The usual caveats about PEDs apply here, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at Manny Ramirez’s career statistics and conclude that he was an elite hitter. Just how elite seems to fly under the radar. Part of that is likely due to the fact that he never won a regular season MVP, and the other is his connection to PEDs, which hardly makes him a sympathetic figure. However, the stats are the stats and it is a fact that Ramirez battered pitchers in a way that we literally haven’t seen since Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. Ramirez and Ruth are the only two players in history with at least 550 career home runs, a .410 career on-base percentage, and a career .310 batting average. Ramirez and Ted Williams are the only players since 1936 with at least a .310 career batting average and a career .585 slugging %. He’s 8th all-time in career slugging % (min. 5,000 plate appearances), and he has the fourth-highest slugging % since 1958. He’s 10th all-time in AB/HR, and his 165 RBIs in 1999 are the most in a single season since 1937. He tallied seven seasons of at least 120 RBIs which trails only Alex Rodriguez for the most since 1937.
Ramirez was clearly a regular season beast, but his postseason numbers are what make him arguably the most underappreciated hitter in baseball history. He led 11 teams to the postseason, winning two World Series titles in four appearances, while also being named the 2004 World Series MVP. His 29 postseason home runs are the most in history. Jose Altuve (27) is the only other player within seven of Ramirez. He’s second all-time in postseason RBIs (78), just behind Bernie Williams (80). In fact, Williams is the only player within 15 RBIs of Ramirez’s total. Ramirez is tied for the lead in postseason walks (72) and fourth all-time in postseason hits (117) and runs (67). Ramirez wasn’t a five-tool player, which does limit his ceiling on the all-time list. However, he is undoubtedly one of the greatest postseason players in history and one of the most productive hitters since the 1930s.
Hi Jake, this is an interesting one. I’ve struggled with Manny. My own list which is based on a WAR formula struggles to get him into the top 100, let alone the top 30. That feels instinctively wrong and I’ve long lacked faith in the defensive element of WAR in which Manny is very heavily penalized. That said, 30th feels high. If I’m counting correctly, you have him rated 14th among position players. Looking at offense alone, that’s a stretch – he’s only 31st in OPS+, though admittedly that includes negro leaders and a lot of guys who played pre-war. Among those who played primarily post-1950 he’s 13th. When you add in defense, base running etc, it’s hard to get from 13th best hitter (excluing pre-1950 guys) to 14th best position player (including everyone). The post season piece is interesting, and I think we differ slightly on this and have discussed before. Clearly, the game is about winning and winning in the post season most of all. But for individuals in a team sport, it’s tough. A lot of post season success is about opportunity. Modern players get more of that anyway given that there so many more post-season rounds now, and then among modern players, some have obviously gotten more than others based on being on the right team at the right time. Manny did indeed have a good post-season record and as you say leads all post season homer hitters. But he also had a lot of post season opportunities. He is 4th in plate appearance with 493. And among the top PAs, only two others were recognized power hitters – Pujols and Ortiz. Manny’s HR per PA ratio is better than those two, but only marginally (29 in 493 or 5.88% vs 19 in 360 or 5.3% for Pujols for example). Overall Manny has an OPS in the post season of .937 which is great, but actually worse than his regular season .996. He hit HRs at a rate of 7% of his ABs in the post season versus 6.7% in the regular season, so his power numbers were fairly consistent too. None of which is to say that Manny wasn’t a great post season player, he was, but he wasn’t so much better in the playoffs than in the 162 game season that preceded it. He performed about as you’d expect and had a lot of opportunities to show his stuff relative to other great players.
Hey Stirlo!
A point about playoff baseball to start: Simply sustaining elite performance in the playoffs (or coming close) is notable in baseball. Most elite hitters dip significantly against the elevated pitching that comes in the postseason. Manny’s playoff performance isn’t great because he raised his game, it’s great because he nearly replicated his absurd regular season numbers in the playoffs, and not across a small sample size, either. Manny had nearly a full season (493 post-season plate appearances) in which he hit at a level well above what we would expect regular season statistics to look like for a Hall of Famer. You can make the argument that the increased # of postseason games are the reason why some players have high post-season raw totals, but that argument doesn’t fly for Manny. Sustaining a .544 slugging % against playoff caliber pitching over 493 postseason plate appearances is remarkable.
The vast majority of the players above Manny on the OPS+ list played during segregation. There’s a reason why there are only two players in the top 10 who began their career in the last seven decades. Manny has the 5th best OPS+ of any player to begin their career in the last 75 years (not including active players who will see their OPS+ dip in their later years), and two of those players (Dick Allen and Mark McGwire) had 2,000+ fewer playoff appearances. The OPS+ stat actually strongly supports Manny as a top-30 player. There are far too many statistics that support Manny being a top 30 (or 40) player. For instance, he has the 4th best slugging % of any player to debut in the last 85 years, and two of the three players ahead of him have 2000+ fewer career plate appearances.
In a sport that is busting at the seems with statistics, there are very, very few in which Manny doesn’t excel, the most notable being his defense. D/War is a statistic that I tread carefully with. Manny’s defense obviously wasn’t great, so it really depends how much faith you put into defensive metrics, and whether you think he was such a poor defender that a top 20-25 regular season hitter of all-time and top-10 playoff hitter of all-time doesn’t rate among the top 30 or 40 players in history.