How a .158 hitter cut by the Giants in spring training became an All-Star

The high fastball traveled a little deeper than Heliot Ramos had anticipated.

When he made contact, he assumed he’d fouled it back into the screen behind home plate. But when the Giants’ 24-year-old center fielder looked up, he didn’t see anything. He scanned between the foul lines at Atlanta’s Truist Park for a ball in play. That’s when he noticed Braves right fielder Adam Duvall jogging to retrieve the baseball.

After it had clanked off the outfield seats and ricocheted back onto the field.

“He’s mis-hitting home runs,” said Giants teammate Curt Casali, shaking his head. “He’s so strong he doesn’t have to cheat to any ball. He can just shoot fastballs to right field and turn on breaking balls. That’s a good, comforting feeling to have.

“You feel like Superman at the plate. And for the most part, he looks like Superman up there.”

Heliot Ramos had no idea where this ball went.

It was a home run. pic.twitter.com/0CMorSe8mv

— The Comeback (@thecomeback) July 3, 2024

Entering this year, Ramos was a .154 hitter in 34 games as a Giant over two seasons. He was buried on the Giants’ depth chart as recently as two months ago. He didn’t make his season debut until a wave of injuries necessitated his promotion on May 8. All he’s done in 53 games since then is establish himself as the team’s best offensive performer and one of the most productive outfielders in the major leagues. And he is leaping in a single bound from semi-obscurity into major-league stardom.

He’s producing at a full-season pace for 36 home runs and 122 RBI. He’s already tied with Matt Chapman for the Giants’ lead with 12 homers. And Ramos’ dynamic play in center field has been a lifesaver for a team that had signed Jung Hoo Lee to a $113 million contract to play the position for six years, then lost him after 37 games because of a dislocated shoulder.

Nobody could have predicted two months ago that Ramos would be an All-Star when rosters were announced on Sunday. But he was both the team’s most surprising selection and one of its most obvious. Ramos’ .894 OPS is the third-highest among NL outfielders with at least 200 at-bats, trailing only elected All-Star starters Christian Yelich and Jurickson Profar. The third elected starter, Fernando Tatis Jr., is on the injured list and must be replaced in the starting lineup. It’d be tough to find a more qualified candidate than Ramos. It’d also be tough for MLB to find a better story to promote. Just a few weeks after the passing of Willie Mays, how could the NL pass up the chance to have a Giant starting in center field in the All-Star game once again?

Ramos is breaking an impossibly long franchise drought. He’s the first homegrown Giants outfielder who will represent them as an NL All-Star since Chili Davis in 1986. And if Ramos replaces Tatis in the starting lineup, he’d become the first homegrown outfielder to represent San Francisco in the All-Star starting lineup since a 40-year-old Mays batted leadoff for the NL in 1971.

It might be the enduring image from the game at Oracle Park last month when every Giants player wore Mays’ number: the sight of Ramos turning his No. 24 to the infield while making an over-the-shoulder catch in deep center.

An over-the-shoulder basket catch in center field 🥹 pic.twitter.com/dJnvLsqA7s

— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) June 25, 2024

Nobody would suggest that the Giants have developed another Willie Mays. Or another Orlando Cepeda, the slugging Hall of Famer whom the Giants also lost last month. But Ramos’ emergence has been a tonic for a grieving franchise. He plays Mays’ position. He hails from Cepeda’s island home of Puerto Rico. He’ll carry a connection to both beloved perennial All-Stars when he arrives for the festivities at Globe Life Field in Texas.

“It means everything to me to represent the Giants,” Ramos said. “They drafted me. They gave me the chance to be a professional baseball player. They gave me the chance to be in the big leagues. I feel at home here. I just want to keep going. To represent them and the city of San Francisco in the All-Star Game is a dream come true.”

Ramos is tied for the most home runs on the Giants (12) as well as the highest OPS+. (Andy Kuno / San Francisco Giants via Getty Images)

As unexpected as Ramos’ sustained success has been, he didn’t arrive out of nowhere.

He was the Giants’ 2017 first-round pick (No. 19 overall) out of Leadership Christian Academy in Puerto Rico. He crushed at the lower levels of the minors and made the mid-60s or better on most of the top 100 prospect lists in 2020 and ’21. Then his trajectory changed. The pandemic wiped out the minor leagues in 2020, and Ramos didn’t have the same success when he split the ’21 season between Double-A Richmond and Triple-A Sacramento. He slipped down the lists in 2022, and fell off them entirely after that.

It didn’t matter that Ramos was an extremely young draftee, signing as a 17-year-old, or that even in his seventh season in the organization, he was still younger than many college seniors who were taken in last year’s draft. Prospect rankers are the fashion buyers of the baseball media landscape, hasty to mark down anything that doesn’t sell and to create floor space for younger and fresher inventory with the potential to move.

