#31 Has José Ramírez transcended the concept of being underrated?

Plus bad Manfred and Big Dumper

One of the distinctions of professional baseball culture is the vast divide in lifestyle between the minors and the majors. Far more than for any other sport, aspiring to be a ballplayer when you grow up sets you on a path of duality. Big league life is glamorous; bush league life is grueling. With vanishingly few exceptions, to get to the former, you must go through the latter — and, indeed, many people never make it.

Hey, it’s Hannah and I have always wondered about not just the salary disparity between the majors and minors (which is, admittedly, the most salient issue and one that has rightly been the object of journalistic and legal pressure for years resulting in the recent unionization of the minors) but also the creature comforts. Both major and minor leaguers are pro athletes who rely on peak physical condition for their job. Big league travel, lodging, and food is designed to optimize that performance. In the minors … not so much.

I recently asked Yankees backup catcher and 30-year-old rookie J.C. Escarra — who spent nearly a decade bouncing around the minors, indie ball, and international leagues — to rank which lifestyle aspect had the biggest and most impactful improvement now that he’s a major leaguer.

His ranking?

1. Travel

2. Hotels

3. Food

Those bus rides must be really bad.

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What is José Ramírez rated?

The Cleveland Guardians are in New York City this week and I (Hannah) was texting Zach about possible storylines to pursue if I went out to the ballpark.

We landed, briefly, on a topic that has come up periodically in six years of talking to each other about baseball: José Ramírez is underrated. So everyone says, anyway. And has been saying. For a while.

I tried to find more examples of us discussing this media criticism phenomenon over the years but instead I found this: Zach going off about how underrated Ramírez was back in 2022…

I was still wondering whether the idea was played out — do people still say that José Ramírez is underrated? — when The Athletic published a feature on how he “remains MLB’s best-kept secret.”

The reporting in that story is solid and the desire to profile Ramírez sound — I was delighted, for instance, to learn that he used to “have his own salsa brand, plus a medium-roast coffee blend (with notes of cocoa and hints of nuts and citrus).” We’re not trying to impugn any particular piece, but this did kick off some more musing on the current rated-ness of Ramírez.

Rather than keep texting each other about this, I suggested we take it to the ‘stack. So that’s what we have for you: A meta musing on whether José Ramírez has failed/neglected/chosen not to make a name for himself — or whether he’s made a very intentional name for himself as baseball’s most underrated player.

ZC: To caveat my own text statement, I don’t think Ramírez has intentionally acted to create this dynamic, except for one big thing — his contract extension. By choosing to remain in Cleveland, on a deal with a dollar amount only notable for being low, he opted out of several possible paths that might have changed the way he is talked about. He wasn’t presented to a new fanbase as a savior, wasn’t compared to prospects on the other side of a trade haul, wasn’t held up against a massive dollar figure. On top of that, Ramírez was never a top prospect, so even his arrival on the radar had no expectations attached.

Avoiding splashy headlines, however, is not the same thing as being underrated. I think Ramírez is pretty much a perfect modern ballplayer, as I wrote when he signed that deal, and I also think the traditional methods of recognition have recognized him. He has made six All-Star teams and finished top-5 in MVP voting five times. He is averaging 34 homers and 29 steals per 162 games since 2017. By Baseball-Reference’s MVP shares tracking, he’s seventh among active players, a fraction of an eyelash behind Aaron Judge, who has two MVPs.

He’s an elite, Hall of Fame-track player with the resume to support it. Is there space for underrated-ness in there?

HK: That one big thing — the contract extension — might be the thing, though. As part of the evidence mounted in The Athletic to argue that Ramírez is underrated beyond just vibes is that he hasn’t won an MVP award.

What if I told you: neither has Juan Soto.

No one would say Soto is underrated (and plenty of people would say just the opposite). Ask a bunch of fans who are the top three most highly “rated” players in MLB are and they’ll probably tell you Soto, Shohei Ohtani, and Aaron Judge — who just so happen to have the top three richest contracts in baseball. The Soto experience this past offseason really solidified for me that baseball players become famous through the fanfare and speculation that surrounds signing a stupid big contract in free agency. The reality is, the casual fan is less titillated by finding out someone is a five-tool player than they are by the ~Biggest Contract in Sports History~. This is maybe not the only way a baseball player can become a Main Character — Ronald Acuña Jr. and Paul Skenes come to mind as exceptions — but it’s their strongest vehicle relative to other sports.

There’s something a little boring and literal about using contract size as a stand in for how highly rated a particular player is but I actually think this is a specific phenomenon. As sports fandom has become more about imagining yourself as a GM as opposed to imagining yourself as a player (or manager), free agency storylines get more mainstream play than in-season performance. If you don’t give the public a dedicated reason to take stock of just how much they would value having you on their team, they might not realize just how good you are.

But there are exceptions. And with Ramírez the question is: Can you be famous for being underrated. Which implies a more theoretical question: If everyone says you’re underrated, are you really?

ZC: While we’re over- or underrating and stating things, let me just say: It’s impossible to overstate how often Ramírez gets the underrated tag.

• When MLB.com asked players for their most underrated peer this spring, Ramírez was No. 1 even though they said things like this: "He's not underrated, but he still doesn't get talked about enough," an AL starting pitcher said. "Shoo-in Hall of Famer. The year he had last year was nuts, and nobody talked about it.”

• When MLB did the same poll in 2024, Ramírez tied for first with Yandy Diaz. “I feel like if you put Ramírez in a New York or an L.A., he'd be one of those guys we're talking about all the time,” said an AL infielder.

• In a Reddit thread asking the question of the internet, five of the top six responses begin with Ramírez.