On Aramis Ramirez

I have to admit: I was a little surprised when Aramis Ramirez made the All Star team this season. He started so slowly those first six weeks that it took us a while to notice that he was putting up impressive numbers. It probably didn’t hurt that at third base, Rolen was hurt and Lowell has struggled, but still: Ramirez deserved to be an All Star, and hasn’t slowed down since. He’s having a brilliant season.

Ramirez is the star who never gives us a sound byte. Like Carlos Zambrano, there’s a language barrier in front of Aramis, but he also seems very quiet and reserved. He seems private. Most often, when the dugout camera zooms in after his homerun, it will catch him fist-knocking his teammates and smiling. However, he lowers his eyes when he realizes the camera is on him, and waits for the attention to subside. That seems to be his style, all the more remarkable for its rarity.

The Cubs awarded Ramirez a very big contract to produce RBIs, and he’s all the way up to fourth in the league. This, in a lineup saturated with awful on-base percentages in front of him for most of the season, except of course for Derrek Lee. He gets big hits in pressure spots, and other than admiring an occasional tape-measure homerun for a moment, he doesn’t seem interested in making it about himself.

Minor injuries have plagued Ramirez all year, so I never know whether to get upset when it seems like he’s loafing just a little bit because he might be favoring a sore hamstring or groin or back. There have also been a few times he tried for a double when he should have settled for a single, so it’s not like he doesn’t hustle. However, part of me still wonders at times, every once in a while, whether he’s the kind of player who goes 100% even when it’s pretty certain that no amount of effort will win a game. We admire players who hustle on every play, no matter what. That would probably be the only knock we could have on Aramis, and it’s only half-hearted because we don’t know the whole story with his health, sometimes.

Maybe it doesn’t matter in this day and age, anyway. Or maybe some people even prefer him to coast at times to avoid risking or aggravating an injury. Maybe he’s more valuable without hustling unnecessarily because hustling can be risky. Maybe the new cost-benefit equation makes hustling not always worthwhile. It’s a strange thought, and Ramirez is the first Cub that makes me think that maybe there’s a tiny bit of sense behind this new mindset, given the larger context.

It seems like a lot of sluggers these days are sometimes exempt from that sort of scrutiny, and whether it’s a bad thing or not, it’s just how it is. Teams do not expect them to play the game that way. Guys like Ramirez get paid to fulfill a role, and it’s the teams that have created a role for sluggers who can’t bunt, for example, and will never be asked to learn how.

Although for all we know, maybe Ramirez can bunt, and we’ll never know because the Cubs would never ask him to try, and I am having a hard time imagining a situation that would challenge this attitude.

Defensively, Ramirez is just fine. He makes great plays charging sometimes, and fields the ball very well to his right, which are the two most important areas for a third baseman defensively. He’ll air-mail a throw from time to time, or boot one, and his range to his left doesn’t seem to be as good or as quick, but these don’t add up to any sort of significant detraction in my mind. It also helps endear us that by all accounts, he has put in a lot of development time, and his footwork is noticeably better than when he arrived in Chicago.

I kind of wish someone would profile the guy for us, sometimes, because we don’t really feel like we know him. That’s probably selfish of me, however, I immediately think. A fan expecting a feature story probably also speaks to the new climate in baseball as much as the big contracts for RBIs, or the lack of sluggers hustling or bunting or whatever else. The game changes, and if there’s guilt, it’s collective. It’s just that I can’t identify with Ramirez at all, owing to his opaque personality -- at least to the general American public via the baseball media.

I’m OK with that, though, because the guy can hit. He will take an outside pitch to right field. He often shortens his swing with two strikes, without sacrificing all of his power. He can hit a breaking pitch. As a result, for a slugger he strikes out quite rarely.

So, if we had our choice between a stony personality who can hit like Aramis or a charismatic spokesman who couldn’t, we would take Aramis every time. That’s the bottom line, jack. Then we watch his body language, and we notice that there’s a fire smoldering that ignites in pressure spots which lets us know he’s a fierce competitor. Then, when the moment passes, his eyes become impassive once again.

He arrived without much fanfare. A lot of Cubs fans didn’t even really know who he was while he was with Pittsburgh. We have since watched him play well enough to earn the big contract, and we have been thankful that the team has an everyday third baseman. This first year of it, he’s earned it.

I can imagine a time that probably never existed when the only way we would judge a quiet player like Aramis was for his on-field performance every day. Now, sometimes, with big-contract players, we like to hear that a player donates to charity or we like to hear an interview where he talks about playing the game the right way. It helps us forget about the wealth, and our disconnection from it. We want to relate to our icons, which can be absurd and even troubling, but then paradoxically we don’t want them to want our attention. Ramirez doesn’t want attention, so while he stays out of trouble he remains mysterious, but the tradeoff is that he will never be a celebrity superstar. I’m guessing he’s fine with that.

Yet ten years from now, when he’s still the Cubs third baseman and cleanup hitter, maybe we’ll be even more thankful for what he accomplished as a result of how he went about it. A few years after that we’ll hear from his teammates about the sort of good things he did in private that we were never able to witness -- and shouldn’t be -- and it will round out our picture of admiration. If that’s how it goes down, that will be more than enough.

If not, the guy sure can hit.