Watching the Cubs/Rays series last night I noticed a pretty consistent trend amongst Aramis Ramirez' at-bats, specifically it seemed that every time he came up to the plate there was at least one runner on, and yet Ramirez did next to nothing. I decided to go back and look over Ramirez' 12 at-bats to see if I was correct in my assessment or just cherry picking memories, and here's what I found:
| At-Bat | Bases | Pitches | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1__ | 7 | K |
| 2 | 1__ | 8 | F8 |
| 3 | 123 | 5 | K |
| 4 | ___ | 5 | K |
| 5 | ___ | 5 | H |
| 6 | ___ | 6 | K |
| 7 | 1_3 | 1 | F9 |
| 8 | ___ | 4 | G4-3 |
| 9 | 1__ | 2 | F9 |
| 10 | 1__ | 4 | K |
| 11 | 1__ | 3 | F7 |
| 12 | _23 | 1 | F9 |
Now I can't say it's unexpected that the team with the highest on-base percentage gets a ton of runners on in front of their cleanup hitter, but four per game seemed a bit high. As it turns out Ramirez has had 123 at-bats with runners on, and roughly 151 total runners. In those at-bats Ramirez is hitting a robust .293/.397/.545, yet Ramirez went hitless during the seven at-bats during the series, welcome to the random world of "clutch" hitting.