus home run hitter over the offseason.

Next: Encarnacion and Gomes: The slow starters

But the signs early on are quite promising. At the very least, Ramirez looks like the same great offensive player he was last year. But there may be potential for a little something more.