After 24 games, Pete Alonso leads the Mets with 16 extra-base hits.
He’s also sixth in Major League Baseball with 58 total bases. Further, his .682 slugging percentage is the highest on the team and the 13th-best in Major League Baseball.
At the opposite extreme is Wilson Ramos with an 24 total bases and an SLG of .333, the 25th-lowest one out of 186 players. So far this season, he has only two extra-base hits, a double and a homer.
A Mets pitcher, Zach Wheeler, has as many extra-base hits.
A noticeable difference between Alonso and Ramos is in their average launch angle. Alonso’s is 15.7º while Ramos’ is -1.8º. Alonso is getting much more lift on the balls he is hitting.
Ramos’ launch angle is the lowest this year in the five years that Statcast has measured it.
- 2015: 4.5º
- 2016: 4.8º
- 2017: 5.9º
- 2018: 4.4º
- 2019: -1.8º
Ramos’ career launch angle is 4.5º.
Another difference is in their fly balls and ground balls. Alonso’s FB% is more than three times higher than Ramos’ while his GB% is just more than half of Ramos’.
Ramos | Alonso |
FB%: 13.1% | FB%: 41.4% |
GB%: 65.6% | GB%: 36.2% |
A final big difference is in how many each has barreled. Alonso has barreled 15 of 58 batted balls; whereas, Ramos has barreled only 2 of 61 batted balls.
In 2016, while playing for the National, Ramos hit .307 with 22 home runs and a .496 SLG. The Mets need to figure out what he was doing then that he is not doing now.
✱ In the chart, the orange bars show the percent of pitches thrown to each batter that resulted in an extra-base hit. For example, in 2019 of the 433 pitches thrown while Pete Alonso was in the batter’s box, he hit 16 0f them, or 3.7%, for either a double, triple, or homer.