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I'm not saying he didn't look bad. My point is that simply saying that he looked bad doesn't explain WHY he looked bad, and when we're talking about a guy with elite talent and proven performance in his prime that's what really matters when discussing how valuable he will be going forward. Chone Figgins is an aging 2nd baseman so the fact that he seems to have hit a wall isn't surprising seeing as how other guys have done the same (Roberto Alomar, Boone, etc.). But an MVP caliber player doing poorly at age 27 is surprising and deserves an explanation because the assumption going forward should be that such a player can still be a star.
If Felix' fastball suddenly plunged from 95 to 87 next year due to injury, you wouldn't simply say "he looks aweful, all the numbers back me up, he's done" because that wouldn't tell us what his health would be the year after which is what is key. When guys like Edgar Martinez (age 30) and Jim Edmonds (age 29) had a poor year in their prime, would dissecting their performance in those injury plagured seasons, whether from a scouting perspective or saber one, told us how good he would be the years after? No, not at all. I'm sure they looked real bad when they were injured and if advanced stats were available at that time you could come up with a list a things that they were struggling with. But all of those scouting reports and numbers wouldn't have told us anything about how good they'd be in the future because they would ignore the cause of the poor performance, the players health.
Today there are an amazing variety of numbers which allows us to analyze players in ways we had never been able to do before. However, I think this has caused a great deal of over-analysis because people want to believe that every obscure stat tells us something vitally important about a player. Specifically, the attitude is now that if I can show 100 different ways that a player is struggling that means he has 100 different hurdles to overcome in order to be effective. But this is often not the case. If Felix did lose velocity, then he would be much worse off. Not only would his fastball be less effective, all of his pitches would likely be worse leading to much worse performance. That reduced performance would manifest in a bunch of different ways; that is, ALL of his numbers would get worse. His strikeouts would plunge, he would give up more hits, he would have more flyballs, balls would get hit harder, etc. The same would apply to his scouting reports; it would be possible to list a bunch of different issues he was having. But if his velocity came back then all of those issues would instantly disappear and all of his numbers would come right back to where they were before. So instead of having dozens of problems, he really would only have one which meant getting back to normal wouldn't be nearly as hard as it may seem from looking at the data.
The same applies to hitters like Ramirez. If an injury slowed down his bat speed, then he would look terrible. He wouldn't be able to catch up to fastballs, adjust to off speed pitches, hit flyballs, hit for power and so. And digging into the numbers would show all sorts of deficiencies as well. That would not mean that he has an assortment of problems holding him back. It's possible that EVERYTHING stems from that one issue: bat speed. If that's the case, then healing up would cure every single thing overnight. That's why listing out a bunch of seemingly different defects doesn't mean anything to me. If a guy's overall numbers are poor, then his component numbers are going to be poor as well so slicing-and-dicing his stats doesn't really add much additional information in most cases. What matters is root causes and we have to be careful not think that each statistic available to us measures a specific, discrete, isolated skill.