There R Giants #6: Heliot Ramos
Photo Credit: Kirk Nawrotzky | Richmond Flying Squirrels.
We’re almost to the finish line of the There R Giants Top 50. Over the winter months, I’m writing a post on each of the fifty players in my rankings, leading us back to the much-needed spring. Our list of previously covered players is getting a little long, so from here on out I’m moving the links for the full list down the bottom of the post.
Today’s a Free For All There R Giants’ Top 50 post. There aren’t too many of these, so if you enjoy it, why not subscribe for more? It’s a good time for it, as I’ll be in Giants’ minor league camp starting tomorrow and hope to get plenty of brand new 2022 looks for you over the next few days!
Over the first three nights of 2021 minor league play, Heliot Ramos ripped six hits, including two home runs and a double. He was coming off of an incendiary performance in major league spring training and a highlight-a-night stint at the Alternate Site prior to the minor league season beginning. When I posted a video of one or another of those first-week missiles on Twitter, I got responses like these:
I’m not here to judge anybody or point fingers and laugh — my responses to those comments were basically to agree with the sentiments: “yup, he won’t be here very long.” It seemed like we were watching a genuine ascendancy taking place right before our eyes.
As it turned out, that’s not quite how things developed over the ensuing months. The season ended up playing out as a series of relative hard knocks and lessons learned for Ramos in a way that would hardly have seemed credible in those early, heady days. He hit just .237 over two months at a level many fans didn’t think he even belonged in to begin with and then moved up and (relative to his league context) did even worse!
Now begins another big league camp (YAY!) for the now 22-year-old. A year ago, we would surely have anticipated that this year’s spring training would be the long-awaited coming out party for a rookie who was about to impact the Giants’ roster in a significant way. Today, with an additional year of data to inform us, the future is…. somehow less clear. That’s annoying! Why does the future constantly do that? Why can’t things become more focused over time rather than all blurry and impressionistic and unsure? Why? Why? WHY???
[Sorry about that everybody! Forty-four of these profiles have apparently unhinged me a bit! It’s hard to constantly peer into the fog of the crystal ball and convincingly pretend you’re seeing some meaningful shapes forming. Don’t worry, won’t happen again! I’m all better now! In fact, I’m definitely now seeing some VERY REAL and not at all made up shapes forming in the fog which I will now definitively inform you about in a hopefully entertaining manner!]
The Giants have said they want Ramos (and all of the other talented prospects coming along in the near future) to knock the door down. As we will see, he clearly has the physical gifts to knock down doors of very large height and girth. And yet, his actual performance record has not always formed the battering ram that was expected. He’s never hit more than 16 home runs in a season, for instance, despite power that can launch balls very VERY far into the distance. As Ramos told Sacramento announcer Johnny Doskow this year: “this game is really hard!” (So true, Heliot. So true.) So what’s next for this gifted, athletic, and enormously likable young player who stands on the very threshold of a big league career?
Let’s see!
Background
The top draft prospect coming out of Puerto Rico in 2017, Ramos drew raves from scouts for his physical toolset — combining plus plus speed and some huge power — but he didn’t always show those tools off to great effect on the showcase circuit. He didn’t always produce those loud, ringing BP sessions scouts love to see, often fouling balls off or even swinging and missing altogether in the cage. But when he connected, he could launch truly legendary home runs (literally! the scouting stories were undocumented moments of pure talk and legend! No Trackman readouts dominating every scouting event back in the prehistoric, analog days of six years ago). His performance in showcase games was spotty — sensational at times, lackluster at others — but his excellent bat speed and loose, handsy swing suggested the promise of a future impact hitter. Baseball America summed up his spring in their scouting report going into the 2017 draft (where he was their 30th ranked prospect), saying:
Ramos has become a divisive prospect, with some teams enthused by his loud tools, while others are wary of his limited track record of hitting with a wood bat against high-level competition.