But John Barr, the amateur scouting director who drafted Ramos, and Junior Roman, the area scout who signed him, continued to believe in the potential they saw when they called the kid’s name in 2017. They also remembered the aptitude that Ramos displayed from a young age.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t look at him as a first rounder right away,” said Roman, who retired four years ago after more than four decades in the game. “But every time I saw him, there was something I really liked. Defensively, he was tracking the ball really well. He had a strong build but he could run. Things started looking easier and easier for him, pounding the ball, going to center and right. When John (Barr) came in, I had to tell him, ‘I think this guy is a first-rounder.’ He’s doing everything you want. Arm, running, the power hitting — all above average.”

Ramos made jaws drop when he was a 15-year-old and played in an Under Armour All-America game at Wrigley Field, hitting a home run into the left field bleachers and finishing a double away from the cycle — a feat he might have completed if the game hadn’t been called in the seventh inning.

Years later, Ramos thought of that game when he walked into Wrigley Field for the first time as a Giant.

“It was a great moment for me,” said Ramos. “Am I surprising myself with everything I am doing now? No, I always believed I could do it. Ever since I was little. But that day, I surprised myself for sure. I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m doing this.’ I’m 15 and I’m facing pitching I’d never seen before, guys throwing 94, 95 (mph).”

“I was an underdog in that game,” Ramos said. “I was hitting seventh in the lineup and DHing. For me to have that game was crazy.”

But compared to the high school players from the 50 U.S. states in his draft class, Ramos hadn’t played as many games against top competition. Entering 2017, only eight players from Puerto Rico had been taken in the first round, not counting supplemental first-round picks, in 29 years since the commonwealth had been folded into the amateur draft.

As a first-rounder, Ramos was the furthest thing from a safe pick. And he was the furthest thing from a quick fix for the major-league roster.

“As a group, as we kept watching him and we kept coming away thinking, ‘Hey, this guy is really good,'” said Barr, who credited Roman and crosschecker Ed Creech with being especially enthusiastic about Ramos before everyone else was on board. “The athleticism was one of the deciding factors. He went from somebody we did not see as a first rounder to somebody we were hoping would get to us. Other teams were hoping to get him deeper in the draft and use some of the money they didn’t spend up top to sign him. But he liked us, he was comfortable with Junior (Roman), and we were willing to be patient through his ups and downs. You have to be when you take one of the youngest players in the draft.”

Former Giants star player and manager Felipe Alou was the club’s representative at the 2017 draft in Secaucus, N.J. After the Giants announced the Ramos selection, a scout from another team leaned in to Alou and whispered: You guys might have gotten the best player in this draft.

Alou was given a hat to wear on that day in Secaucus. He still has it.

“I said to myself, I’m going to keep this hat until the day Heliot Ramos makes it to the big leagues,” Alou said in a phone interview last week.

“And then seven years passed. But he always had a good personality, a passion for the game. I’ve been watching him. I really believe he is going to be a big leaguer for a long time.”

Roman, after he retired, kept tabs on Ramos. He’d scan the minor-league box scores. He found himself asking the same question.

“Why were they not giving him a chance?” Roman said. “I was sure they’d throw him in a trade and he’d be one of those guys who change scenery … like Adam Duvall, one of those guys playing somewhere else where you say, ‘Jeez, I’d like to have these players back.’ And they probably would have. If everybody hadn’t gotten hurt this year, he probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day.”

Did the Giants luck into Ramos? Did they not know what they had? Did they make a critical misjudgment last season when they didn’t call him up until Sept. 23, after their run-deprived team had fallen out of contention, choosing to keep him at Triple A while giving roster whirls to a cast that included Wade Meckler and A.J. Pollock?

Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, who arrived in San Francisco two years after the club drafted Ramos, argued that the situation was a bit more nuanced than that. But he doesn’t shrink from the criticism that the organization erred by not giving Ramos more runway last year.

“He wound up with 60 at-bats,” Zaidi said. “Could he have had 100 or 200 at-bats given some of the injuries and opportunities we had? Look, I won’t go to the mat arguing that 60 at-bats was the right opportunity for him or the amount of time he’d earned based on his performance.

“We are performance-based in who we promote and who gets opportunities at the big-league level. We believe the farm system should be a meritocracy no matter your draft status or prospect pedigree. Maybe we do that to a fault, but I believe in the consistency and fairness that that approach creates. With Heliot, in ’21 and ’22, as a pretty young player, the performance was fine but it wasn’t at the level of the other guys we were bringing to the big leagues. That limited his opportunities.”

So did an oblique injury that sent him to the injured list in May of last season. The Giants transferred Ramos to the 60-day injured list in order to use his 40-man roster spot on other players, which meant that he earned a prorated major-league salary as well as service time. It also meant that Ramos accrued enough service time to burn his official rookie status.

When he returned with Sacramento in late June, he embraced a different mentality, and started to believe in himself again.

“It’s tough, man,” Ramos said. “Pressure is more than what people think. It’s not just in your head. It’s in your heart, it’s in your life. It happens in baseball and every part of life. I think people go into depression because of the pressure they feel. I didn’t get to that point, but it was tough at times.

