The first inning of Friday night\u2019s World Baseball Classic meeting between USA and Brazil had shades of Major League Baseball\u2019s most fiery rivalry.<\/p>\n
Moments after New York Yankees star Aaron Judge homered to give Team USA an immediate 2-0 lead, Lucas Ramirez answered back in the bottom of the inning with a leadoff homer for Brazil.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right, Manny Ramirez\u2019s son. (Specifically, the youngest of his three sons, after Manny Jr. and Manuelito.)<\/p>\n
Wearing his father\u2019s No. 24, Lucas sent right-hander Logan Webb\u2019s 1-0 four-seam fastball, 392 feet to right-center at 104.1 mph.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the second time this week the younger Ramirez showed off his power. He homered off two-time Cy Young award-winner Jacob deGrom earlier this week in Brazil\u2019s exhibition game against the Texas Rangers.<\/p>\n
Manny was a career .312 hitter, nine-time Silver Slugger and 12-time All-Star, including 11 consecutive seasons from 1998-2008, in his 19-year MLB career. He won two World Series championships with the 2004 and 2007 Red Sox (and was named series MVP for the former). He\u2019s a top-10 offensive player in franchise history in most metrics, including on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, total bases, RBI, intentional walks, and extra-base hits. He\u2019s one of six players to hit more than 230 home runs in a Red Sox uniform (he hit 274).<\/p>\n
Those are big shoes to fill.<\/p>\n
Unlike his father, who he\u2019s referred to in interviews as his lifelong hitting coach, Lucas bats left-handed. The Angels selected him in the 2024 draft, and he reached their High-A level last season. At 20 years old, he\u2019s one of the youngest players in this year\u2019s tournament.<\/p>\n
But not the youngest, even on Team Brazil. Joseph Contreras, the 17-year-old son of 11-year MLB veteran Jose, pitched 1 1\/3 innings in relief Friday night. The younger Contreras may still be in high school, but he got Judge to ground into an inning-ending double play in the second.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first inning of Friday night\u2019s World Baseball Classic meeting between USA and Brazil had shades of Major…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610939,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2375],"tags":[106,5,141,48,2542,18957,78495,2556,4,89,2543,5824,4820],"class_list":{"0":"post-610938","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-red-sox","8":"tag-aaron-judge","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-boston","11":"tag-boston-red-sox","12":"tag-bostonredsox","13":"tag-brazil","14":"tag-lucas-ramirez","15":"tag-manny-ramirez","16":"tag-mlb","17":"tag-red-sox","18":"tag-redsox","19":"tag-usa","20":"tag-world-baseball-classic"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116185631614684077","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}