His best moment in the process leading up to the draft came in the Under Armour All-America Game, played in Wrigley Field the summer before the draft. Ramos was the event’s standout player, collecting three of his team’s six hits and finishing a double shy of a cycle.
In the days leading up to the draft, I mentioned Ramos in a conversation I had with Christopher Crawford (who has written about prospects for ESPN, Baseball Prospectus, Rotoworld, NBC, and other outlets over the years) and his response perfectly illustrated the “split camp” nature of Ramos as a draft prospect:
Me: I'm a little over-fascinated by Puerto Rican Heliot Ramos. The Puerto Rican Academies are a well the Giants have been going to fairly regularly the last few years with mid round selections (Fargas, Rivera, Layer). Any chance they take a big swing with Ramos this year? And what's your read on him as a player?
Crawford: I don't think I'd take him in the first, but it wouldn't be a crazy reach.…He has plus power, and he runs well enough that he might be able to stay in center, although corner outfield is the more likely landing spot. A long way away, but he could definitely be an impact bat.
The Giants, as it turned out, ended up being one of those teams enthused by the loud tools. He covered ground in center field, he was fast, he had a strong arm. He was also very nearly the youngest player in his draft class, not turning 18 until September. Picking in the back half of the draft, Ramos represented a big swing of the bat for a Giants’ system that had emptied out as the major league club piled up three championships in five years (a good reason for a farm system to empty out, after all).
Hey, and speaking of big swings of the bats, Ramos immediately started making some! He opened his professional career by lashing seven hits in his first two games — including four doubles, a triple and a home run! HUBBA HUBBA! “I got your split camp right here, buddy! That’s a good way to make first impressions!
From there, Ramos launched into one of the more outstanding rookie ball performances we’ve seen from a Giants prospect. By wRC+, it was exactly on par with Marco Luciano’s two years later (175 for Ramos, 177 for Luciano). Ramos led the circuit in slugging (.645), while finishing just two-thousandths of a percentage point away from the batting title (.348). He belted six home runs, 23 extra base hits, had 89 total bases in just 35 games, and, for good measure, showed off that plus plus speed by stealing 10 bases. Along with his fellow top round draftees Jacob Gonzalez and Seth Corry, Ramos helped lead the AZL Giants to an elimination game in the league’s championship series (though Ramos unfortunately was unable to play in the post-season following a beaning). The season wasn’t totally without its flaws (he struck out more than 30% of the time), but it certainly set fire to the imaginations of Giants’ fans!
(As an aside, super annoying that I can’t seem to find even one video of a Ramos’ home run during that rookie league season!).
From rookie ball, Ramos’ progress was uneven but steady. Playing an entire year in Low A Sally league at just 18, he struggled to follow up the sensational rookie campaign, but he still put up a league average line (.245/.313/.396), while cutting his strikeouts down to 25%. Overall, however, he kept his head above water in difficult circumstances.
Moving up to High A San Jose in 2019, however, he did more than survive — he thrived. Showing off a new-found discipline, Ramos pushed his walk rate to 9.5% and kept his strikeouts in check. The improved approach allowed his power to play, pushing his Iso up to just a hair under .200 — pretty impressive for a 19-year-old. He showed all fields power, often shooting balls out to right field while crushing balls to the pull side. To many observers, his advances during the 2019 season were the single best thing to happen on the farm that year — a year in which Luciano and Luis Matos made their debuts and Joey Bart played his first full season!
He ended the year with a month long stint in Double A — becoming the first teenager ever to play for the Richmond Flying Squirrels and the first Giants teen to hit Double A since Madison Bumgarner back in 2009. Always pretty good company to keep! The overall results from that first taste of the upper minors were sketchy — the strikeout rate popped back over the 30% line, the numbers all came down — but once again, he held his head above water despite being the league’s youngest player. And he got stronger as he went along, picking up 10 hits (5 for extra bases) in his final 33 PA of the year and blasting a mammoth home run on the season’s final day.
