Great win for the Reds. I am always struck in baseball that often your heroes of the game come from the most unexpected players. I have an unjustified poor perception of Ramon because he takes playing time from the probably definitely better player in Ryan Hanigan. So when Hernandez hits a home run it was certainly one of the unexpected hero moments for me.
This made me think, while Ramon is certainly not done at age 34 and still playing well, this home run very likely be the most valuable hit he will have for the rest of his career. Also I wondered how valuable was this home run in the context of his entire career?
Below is the win expectancy chart from FanGraphs of the game. The Reds were down to a 9.8% win expectancy. That means Ramon’s hit was worth 90.2% of a win!
I looked through the play logs of Ramon’s career which are available on FanGraphs since 2002. The next biggest hit he had was on 4/17/09 when he hit a two run home run in the top of the 9th where he made a 66.3% change in the Reds win expectency.
So the answer is while we don’t have his entire career we can safely say it was his most valuable hit since 2002. It is also very likely to be the most valuable hit of the rest of his career. This would likely be the most valuable hit of most careers as you have to be pretty lucky to even be in the situation where you can make this valuable of a hit.
What I also found interesting is that for his entire career Ramon’s WPA at the end of 2010 (adding up all these win expectancies from every at bat he ever took) was -0.57. That is pretty good for a catcher as his offense has been right about average (0) over his entire career. This single game (.929 WPA for the game) pushes him into positive territory.
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