No One Wants To Pitch To Guardians' Jose Ramirez

Cleveland Guardians' Jose Ramirez has been intentionally walked 15 times this season.

Jose Ramirez is playing in year 10 of his Major League career and perhaps he's still even a little underrated for everything he's done on the diamond. The Cleveland Guardians' third baseman is in the midst of another All-Star-worthy season even though the team has largely failed to live up to expectations.

Ramirez is hitting .282/.357/.487, which you can argue is a down year for him. He's one of Cleveland's best hitters and other teams are well aware of this. That's why they don't pitch to him if they don't have to.

Ramirez has been intentionally walked 15 times in 2023 which is just one behind the Major League leader Shohei Ohtani. That's an incredible stat considering Ohtani is putting together arguably one of the greatest seasons baseball has ever seen. 

This is nothing new either. J-Ram led baseball in intentional walks in 2022 (20) and beat out both Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Just a reminder that this was also the season where Jude hit 62 home runs to tie an American League record. 

There are two ways to look at why Ramirez is given a free pass so many times. 

One is that Jose is a fantastic hitter and opposing pitchers would rather give the Guardians a free-base runner than play the game of chance of what he could with his bat with the game on the line.

The other reason is that opposing pitchers understand how good Ramirez is, but they also know the rest of the lineup isn't on the same level. It's worst the risk of walking him when there's no protection.

Cleveland tried to address this in the offseaosn by signing Josh Bell before the 2023 season. We all know that experiment didn't quite work out and he was traded to the Miami Marlins before his first season as a Guardian was up. Thankfully, Josh Naylor has emerged as another dangerous hitter in Cleveland's lineup which has helped this offense tremendously. 

It's nice that Ramirez gets the respect he deserves from his opponents, but the Guardians need to get another bat in the lineup and find a way to let Jose Ramirez be Jose Ramirez in these big moments. 

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