Farhan Zaidi would later say that Ramos was on track to make his big league debut sometime in 2020. But then, 2020 scattered all tracks to the winds and dashed more plans than just Ramos’ arrival in the big leagues.
Scouting Report
When drafted, Ramos was a power-speed combo threat in CF. Over the years, as he’s matured into a powerfully built, barrel-chested youth, the speed has ticked down. Until last year, he’d never again matched the 10 SB he had as a 17-year-old in rookie ball. More importantly, his body size has long caused observers to believe that he would ultimately have to move out of CF. That’s continued to be a question that’s hung over Ramos and it’s a crucial one. So long as he can stick in CF, the demands on the bat might not be as great as if he ends up moving to RF.
Fortunately, despite his build, his speed has continued to play in CF and he has always shown strong ball-hawking instincts in the OF. He’s particularly good going back on balls and can move around expansive outfields with grace and flair.
The end result might not be a prototypical Steven Duggar-type CF, but he certainly seems to me to reach the Mike Yastrzemski/Austin Slater bar for manning the position. While infielders (especially shortstops) tend to be the focus of most conversations about the impact of defensive data and positioning, obviously outfielders are receiving the same benefit — indeed, Russell Carleton has suggested that rules banning infield shifts may have the unintended consequence of creating more four man outfields.
Still, if Ramos does ultimately fit better in a corner, he should have the range to man Oracle’s difficult RF — and he definitely has the arm for it!
At the plate, Ramos shows terrific bat speed, a handsy swing that can cover the strike zone, and big raw power. He seems to have always had a pretty good feel for hitting to the opposite field. Indeed, way back at that appearance at the Under Armour All American Game when he was 16, this note appeared in the scouting reports:
What was especially notable was how the ball carried when he stayed back and drove the ball to the opposite power alley.
My friend David Lee (who now works with the Braves) told me that Ramos used the opposite field almost as a survival mode during his rough 18-year-old season in Augusta. After the league abused him for months with pitches off the outer half, especially breaking balls, he began working on fighting those pitches off to right field. The next year, he started showing the ability to use the opposite field to do damage, not just as a defense mechanism — as his spray chart from 2019 clearly shows.
In 2021, this trend grew in prominence as we’ll see in a moment! Ramos has also developed into a patient hitter who draws a fair number of walks. However, despite the high walk rate and all fields hitting approach, there have remained holes in his offensive game. He continues to strike out at a high rate without producing commensurate power numbers to offset the whiffs. In his earlier years, breaking balls were the cause of much of his K rate. Later it was good sequencing that would beat him. Last year, many of his struggles came against fastballs (surprising, given his excellent bat speed), while he hit off-speed pitches effectively.
For his career so far, he’s produced a .270/.340/.448 line with a 27% K rate and 8% BB rate. The elements are all in place for a dynamic hitter but, thus far, he’s not always been able to put them together consistently.
This Season
Coming off of the lost 2020 season (most of which he had spent at the Alternate Site in Sacramento), Ramos seemed eager to make up for lost time. He became a major presence in the Giants spring training games, electrifying the fanbase with rockets in seemingly every spring game — a staccato beat that made him the talk of every Giants conversation from Scottsdale to KNBR. He was the talk of camp and Zaidi no doubt got a little sick of answering the “Will Heliot make the team” questions.
That wasn’t going to happen, but as Ramos highlights continued to come from the 2021 Alternate Site (remember, the minor league season was delayed to open 2021 to avoid overcrowding at team facilities during spring training), Melissa Lockard and I openly wondered if his performance would cause the Giants to skip him directly to Sacramento.
That didn’t happen either, as the Giants believed Ramos should get more than just the month of experience at Double A that had come at the end of 2019. Still just 21 years old, it certainly wouldn’t do him any harm to let him bash his way out of the level.
And, as I noted at the top, it certainly seemed likely that that was the way May would play out. In the second game of the year, Ramos crushed his first home run, deep to left field. The next night, he yanked a double into the left field corner while shooting another home run straight down the right field line. Over his first seven games, Ramos hit .400, reached base in half of his plate appearances, and pounded six extra base hits. Next stop: Sacramento!
