After having produced one of the best overall lines on Cleveland’s World Series club and subsequently received a $26 million extension, Jose Ramirez enters the 2017 campaign as a core member of the Indians’ major-league club. For as obvious as that sounds, it represents a departure from his status at this same point last year.
Known as a useful defender with good contact skills, Ramirez also began the 2016 campaign having produced just a 78 wRC+ over his first 635 major-league plate appearances (a number of which he’d compiled while holding Francisco Lindor‘s place before the latter’s promotion). Nevertheless, he exhibited sufficient promise and present-day skill to make the Opening Day club and was used in a multi-positional role over the first four months of Cleveland’s season, recording starts at second base, third base, shortstop, and left field — the majority coming at that last position. When teammate Juan Uribe’s season ended at the end of July, Ramirez assumed third-base duties on a regular basis. Supplementing his contact ability with unprecedented power, Ramirez ultimately produced a nearly five-win season.
Officially speaking, Ramirez is now Cleveland’s starting third baseman. He also retains positional flexibility, however. So when it became clear that Jason Kipnis would have to begin the season on the disabled list, Ramirez represented an obvious choice to slide across the infield. The less obvious choice was who should fill the spot vacated by Ramirez.
One of the solutions to that quandary is utilityman Michael Martinez. Martinez has the benefit and drawback, from Cleveland’s perspective, of being a known commodity. One knows that Martinez can field almost any position. One also knows, however, that he can’t hit sufficiently to support any of them. He’s the Platonic ideal of a replacement player.
The other solution is Yandy Diaz. Signed out of Cuba in 2013 for $300,000, Diaz has been a fixture within the author’s Fringe Five columm, appearing among the top-10 finishers on the arbitrarily calculated leaderboards for that column both in 2015 and 2016. In many ways, Diaz is a clone of Ramirez.
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