Heliot Ramos didn’t wait for a perfect fix. He made one in the middle of the season, in the middle of a slump, and the Giants have been living with the results ever since.
Back in mid-April, Ramos was stuck in a rough stretch when San Francisco opened a road series against the Washington Nationals. Through his first 18 games, he had no home runs, a .526 OPS and a strikeout rate that had ballooned.
The previous stop in Cincinnati had already sent him to the bench for two games, where he was limited to pinch-hitting. His swing was off, and the numbers made that obvious.
So right before first pitch on April 17, Ramos changed things up. He altered his stance, shifted where he put his hands and adjusted where he stood in the box.
There wasn’t any deep dive or long-term blueprint behind it. It was instinct.
“This game is about adjustments,” Ramos said. “This game is about learning from your mistakes and just getting it right.
It’s not only about hitting; it’s about doing everything right. I’m still learning, I’m still getting better.
I’m going to get better, and that’s all that matters.”
Since those tweaks, the results have turned sharply in his favor. Over his last 39 games, Ramos is batting .295 with eight home runs, 21 RBIs and a .944 OPS. He also missed more than a month with a right quad injury in mid-May, then came back on June 28 and kept rolling, launching four homers in his last seven games.
That power was on full display Monday in the Giants’ 10-1 win over the Toronto Blue Jays, when Ramos recorded the first multi-homer game of his career. His first blast was an opposite-field, three-run shot into the right-field arcade. The second was a 434-foot drive that landed more than halfway up the left-field bleachers.
The changes weren’t just cosmetic. Early in the season, Ramos was striking out at a brutal clip. He entered the year with a career strikeout rate of 24.6 percent, but through 18 games that number had jumped to 35.3 percent, one of the worst marks in the league.
“The first two weeks, I think I struck out like 13 games straight,” Ramos said. “That’s not who I am.”
What changed, in part, was how he set up in the box. Since April 17, Ramos has moved back nearly three inches, from 25.7 to 28.6. He’s also set up two-and-a-half inches farther off the plate, from 27.0 to 29.6, and narrowed the distance between his feet from 30.3 inches to 25.5.
The goal was to free up his hands. At the start of the season, Ramos had them high near his head, and he felt like he was creating too much extra movement. By lowering them closer to his shoulder, he gave himself a cleaner load and a simpler path.
“I had my hands in the back of my ear too much, like hiding back there,” Ramos said. “So, I was moving my hands down, then back.
That’s too much movement. What I did was I put my hands in a position to where I have them here, I feel them and I got rhythm.
But when I load, I just load with my legs and I don’t have to move my hands a lot.”
Before the turnaround really took hold, Ramos had to absorb the frustration of not starting. In Cincinnati, he was out of the lineup for two of three games, though he still contributed as a pinch-hitter in the games he didn’t start. He said the experience hurt “in a good way.”
“At that point, I was like, it is what it is. I get it,” Ramos said.
“Obviously, you want to play every day. … I like playing.
I like being good. I don’t like being bad and sucking.
So, those days, I was mad, I was feeling some type of way, but it was like, now it’s time for me to work and get better.”
And after the way he’s hit since returning from the injured list, another benching doesn’t look like it’s coming anytime soon.
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