Esteury Ruiz Has So Much to Gain, and So Much to Bruise

Things aren’t going well in Oakland at the moment. Ownership, after years of quiet quitting, is up and moving the team. (Or maybe not, if owner John Fisher and his confederates turn out to be worse at lobbying than they are at pest control.) That leaves a last-place club to play out the string in front of “SELL THE TEAM” banners, probably for multiple years to come. The most obvious simile for this situation would be something along the lines of “like the waning days of a loveless marriage,” but that would be an insult to loveless marriages.

Still, a few dozen unfortunates are obliged to put on the storied green and gold colors of the Athletics and perform baseball six days a week. And they’re trying, albeit not too successfully, to win. It could happen! All the time we see a team made up mostly of youngsters, or with a payroll out of the mid-90s, get hit by lightning and make a run at the playoffs. Frequently that has even been the A’s in recent years.

Unfortunately, this year’s Athletics probably needed five or six different lightning strikes to turn their 100-loss roster into a contender. One break the A’s needed — following on the team’s biggest offseason move — involved outfielder Esteury Ruiz.

Ruiz came west in December as part of a three-team blockbuster trade with the Brewers and Braves. More people changed teams in that trade than live in, like, Andorra. But at the center of the deal: Oakland moved starting catcher Sean Murphy to Atlanta, Atlanta moved catcher William Contreras to Milwaukee, and Milwaukee sent Ruiz, a rookie outfielder heading into his age-24 season, to Oakland.

The idea, from Oakland’s perspective, was to send out their most valuable trade chip in order to get younger, cheaper, and better at a different position. Murphy was 28 and just coming off a five-win season, but he played at Oakland’s only position with a surfeit of major league talent. Shea Langeliers had just broken into the big league lineup, rendering one of him or Murphy redundant; that made Contreras unattractive to Oakland as well.

Plus Murphy was about to get expensive, or at least expensive by Oakland’s standards. Atlanta quickly signed him to a six-year, $73 million extension, or about the same guarantee they gave a (very good, admittedly) rookie pitcher the same offseason.

If this isn’t a challenge trade (think Zac Gallen for Jazz Chisholm Jr., or Michael Pineda for Jesus Montero), it’s adjacent to the concept. All Oakland needed to come out on top was for Ruiz to perform on the level of Contreras and Murphy, adjusted for age and position.

You’ve got to be patient judging any trade, particularly one involving a player as new to the majors as Ruiz. But it’s been a month, so it can’t hurt to check in and see how it’s going for Oakland:

Even after his big night on Wednesday (2-for-3 with a double and two stolen bases), he’s still getting outhit by two catchers for the season.

Okay, it’s a little harsh to compare Ruiz to Murphy and Contreras; through one month of the season, Langeliers has been one of Oakland’s best players, and part of the reasoning behind the trade was to get him in the lineup every day. And it bears repeating that Ruiz is the youngest and least experienced of the three trade principals, so we should give him some latitude. But the success of this trade was predicated on Ruiz being good. Whether he’s met that standard, based on total performance, is open to debate. What’s not up for debate is how interesting he’s been.

Ruiz leads the American League in two categories. The first is stolen bases; he’s taken 13 in 14 attempts. That’s good; a big part of the appeal of Ruiz is his 70-grade speed. If he can grab extra bases with his legs, that takes some pressure off his bat. And he’s running every chance he gets. Ruiz has reached base 43 times this season; 23 of those have come in such a manner that the base in front of him was unoccupied, and he’s attempted to steal 14 times.

Just from an aesthetic perspective: Hell yeah.

Unfortunately, Ruiz needs to be on first base in order to steal second or third, and that’s been problematic. He’s hitting just .265 and has walked just four times in 130 plate appearances. About a week ago, I wrote about how Ryan Mountcastle was killing the ball, but for some reason the hits weren’t falling for him. Therein, I pointed out that unless he started walking more than once a month, it doesn’t really matter how good his exit velo is — it’s very, very difficult to be an above-average hitter when your walk rate is in the low single digits.

Ruiz walked just 2.8% of the time in his brief major league cameo last year, and he’s walked just 3.1% of the time in 2023. Moreover, he’s not making anything like the quality of contact Mountcastle is. Of Ruiz’s 30 hits, 23 have been singles, seven doubles. His isolated power, .062, is 165th out of 174 qualified hitters. Ideally, a hitter will both draw walks and hit for power — and Ruiz did in the upper minors — but you have to do at least one.

