Giants' Heliot Ramos joins small club with two blasts and Little League homer originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO — Heliot Ramos did not have immediate access to Statcast data when he returned to the dugout in the first inning Monday night. But he didn’t need it.
“I knew it!” Ramos said after the 10-1 win over the Toronto Blue Jays. “Me and [Rafael Devers] were talking about it. I knew it.”
Ramos’ 399-foot laser while leading off the bottom of the first was an Oracle Park special. It would have been out of all 29 other ballparks, but Ramos had to settle for a triple and Little League home run when the ball was thrown into the home dugout as he slid into third.
He wasn’t done, though. Not even close.
Ramos followed his near-homer with two actual ones, and both were impressive blasts. His fingerprints were all over one of the cleaner wins of the year for the Giants, who got a career-high eight innings from right-hander Landen Roupp and might have had their best baserunning game of the Tony Vitello Era.
On another night, the story might have been Devers going first to third, or the Giants successfully executing a double steal. But Ramos stole the show in the second half of a quick game.
His three-run blast to right in the sixth gave him a triple and homer in the same game for the second time in five days, and Ramos said that was his favorite swing of the night. His father, a pretty good player in Puerto Rico, taught him the opposite-field approach that he’s so proud of, one that once led to him becoming the first player in Oracle Park’s history to get a Splash Hit from the right side.
In the eighth, Ramos blasted a 434-foot homer to left to clinch his first career multi-homer game. It was the third-longest homer by a Giant at Oracle Park this season, behind a couple on the last homestand from Victor Bericoto, who had two more hits Monday and drove in two runs.
The huge night gave Ramos four homers and two triples in eight games since he came off the IL and provided a reminder of what the Giants are missing when their energetic former All-Star isn’t in the lineup. While there are a lot of reasons why San Francisco is 14 games under .500 — most of them related to pitching — it perhaps hasn’t been discussed enough that Ramos missed six weeks with a quad injury.
Vitello keeps telling the same story about his return. He heard Ramos before he saw him, and that energy is always there between the lines.
On this night, Roupp didn’t need much to work with. He pushed for his first career complete game but was pulled after 104 pitches. Still, he snapped a streak of 11 straight team losses in games that he started.
Roupp said that was a “heavy” weight he was carrying, but he gave up just three hits Monday. That was matched by Ramos, who joined a small club. He’s the first Giant since Johnny Mize to hit two homers and a Little League home run in the same game, and the first big leaguer to do it since San Diego’s Bubba Trammell in 2002.
The night was capped by a home run that left the bat at 110 mph. Vitello said the dugout was “in awe.”
“Everybody was thunderstruck on that one,” Vitello said.