And then a not so funny thing happened. Double A pitchers — always quick to make adjustments — decided that attacking Ramos with fastballs wasn’t a good idea, and started teasing him off the outside corner with breaking balls. At first, Ramos seemed nearly defenseless, striking out 24 times in 67 trips to the plate (36%!). Gradually though, he began looking for sliders away that he could drive and began to adjust to the new approach. Then, however, the league adjusted back, setting him up with soft stuff away and then putting him away with fastballs on the inner half. Needing to defend against both soft stuff away and hard stuff in put Ramos into a deep funk, as he hit just .155 in June and continued to strike out more than 30% of the time.
Along the way, his pull side power dried up almost completely. Instead, he seemed to be “hitting backwards,” looking to bang sliders and offspeed pitches the opposite way, while getting beat consistently with inside fastballs. For a player with plus bat speed, his inability to catch up to hard stuff was truly baffling. His home run spray chart told the story well — only four of the 14 home runs he hit for the season went out to the pull side, while he was able to muscle balls out to right field fairly often.
This might be a trend to keep our eyes on, as Oracle Park certainly doesn’t tend to reward right-handed hitters with opposite field approaches (how many home runs did Buster Posey lose over the years in that park?)
By the end of June, Ramos was hitting just .230 for the year and his OPS had slipped below .700. This wasn’t the coming out party the Giants (or their fans) had been hoping for. In July, however, he began to show an uptick in power, homering in three out of four games in Bowie. Following a quick trip to the Futures Game (his second appearance at the Prospects All Star extravaganza), he returned to bash two more homers in a series against Somerset (including this monstrous shot over the Batters’ Eye in Richmond off a knee high fastball).
Though he was still hitting just .237 (OPS up to .756!), the Giants seized on the power surge as an opportunity to finally promote him up to Triple A. But things didn’t get any easier at the new level. Though the batting average came up in his half season at Sacramento (.272), his walk rate plunged from 10.2% with Richmond down to 6.6% and his power evaporated, with his Iso dropping from .195 down to a career low .127. In the offense-friendly Triple A West, the one thing you’d hope to see more of out of Ramos was power production. Instead, it took nearly three weeks for him to clear the fences, and he’d go deep in a River Cats uniform just four times (none of those, btw, going to the pull side).
What started as a coronation ended up something of a slog. On the whole, Ramos hit .254/.323/.417 with just 14 home runs, while striking out 31% of the time. Still, slogs have their value too. Ramos had reached Triple A before his 22nd birthday. He’d consistently fought his way upwards against older, more experienced pitching. Just five of his 495 PA on the year came against pitchers younger than him. That continued a career long trend — he’s faced younger pitchers in just 17 of his 1,625 trips to the plate as a professional, an indication of just how precocious Ramos has always been.
The hope is that all of those difficult lessons he’s absorbed over the years from his elders will eventually set him up for success.
The Future
As the Giants begin reporting to camp, Ramos will no doubt look for a repeat of his spring 2021 performance, which put his name on the lips of every Giants fan. As exciting as that would be, this year we’re looking for more from Heliot than a hot spring training. Farhan Zaidi has said publicly that he wants to see Heliot Ramos force the issue. That’s got to happen in Sacramento, not Scottsdale. Will Clark, speaking on a recent Giants Talk podcast with Alex Pavlovic, said that this year needs to be Ramos’ “get after it year. If he can’t make it this year, he might not.” That’s a harsh assessment, but it comes from a player who knows this is a harsh industry and opportunities don’t last long before moving on to the next hot new prospect.