Since 2016, in a 162-game season, there have only been nine instances of a qualified hitter posting a BB% under 5.0 and an ISO under .100. Generally, hitters like that get benched before they qualify for the batting title, and you’ll see why:

Most of these hitters have a wRC+ below 80. Anything below that and your hitting coach will start to gently suggest that baseball might not be for you, and start leaving hints that you might be better off going to grad school.

The only hitter who walked this little and hit for this little power, and managed to come close to a league-average batting line, was Dee Strange-Gordon in 2017. That year, he hit .308 and wore 10 pitches, which boosted his OBP to .341. That’ll play, even if Strange-Gordon hit for zero power.

There’s little cause for optimism in Ruiz’s contact profile. He hits fastballs well, but even then, his .367 batting average on heaters is less than 100 points under his .449 slugging percentage. Ruiz is in the bottom 10% of the league in hard-hit rate, and even when he does hit the ball hard, his groundball-heavy profile makes it difficult to squeeze out more than the odd single.

But sometimes you hit the ball, and sometimes the ball hits you.

One of my favorite college baseball players of all time is University of Buffalo outfielder Nick Sinay. As a junior, Sinay hit .328/.477/.377 with 39 stolen bases from 48 attempts in just 51 games. Having an OBP 100 points higher than his SLG, you might conclude that Sinay was some sort of strike zone judgment savant. Not really, though he drew his fair share of walks. His secret was getting hit by 22 pitches in just 237 plate appearances. And once he got on base, Sinay, a plus-plus runner, could figure things out from there.

Sinay got drafted by the Blue Jays in the 22nd round, and lasted just two and a half seasons in the minors before he retired. He never hit pro pitching that well; in his final season, he batted .215 with just six extra-base hits in Low-A. But he also got hit by 38 pitches in 293 plate appearances, which means he retired after posting a .405 OBP.

Ruiz is hitting just .265, and he’s not walking, so how is his OBP all the way up at .341?

Because he’s been hit by nine pitches in just 130 plate appearances. For comparison: Last year, the Mets set a new all-time record by being hit by 112 pitches over the course of the season. And for the record, they weren’t exactly thrilled with being hit in 1.8% of their plate appearances in 2022.

Ruiz is getting plunked almost four times as frequently as the Mets did last year. In terms of HBP rate, he’s just under a percentage point behind Ron Hunt’s 50-HBP season in 1971. There are 49 qualified hitters, including Rafael Devers, George Springer, and Manny Machado, who are walking less frequently than Ruiz is getting hit.

So is this sustainable or is it just a curiosity, a statistical blip after five weeks of play that we’ll forget about by Flag Day?

I don’t know if Ruiz is going to get plunked 40-odd times this year, but he’s definitely doing everything he can to wear a pitch. Ruiz stands right on the plate, the toes of his right foot just a couple inches from the inside chalk of the batter’s box, and he stands fairly far back in the box. That gives pitches an extra foot or two to carry out of the zone and hit him.

Of the nine times Ruiz has been hit this season, just one was the Brandon Guyer Special: A back-foot breaking ball that literally hit him in the legs. And Ruiz, like Guyer in his prime, didn’t lift a finger in an attempt to save himself from coming to harm. As my Little League coach used to say, we’ve got ice.

Two of those HBPs have come on bunt attempts, in which Ruiz is hanging his torso out over, or at least near, the plate. Here’s one worth watching because it illustrates the dangers of going Full Don Baylor, and also because it’s an excuse to include Shohei Ohtani in the post:

The remaining six have hit Ruiz on the upper body. For five of those, Ruiz took the pitch on the elbow, where he wears a giant Barry Bonds-looking pad to protect himself. On April 7, Ruiz wasn’t wearing the Robocop elbow guard, and Jason Adam came inside and hit Ruiz in the ribs, but otherwise, he’s been putting his arm in just the right place to attract baseballs. Behold, a representative example:

This is textbook. Not even a glimmer of a flinch; Ruiz just sets up with his front elbow near the zone, lowers it even further by dropping deeper into a crouch as he prepares to swing, and just lets the mountain come to Mohammed. This is the Ted Williams swing of getting hit by a pitch. It’s exquisite.

Now, is this an ideal offensive approach for a player upon whom the A’s have thrust so much in the way of expectations? I’d say no. But if you have a better way to post an above-average OBP without either hitting or drawing walks, I’m all ears.

The A’s are being actively sabotaged by ownership off the field, and they’re getting crushed on it. But no one should accuse them of lacking ingenuity. Ruiz, at least, is getting on base no matter the cost.