Soon after the 27th out was recorded in the 5-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays, Giants players filed out of the dugout into the clubhouse as somber as one leaves a church pew at a funeral. Heads were mostly bowed. Hats pulled low. Eyes kept down. The coaches busied themselves with their game-prep clipboards and binders. The auxiliary staff gathered equipment. Amidst the muffled bustle, Rafael Devers and Willy Adames stayed frozen on the bench, bearing expressions infinite in their emptiness.
The pair
have sat shiva together after each loss so far in Florida. After today’s defeat, a camera operator slowly zoomed in on the two processing their grief. Adames started to distractedly wipe his brow of sweat, hiding his face in the crook of his arm. Beside him, Devers’s wide, glazed-over eyes laid the hollowness behind them bare as Katrina and the Waves 1983 hit “Walking on Sunshine” blasted over the stadium PA system. The song’s refrain “I’m walking on sunshine…wooah!” repeated again…and again…and again… and again… as the camera closed in on Devers’s face, numb and in hell.
Pure cinema. The clip was better than anything Giants fans had watched all game, and thank god the camera caught the moment, considering how one failed to track the flight of a consequential ball off of Heliot Ramos’s bat in the 2nd.
I say consequential because in theory, this hit should’ve been the Giants’ first home run since last Sunday — coincidentally the last outing of the evening’s starter, Landen Roupp, and San Francisco’s last win.
Runs have been hard to come by for this club. Wall-clearing power, nearly impossible. Going into Saturday’s contest, the 2026 Giants have gone homer-less in a MLB-leading 19 games. Their record in those games: 3-16, good for a .158 win-loss percentage that’s the lowest in the National League. Conversely if a Giant homers in a game, the team is 10 – 3, which is a much better .769 win-loss percentage, which means good things happen when the Giants hit a home run, which means it was kinda messed-up when Ramos’s 108 MPH shot to center somehow got knocked out of the sky and fell to earth twenty feet short of the wall.
Baseball should be played outside. God wants it that way. Hurricane Milton made that abundantly clear in 2024, and yet, the Rays organization stubbornly spent all of last season rebuilding Tropicana Field’s roof in blasphemous defiance.
Because of this repeated hubris, new rules were made to account for totally foreseeable occurrences like a baseball hitting a bunch of metal hanging down from the ceiling. The rule: If a fly ball hits one of the lower two catwalks between the foul lines, a home run should be awarded. That rule makes a lot of sense. What doesn’t make a lot of sense is having a rule and not enforcing it. Or not having a way of enforcing it. Or not having a back-up plan, like an all-seeing eye-in-the-sky in case something goes awry.
Something went awry in the 2nd inning of Saturday’s game. Heliot Ramos ripped a 96 MPH four-seam from Rays’ starter Griffin Jax to dead-center. It shot off his bat at 107.9 MPH with a 33 degree launch angle. A baseball with similar off-the-bat metrics left Ramos’s bat under a roofed park in Arizona back in June 2024. 108 MPH exit velocity, 35 degree launch angle. It cleared the center field wall with ease, officially traveling 424 feet, officially outta here in all 30 Major League parks. It stands to reason a similarly struck ball in a similarly, climate-controlled enclosed arena, would also clear an outfield wall by plenty.
Apparently not. Ramos’s projected 420 foot bomb was quickly downgraded to a routine 380 foot flyout after it fell into center fielder Cedric Mullins glove. Ramos lingered around second base, mouthing “No way,” looking around in disbelief. What went on up there was apparently beyond the field of vision for the four bleary-eyed umpires in attendance, and out of frame of the dozens of officially sanctioned cameras that Big-Brother MLB games nowadays. Giants coaches voiced their discontent, gesturing towards the heavens, towards he obvious. The umpires performed an official review on the play, waiting on the field for visual confirmation to bail them out for their collective blink. They surely understood what had happened by that point, but now needed visual proof, another angle. There were plenty that provided cursory evidence. How ‘bout Heliot Ramos trotting out of the box as if the ball was destined to splash down in the aquarium; or Griffin Jax rubbernecking the drive from the mound? With his eyes pinned to the ball at the center field wall, Cedric Mullins clearly says “Oh sh*t” before retreating back across the warning track to catch the baseball dropping from the sky like a dead dove.
One of the catwalks turned a sure-fire tater into a can of corn, and I guess since the lens’ eye missed it, it didn’t happen, no matter what physics and geometry and logic dictates. What is written in the official scorebook is what happened. No questions asked. Baseballs fall from the sky all the time.
The home run that never was cost the Giants the game.
Well, probably not.
It cost them an early lead, at least, a brief boost in energy, a reprieve from the suffocating bleakness that has blanketed the team. The solo shot could’ve meant something — but it didn’t happen, so nothing happened. A couple of frames later, the Rays scored first with three consecutive weak singles off Landen Roupp in the 4th. A lead-off double, a pair of walks, and a single helped chase the right-hander off the mound with just an out recorded in the 5th, serving Roupp his shortest outing of the year. The Giants bullpen kept things mostly steady in relief, and the offense avoided the complete embarrassment of another another shutout when Devers doubled home Luis Arraez in the 6th.
Arraez’s one-out double gave San Francisco their first at-bat with a runner in scoring position. They managed just one yesterday; today they got three and a hit! Devers punched a hard-hit liner towards left field that Chandler Simpson jumped after, pocketed in his glove momentarily before jostling free after colliding with the wall.
So I guess things evened out. Tropicana’s structural features, they giveth and taketh. Thanks to a wall, the Giants had their first run in the series — four innings late, but what can ya do? Be mad at a building?
