RamirezLast season, I felt jusified in beginning this chant for Aramis Ramirez after he hit his dramatic lead-changing, walkoff homerun last year against the Brewers.

Of course, it’s hard to give the award to a player whose team squeaks into the playoffs with 85 wins.

Conversely, it’s hard to give it to one player on a team so dominant that every dang player helps push the team to near 100 wins, like this year’s team.

Neither of those arguments, of course, makes any sense.

Sure, the Cubs may very well finish the season with four guys with 90 RBI. Sure, nobody on the team has numbers that are so gaudy that Liberace would blush. But the more I watch this team, the more convinced I am that Aramis Ramirez is the engine that drives this bad fucking ride and, without him, that ride is busted down along the interstate.

Besides, while his numbers may not scream it, there’s still a month of baseball to go. And Ramirez already has 99 RBI as it is (is it just me, or has Aramis racked up that total rather quietly?). Hell, he could still easily finish with 32 home runs and 120 RBI. Throw in to the mix his stellar defensive play at the corner and, well….you’ve got to give the award to someone, right?

More than anything, though, has been the importance of Ramirez’ hits. This guys winning more games than CC Sabbathia eats nachos for breakfast. As Dolan pointed out, eleven of Ramirez’ twenty-four home runs have occurred after the seventh inning.

Holy crap.

(By the way I didn’t bother to look that up myself; I just took Andy’s word for it. I hope he was right because that’s just insane.)

The best way to assess the value of a player is to figure what the team would be like without the player. I’m positive hat nobody would be missed more than Ramirez. While it’s true that the Cubs won/loss record when Alfonso Soriano was out from mid-June to mid-July was 16-18, but that was also the Cubs’ toughest stretch of the year. 21 of those 34 games were on the road, including three in Tampa, three at Sox Park, three in St Louis and three in Houston and two in Arizona–all above .500 teams. I’m not trying to take anything away from Soriano–surely the Cubs would have done better with him in the lineup–but imagine how much worse they would have been if it were Ramirez, instead of Soriano, who was out. I shudder.

If Derrek Lee were out for a while, you could move Ramirez in to the three-hole and suffer at cleanup. If Ramirez were gone, however, you’d be suffering much worse at cleanup, regardless of who was there, and the effect would trickle down to Lee, who wouldn’t have Rammy smashing his pancakes behind him.

Soto. DeRosa. Fukodome. Theriot. Along with Soriano and Lee, all have had a big impact on this year’s team. That’s why we’re watching a team that has spent the better part of the summer treating the National League like a chew toy. But there’s one man whose presence has ensured the Cubs’ dominance, and it’s high time the league took notice.

Rumor has it the crowd last night had begun the chant when he hit the grand slam. It’d be nice to hear it every time he does something big in September, because he will have deserved the award by season’s end.