The Official Site of Hanley Ramirez

Mon, Oct 26th 2009, 12:13

Path of the Pros: Hanley Ramirez

Baseball scouts go to great lengths to avoid the phrase “sure thing.” So many factors can prevent a talented prospect from maturing into a skilled pro that scouts know better than to make predictions with certainty.

But before he was 20, Hanley Ramirez was making people all over baseball drool.

In 2000, he signed with Boston as a 16-year-old kid out of a peninsula town in the Dominican Republic. He spent one short season in the Dominican Summer League before the Red Sox brought him stateside to the Gulf Coast League. By 2002, Baseball America had named him the No. 1 prospect in the New York-Penn League and described him as a “can’t-miss” player.

Mike Boulanger, who managed the Lowell Spinners that year, told the magazine, “He’s the best player in this league, and the best prospect in the Red Sox organization. He can do everything. He’s got a feel for the game you can’t teach. You could put him in Triple-A right now and he’d fit in.”

There’s never been a question of ability in Ramirez, but he spent six years toiling in the Minor Leagues before he was ready for a regular starting job in “The Show.” Considering his natural talent, one question comes to mind: what took so long?

“There were challenges there,” said Todd Claus, who managed Ramirez with the Double-A Portland Sea Dogs in 2005. “Hanley had to deal with things that most Minor Leaguers don’t have to deal with.”

Claus never doubted that his shortstop — by then one of the most touted players in the Minors — was as good as everybody said he was, but he knew Ramirez would need to get over certain humps if he was to blossom into the player he was capable of becoming.

“A lot of people expected him to play like he plays now, based on his athletic ability,” said Claus, who’s now an assistant coach at Jacksonville University.

But Ramirez was still young. It wasn’t easy for him to reconcile the attention he received as a top prospect with the smaller crowds that would sometimes come to watch him play.

“We were trying to get him not to worry about the limelight. Any time the stage got big, Hanley played big. He played well every time he was being watched,” Claus said. “But he needed to learn to play well consistently, all the time, even if there were only 100 people in the stands.”

Chad Spann, who played alongside Ramirez for the Augusta GreenJackets in 2003, remembers that team attracting extra media attention too.

“There was a lot of hype,” Spann said, adding that some games caused more hubbub than others. “He and B.J. Upton — at the time [Upton] was a shortstop too — were both [in the league]. When we played against each other, there was a big writeup in Baseball America and everything.”

Spann noted that Ramirez was often spectacular on defense, but he occasionally botched easy grounders.

“He did make some unbelievable plays. He made routine errors, but he also made some amazing plays look routine.”

While Ramirez’s swing was powerful and smooth that year, he didn’t produce the way he projected to, hitting .275 with eight home runs and 50 RBIs in 111 South Atlantic League games.

“If you’d watched him taking batting practice that season, you wouldn’t have thought there was anything he needed to improve on,” Spann said. “But he got more consistent the next year and even more consistent the year after that, which showed that that’s what he needed to do: work on his consistency.”

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