Ramos’ career has taken a forwards/backwards shape with dominant years in 2017 and 2019 followed by step back seasons in 2018 and (following the pandemic outage) 2021 — somewhat similar to the pattern of Pablo Sandoval’s early development. If the pattern holds, then maybe this is the big breakthrough year we’ve all waited for. The upside is still tantalizing — a fast, powerful, athletic player who can patrol CF and RF while hitting for power. As he’s risen, though, the questions about his game have continued to grow. Can he stick in CF, and if not, will the bat play in a corner? Will he hit for enough power to overcome low averages and high strikeouts? Will he hit for enough average to overcome game power that tends more towards doubles than homers?
The statistical portfolio has enough warts to shake the confidence. But the fact that he’s compiled that portfolio while consistently going up against more experienced pitchers is crucial context. I’ve made this comparison before, but a young, toolsy OF taken in the 1st round followed a fantastic debut in the complex league by hitting .231 with a .690 OPS in Low A, .223 with a .709 OPS in High A, and .233 with a .693 OPS in AA. He ended the following year as a starter in a National League playoff game and is now well established as one of the fresh young talents in the game. That toolsy young kid was Padres’ CF Trent Grisham, who took plenty of development lumps along his path.
In the end, tools play at the top level and hard lessons are still lessons learned. For what it’s worth, Grisham was more than a year older than Heliot Ramos at each of those levels. There’s plenty of reason to believe that Ramos’ physical ability and many game skills will end up manifesting the big league career many have projected for him all along, even if the path hasn’t always been a smooth one. The point of the minors, as is often repeated, is to improve, not just to put up an unbroken string of pretty numbers.
But The Thrill is also right. At 22, it’s time for Ramos to make that leap from “improving” to “ready.” The Giants’ outfield is hardly impregnable and opportunities will come if he can force himself into the conversation. If and when he does join the Giants this year, it will be very interesting to watch how the Giants utilize him. One aspect of his 2021 season that I deliberatively hid from you above could well come into play when he joins the big club. While his numbers overall might have been somewhat disappointing last year, his numbers against LHP were star worthy. Against port siders, Ramos mashed to the tune of a .320/.380/.528 line. His .908 OPS was a full .233 points higher than the .675 he managed versus righties.
Of course, this could just be a one-year anomaly. Ramos had never shown a particular proclivity towards platoon splits in lower levels. Still, for a club that focuses as heavily on matchup advantages as the Giants, putting Ramos in a position to succeed might mean treating him something like Austin Slater, at least at first. And if, ultimately, a Slater-esque level of production is Ramos’ fall back position, that’s not at all a bad outcome, either — even while we’re all naturally holding out for the Trent Grisham thing because….well… that’s even better!
Whatever career is awaiting Ramos, this is the year it should begin to show itself. The stage is set. The audience assembled. The curtain goes up.
This has been a Free For All There R Giants’ post. As you know by now, there aren’t too many of these, so if you like what you see, why not subscribe? Now is a particularly good time, as I’m about to start sending out many more posts (as you’ll see below).
Before I go, a word on There R Giants’ schedule over the next few days. Tomorrow morning, I’ll fly to Phoenix to spend the next week or so at the Giants’ minor league camp. That’s going to bring a few changes to my regular production schedule — and I’ll be honest, I’m not 100% sure just yet what those changes will be. On the good side, once I start spending days at camp, I’ll be putting out more regular posts than the three times a week schedule I’ve kept through the winter. I’ll post my notes, videos, observations, etc from camp each day that there’s activity going on, including on the weekend.
So, more There R Giants’ content will be flowing over the next week. However, I’m not quite sure what time of day I’ll be sending out the posts while I’m in Arizona. It might make more sense to send posts out in the evening following days in camp, rather than my normal morning publication schedule. So if post doesn’t arrive Wednesday morning, don’t worry! Hopefully something will come in later that day. And finally, I’m not quite sure if I’ll be able to intermix the remaining five Top 50 profiles or if I’ll save them for a final push once I get back home. Basically, I’m going to be making this up as I go along! Hopefully, some brand-spanking new videos will help you get over whatever frustration that causes.
Next stop: Scottsdale!
Have a safe trip!
Very interesting comp with Trent Grisham.