Heliot Ramos hits three home runs, makes Giants history not seen since 1920

What happened

Heliot Ramos had a night that Giants fans will be explaining to people for a while. The San Francisco outfielder hit three home runs — two that cleared the fence in the conventional sense and one "little league" homer — in the Giants' 10-1 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday, July 6, per Yahoo Sports.

The combination made Ramos the first Giants player in over a century to put together two home runs and a little-league home run in the same game, per Yahoo Sports. The last time any Giants player managed that particular combination was 1920.

In a postgame broadcast interview with NBC Sports Bay Area, Ramos credited work in the cage and batting practice earlier in the day, describing his focus on his swing path and his approach at the plate. "I just felt pretty good about it honestly," he said, per Yahoo Sports. Understated, as one does after rewriting a franchise record book.

Why it matters

The little-league home run is one of baseball's stranger statistical creatures — a ball that stays in the field of play while the defense scrambles and the baserunner circles all four bases. It counts the same as any other home run in the box score, but it arrives with a particular chaos energy that the traditional over-the-fence variety does not. Combining two of the conventional kind with one of the scramble-and-pray variety in a single game is, apparently, something no Giants player had managed since 1920.

For Ramos personally, Yahoo Sports described it plainly as a career night. The 10-1 final gave San Francisco a comfortable margin, but the individual performance was the story — player-of-the-game recognition went directly to Ramos, per the report.

The performance is also a reminder that franchise-first moments do not wait for convenient standings situations. A record that has stood since 1920 does not care what the Wild Card column looks like when it finally falls.

The numbers

The Giants' 65-97 record (.401) and their position 35 games back in the NL West tell one story about this season. The Wild Card rank of 11th, sitting 23.0 relative to the cut line, tells the same story from a different angle. Both races are closed, and the club has been eliminated from the division race and the Wild Card race.

What Monday added to the ledger is harder to quantify in a standings column: a three-home-run game featuring two distinct varieties of home run, a franchise combination that had not been recorded since 1920, and a 10-1 final that at least temporarily interrupted a five-game losing streak. The Giants entered Monday on that L5 skid, which makes the margin — nine runs — a meaningful change in texture even if the broader season arc is already written.

Where the club stands

San Francisco sits 4th in the NL West at 65-97 (.401), 35 games back in the division. The club's Wild Card standing ranks 11th, 23.0 relative to the cut line, with both the division race and the Wild Card race officially closed.

None of that context diminishes what Ramos did on Monday. A franchise-first performance is a franchise-first performance regardless of where it lands in the standings, and the 10-1 win was the kind of result that gives a clubhouse something to feel good about heading into the final stretch of a long season. The Giants host Toronto for two more games before welcoming the Colorado Rockies to Oracle Park, which means the homestand offers at least a few more opportunities to build on whatever Ramos found in the cage earlier that afternoon.

What we don't know yet

Yahoo Sports reported the game result and Ramos's historic performance but did not provide a full statistical line for the night beyond the three-home-run combination. The broader arc of Ramos's season — whether Monday represents a sustained stretch or a singular eruption — is not addressed in the report.

The specific circumstances of the little-league homer, including which inning it occurred and the precise sequence of defensive misfortune involved, were not described beyond the label itself. The 1920 Giants player who last accomplished the same combination was not named in the report, which means that particular piece of trivia remains, for now, a question for the record books rather than this desk.

What to watch

The Blue Jays remain at Oracle Park for two more games, which means Toronto's pitchers will have had a night to think about Ramos before Tuesday's action. Trevor McDonald is the probable Giants starter on Tuesday, July 7, opposed by Spencer Miles for Toronto.

Wednesday, July 8 brings the matchup that will draw the most attention regardless of what happens Tuesday: Logan Webb takes the ball for San Francisco against Dylan Cease for Toronto. That is the kind of pitching alignment that generates interest on its own terms, even in a series between clubs whose October situations are, to put it gently, already resolved.

The series closes Thursday, July 9, when the Colorado Rockies come to Oracle Park and Carson Whisenhunt is the probable Giants starter against Ryan Feltner.

For the immediate term, the question is straightforward: can Ramos carry any of Monday's approach — the swing path, the preparation he described to NBC Sports Bay Area — into the remaining games of this homestand? That is genuinely impossible to predict, so the desk will simply note that the Blue Jays will presumably be paying closer attention to the outfield gaps.

For now, though, the story belongs to Ramos — and, in a small way, to whoever last did this in 1920, whose name the record books have apparently been holding in trust for over a hundred years.