“It happened to me: you lose sight of what actually matters. You stop being happy with yourself inside. I was a little blind, I can’t lie to you. When I had those bad years, my mindset changed. I settled a little bit. But thank God I caught myself at the right moment and didn’t let my talent go to waste.”

The final thing he needed was the chance to show it in the big leagues, though the Giants already had a full established outfield group including Lee, Mike Yastrzemski, Michael Conforto and Austin Slater.

“I remember early this year we had a discussion as we were going through the minor-league depth chart,” Zaidi said. “What we came to with Heliot is, ‘Let’s just see if he can continue the momentum from last year…  If he does, something’s gonna happen.’

“We had a pretty full outfield. But we thought, ‘As crowded as we think the picture is, he’ll have his chance to work a way in.’ I can’t say it was more calculated than that.”

Give Zaidi credit for this much: as blocked as Ramos appeared to be, the Giants didn’t package him in a trade and didn’t come up with a better use for his 40-man roster spot, even when they had as many as nine outfielders on it.

Zaidi said the front office never shopped Ramos in trade talks. He wasn’t a name that other clubs would bring up, either. If the Giants didn’t fully comprehend what they had in Ramos, then apparently, neither did anyone else.

Ramos was a hopelessly blocked .158 hitter in 76 at-bats entering this season. And the clock was ticking. If he didn’t establish his value as a big leaguer this year, then he would arrive next spring without any minor league options.

Timing is everything in this game. No matter how much the Giants still liked Ramos’ tools and talent, he needed a window to prove himself this season. And he needed to smash through it.

Ramos, who was drafted at just 17, struggled at times in the minors, and seemed blocked at the major-league level until multiple injuries struck the Giants this season. (Charles LeClaire / USA Today)

When the Giants signed designated hitter Jorge Soler to a three-year contract in February, it sealed off one more avenue to playing time for Ramos. That avenue opened back up on May 8. Soler started the season in a slump. He took so many swings in the cage while searching for answers that he injured his shoulder. He was the seventh Giants position player to hit the IL in an eight-day span.

Ramos was summoned to replace him. He batted seventh and was the DH — just like he had as a 15-year-old at Wrigley Field.

Ramos hasn’t stopped hitting since. He’s launching backspun balls over the center field fence. He’s splitting both outfield gaps. If he puts the right swing on the right pitch, he might become the first right-handed hitter to record a splash homer in McCovey Cove.

But the times that Ramos hasn’t swung the bat have been nearly as impressive. As fun as it’s been for his teammates to watch him swing, they also look forward to when he draws a walk.

“Oh, you’re asking about the bat flip?” infielder Brett Wisely said. “I love it. It makes me chuckle. Especially when he works a long at-bat. He’ll heave it over the top.”

“That one’s all of our favorites, when it’s like tossing salt over your right shoulder,” Casali said.

“For what it’s worth, my favorite is the underhanded drumstick twirl,” Zaidi said. “It’s the twirl and going to take his shinguard off in one motion.”

“I’m happy baseball is in a place where people can be themselves,” Yastrzemski said. “I’m from an old school but it doesn’t bother me. I’m glad he feels comfortable enough in our clubhouse and on the field to be himself. It’s working because he’s playing to his best potential right now.”

“Even watching from afar, you can see he’s having fun,” Barr said. “He’s enjoying it. He’s playing the game with confidence. He feels he belongs here and all aspects of his game are taking a step forward.”

i love Heliot bat flipping on walks pic.twitter.com/hObyQeghPI

— sean (@seanyouidiot) June 7, 2024

Ramos cannot remember when he started flipping his bat after taking ball four. It was sometime in the minors. He plans to keep doing it, even if there’s been a time or two when he had to retrieve his bat after a borderline strike.

“One of the earliest conversations I had when he came up was, ‘There are few things that give me as much joy as watching you celebrate your walks,'” Zaidi said. “There’s an obvious pride he’s taking in making pitchers work to get him out. When you combine that with the ability to make really hard contact, it’s unquestionably an All-Star caliber performance.”

Ramos does not plan to coast on that performance. He played for Santurce in Puerto Rico last winter, but otherwise spent his offseason in Arizona at the Giants’ minor-league complex. He wanted no distractions as he worked every day with hitting coach Justin Viele. He checks in regularly with his older brother, Henry, who played briefly for the Reds and Diamondbacks and is currently playing for Doosan in the Korea Baseball Organization.

Most hitters try to feel comfortable at the plate. Ramos said a key to his success has been putting himself in positions that make him feel uncomfortable, and then managing how he responds to them. Whenever he needs to feel grounded, he thinks of his girlfriend, Carolina, and the baby girl, Heliana, whom they welcomed in January.

“She is beautiful,” Ramos said. “Growing every day. About ready to crawl.”

Even Superman had to crawl before he could fly.

(Top image: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Andy Kuno / San Francisco Giants via Getty Images; Casey Sykes / Getty Images)