Watching Hanley Ramirez, Finding His Level at Last

The Boston Red Sox are a popular pick to again do the worst-to-first thing, an ambitious projection that's based partly on the club's blend of blooming talent and veteran assurance and partly on the fact that this particular feat has become something of a team signature of late. The first reason is the more convincing of the two. The Red Sox have a pair of 23-year-olds in center field and at shortstop, Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, each coming off the sort of season that tends to signal an approaching string of All-Star selections. They have David Ortiz, one of baseball's most daunting hitters even as he embarks on his farewell tour, and David Price, added in the offseason to spot his sonic-boom fastball and anchor a rotation that has lacked a true No. 1 since its last World Series win, in 2013. As always, they also have the resources to make a late-season addition, and last August they brought in a new president of baseball operations, Dave Dombrowski, famous for doing just that.

On a list of reasons to like Boston's chances this year, Hanley Ramirez holds a tenuous spot. The career shortstop turned comically bad left fielder turned hopefully passable first baseman figures to have a better 2016 than 2015, if only because it can't be much worse. After signing a four-year, $88 million contract before last season and starting off strong with 10 homers in the opening month, Ramirez spent the rest of his introductory campaign with the Red Sox grounding out, bonking into the Green Monster, and getting hurt.

The hope in Boston is that this year's move to first proves less challenging than last year's experiment in left, and that the eased-up defensive duties put some of the charge back in Ramirez's bat. The deeper hope is that Ramirez's contribution, among the whiz kids and the stalwarts, won't matter much either way.

Ramirez has a curious relationship with expectation. For the past few seasons, he's been the sort of player—phenomenally talented, often injured, capable of sustaining a team's offense one month and weighing it down the next—whose periodic success is praised with one eye already on coming disappointment. He's been cast in roles that haven't quite fit: the linchpin of an organization's reboot in Miami, the dependable hitter supporting the Dodgers' staff of aces, the showy splurge of the Red Sox. This season, though, Ramirez needs only to contribute. That and, maybe, let the lovely nonsense of baseball's whims work in his favor for once.

My lasting image of Hanley Ramirez comes from the 2013 World Baseball Classic. I don't remember the stage of the tournament or the stakes, only that the Dominican Republic was facing the United States one afternoon in Marlins Park in Miami, where Ramirez had played his home games for half a season before a trade sent him to the Dodgers in July. R.A. Dickey, pitching for the United States, left a knuckleball helicoptering in the zone, and Ramirez turned on it, sending it soaring to left-center. It cleared the outfield wall and bullpen easily and landed in a row of seats almost 430 feet from home plate.

The swing was perfect, or somehow more than perfect. Certain hitters can find the absolute center between technique and power, utilizing each to the maximum extent possible before it starts to impose on the other. Ramirez has the ability, on occasion, to throttle both all the way up simultaneously. He diagnosed Dickey's pitch, waited on it, and brought his bat to the ball in a short line that exploded into an arcing, one-handed follow-through. His feet stayed still while his arms wheeled. It was a singular display of athleticism and craft.

I think it stayed with me, though, for reasons beyond spectacle. The sight of Ramirez hitting that kind of homer (synapse-searing, glass-shattering) in that kind of game (a March gimmick, a semi-exhibition) seemed to summarize his recent career. By that point, he had turned from one of the best young players in the game into someone whose talents shone only in between various slumps and injuries. His range in the field was evaporating, his bat prone to weeks of ineffectiveness. Most maddening of all, the cold streaks came without any discernable pattern. He'd look like his former self for a few games, slashing doubles all over the park, and without warning he'd be flailing out of his helmet at sliders half a foot off the plate.

That blast in Miami acknowledged Ramirez's blessings and curse simultaneously. He can be brilliant sometimes, but he can't choose when. The following season with the Dodgers, Ramirez put up an OPS over a thousand but played in only half of the games, owing in part to an injury sustained at the WBC; in the NLCS that year he took a Joe Kelly fastball to the ribs and was ineffective the rest of the series. The season after, his last in Los Angeles, he missed 34 more games and was of varying value when he was in the lineup. In retrospect, the shot off Dickey seems a sort of cosmic joke, an empty triumph for a player who, given his druthers, would rather it had come most any other time.

Ramirez's past few seasons have been a difficult but necessary correction, a period of massing proof that the superstar is gone and that all anyone should expect from him now is sporadic excellence that might result, if used correctly, in season-long competence. It is only just this year, finally, that what his club wants from him seems to match what he'll be able to give. When Ramirez is hitting well, he may turn a good Boston lineup into an insurmountable one; when he scuffles, there should be enough pop elsewhere to pick him up. Whatever shortcomings he has as a first baseman will surely not be as severe as those that had him misreading every other fly ball in left. He'll help, when he can.

And sometimes, on the odd Tuesday afternoon or Thursday night, he'll lift a ball a long way like it's the easiest and most natural thing in the world. He'll look like a hitter without weakness, all eye and balance and muscle in souped-up harmony, and in that moment, for however long it lasts, he actually will be. It is great fun to watch. And it is better for all involved that the Red Sox aren't really counting on it.