Heliot!

Is he going to stick this time?

Last year, the Giants had the fifth worst outfield offense in the majors, and Heliot Ramos spent just about the whole year playing in AAA. He played 25 games for the big team, starting 17 of them and getting just 60 plate appearances, and in those 60 plate appearances…he was pretty bad. In 2023, Ramos hit just .179/.233/.304, with one homer and 2 runs batted in.

So, well, okay, he wasn’t very good. But he had had a nice year in Sacramento, hitting .300/.382/.546. In the PCL, that’s not a great year — there are an awful lot of parks that are so friendly to hitters that they render offensive stats almost meaningless — but it is a very good one, and you would think it would lead to better results than he got with the Giants.

More to the point, you would also think that it would lead to more consistent playing time with the Giants. And in his first call-up, in April, Ramos started 8 of the 12 games the Giants played (and 8 of the 9 that he personally got into), which is a pretty good ratio, though his OPS was only .491 over that time. In his second call-up, in August, Ramos started just 7 of the 15 games the team played while he was up, and did have a .775 OPS, though over his last 14 PAs, it was just .298. In his final call-up, over 5 games in September, Ramos didn’t reach base once in 8 plate appearances.

And then we all complained about how the team hated him! Giants fans are such ungrateful brats.

Here was the problem: It sure felt like the Giants were saying that Heliot Ramos was not their priority. He got one chance in April, it didn’t go great, and then the team half-assed it whenever they felt forced to call him up. Starting one of your youngest major league-ready prospects in half the games he’s up is not doing him any favors. Meanwhile, over that same period of time that Ramos was slumping, Luis Matos was scorching the ball and Wade Meckler was hitting competently. Something had to give, and that something ended up being Heliot Ramos.

But should it have been? Ramos certainly has a long more swing-and-miss in his game than Matos, but he also has a lot more ability to hit the ball hard. If you’re wondering how Ramos compares to Meckler, well, Wade Meckler certainly tries very hard and we should respect that about him.

So even with an excess of whiffs, Ramos is a better option than Meckler, certainly, and considering the context last year, he was a better option than just about anyone. Someone who swings through pitches as often as Ramos does — he is still swinging through a lot of pitches this year, although he’s not quite as glaringly awful against offspeed stuff like changeups and splitters — needs to face pitches at the major league level to get better. You can’t learn to lay off a major league changeup if you’re facing nothing but AAA ones.

But Heliot Ramos did not catch fire last year, and so he did not get to stick around. Well, maybe I should say that in the nicer way: Heliot Ramos did not force the issue last year, and so he got sent down to Sacramento to work on some aspects of his game. Yes, that’s much kinder sounding. But breaking into the majors is hard, and the fact that Luis Matos was able to maintain a .250 batting average all year certainly didn’t do Ramos any favors. This isn’t to say that Matos should have been concerned about doing favors for Ramos, but along with the good of Matos rarely striking out came the bad of Matos not hitting the ball with authority.

You can’t really say that the Giants should have just given up on the season and played the kids in August of last year, because they were in playoff position on September 1. But once they fell out of the race, which happened in short order in September, as you’ll recall, they spent a lot of at-bats on Joc Pederson and Michael Conforto and Mitch Haniger, which didn’t do the team a lot of good. As shown by those five games later in the month, Ramos was around and could have stepped in to play, but the team didn’t want to.

And with Heliot Ramos, it’s felt like that for a while: that the team isn’t really sold on him. On a basic level, it makes sense, because what Farhan Zaidi prizes immensely is swing decisions, and Ramos swings at a lot of pitches he shouldn’t. But there comes a point — and for the Giants this point was a while ago — where you have to just admit that there’s more than one way to be a good player, and it’s worth seeing how Heliot Ramos copes with the majors. It took multiple injuries for his current call-up to stick, and if he was hitting like Matos, sending him back to Sacramento would be a fait accompli.

Farhan has already said that Ramos will be sticking in the lineup for a while, which is good. But it’s easy to say that when he’s hitting well. It’s when the struggles come — and they are coming, for everyone, no matter what — that we’ll see how committed this team is to developing Ramos. On pure talent, he’s one of the team’s most promising players, but when he gets into one of those phases where he starts swinging through everything, we’ll have to remember that that is part of the learning curve for him.

If you stick was Heliot Ramos in the lineup, there will be bad things coming. The key is that, over the long term, you hope that whatever pain is coming will be balanced out by the thing he learns from it. But that means that he has to finish learning, and then stick around, and if the team is within a nautical mile of a playoff spot, it’s tough to see them allowing that.

But Ramos is talented. He has tools. He’s got a good arm, and a lot of power. And on occasion, he can sure hit the hell out of a baseball. It would be nice if he could do that in San Francisco for years to come, but the team’s going to have to take a risk to get there.