Can Heliot Ramos make most of his callup?

Alex Pavlovic tweeted this morning that the San Francisco Giants have called up Heliot Ramos to help with the contingent of left-handed starting pitchers the team is set to face starting today with KC’s Kris Bubic.

Beginning tomorrow, Julia Urias, Clayton Kershaw, Eduardo Rodriguez, Joey Wentz, and Matthew Boyd are all in the mix and the Giants will need some help from the right side while Mitch Haniger continues to recuperate. Can Ramos take advantage of this moment?

A month ago, the Giants optioned Ramos back to Triple-A a few weeks out from Opening Day, that’s how little they thought he could help them. At the time, I wrote:

As for Heliot Ramos, there was a time when the Giants — along with Giants fans — thought this guy could become a really solid contributor. I’m talking all the way back to... last season, when Zaidi basically setup the roster in hopes that Ramos could step up and be a part of the platoon. He hit .227/.305/.349 (.654 OPS) in 475 Triple-A plate appearances and was 2-for-20 in 22 MLB PAs.

The 23-year old still has plenty of time to figure things out. The question now is whether or not that will happen on the Giants. In 7 games with the River Cats this season, he’s hitting .333/.355/.370... that’s still a remarkable lack of power for a guy who is supposed to be a doubles and homers guy. He has just one extra base hit (a double) out of 9 and just one walk against five strikeouts in his 31 PA. So, maybe the new rules will help him out as long as he’s hitting the ball hard.

This isn’t necessarily a make or break week for Ramos, but if he can show some flashes here before heading back to Triple-A, and then continuing to show improvement down there, he might be able to raise his stock. The Giants need all the help they can get down on the farm.We might not see too much of him, in fact, but if we do, there’s going to be a spotlight. That’s unavoidable. He had been talked up for so long.

In the meantime, it must be said that this is not what Matt Beaty wanted and the Giants’ acquisition of him is just a tough thing that happened. To borrow some more of Pavlovic’s reporting from last week,

The first was that Beaty, a player the Giants coveted, didn’t make the Kansas City Royals’ roster but had an “upward mobility” clause in his contract. That meant if another team offered him a big league job in the next 48 hours, the Royals had to let him go. It’s somewhat rare for players to get a shot because of that, but the Giants scooped Beaty up for cash considerations.

So, the Giants, by way of having Beaty on their Opening Day roster, regained the right to option him down. The team’s ability to navigate and optimize loopholes and conditions is definitely one of its key strengths, and in Beaty’s case, seeing how the Royals have handled the Giants pretty easily for the first two games of this series, it’s got to be a little bit frustrating if not confusing.