SAN FRANCISCO — He’s striking out far too often for a guy signed to be a middle-of-the-order hitter for a Giants team that badly needs one, but when he does make contact, Michael Conforto has been worth every penny.
In the biggest moment of his young Giants career, Conforto blasted a two-run homer to break a tie in the eighth inning and lead the Giants to a 3-1 win over the Kansas City Royals on Sunday afternoon at Oracle Park.
“I kept it simple,” Conforto said. “I wanted to hit the ball hard, swing at strikes and I’ll try to keep that approach going forward. It felt amazing.”
The Giants took a risk on Conforto after the 30-year-old sat out the entire 2022 season recovering from shoulder surgery. They signed him to a two-year, $36-million deal this offseason hoping he’d look more like the guy who had a .920 OPS with the Mets in 2020.
Conforto entered Sunday as one of the worst hitters in the league at making contact while striking out 36% of the time. But when he has made contact, Conforto’s average exit velocity of 95 mph has been among the best in baseball.
Sunday, he got a hanging breaking ball from Royals lefty Ryan Yarbrough and cranked it 429 feet over the right-field wall.
“He understands this is a long season and you’ll go long stretches of the season where you don’t necessarily get the big hit,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said. “A moment like this was inevitable and coming for Michael.”
The Giants otherwise looked anemic at the plate on Sunday. Until Conforto’s blast, there had been 15 balls hit with an exit velocity of at least 90 mph, and 13 of them were hit by the Royals, a young team in the midst of a rebuild.
“We were having trouble getting on base,” Kapler said.
It finally opened up in the bottom of the eighth, when Bryce Johnson blooped a single to left. Two batters later, Wilmer Flores hit a groundball down the third-base line and Johnson bolted home all the way from first base on a gutsy, but correct decision by third-base coach Mark Hallberg.
“I felt like the game changed right there,” Johnson said. “You could feel it throughout the stadium.”
Conforto stepped up next and hit the two-run shot.
Tyler Rogers handled a scoreless ninth as the Giants avoided a three-game sweep to the Royals and moved to 4-5 on the year.
Also…
— There was confusion in the seventh, when the Royals appeared to remove right-hander Carlos Hernandez due to a hand injury, prompting Kapler to send up a left-handed pinch hitter, Blake Sabol, to hit for Austin Wynns. Sabol stepped onto the field, but Kapler never officially pointed him into the game. So when Hernandez went back to the mound for a moment, signaling he’d be staying in the game, umpire Dan Iassogna gave Kapler the option to keep Sabol as the pinch-hitter, which Kapler took, according to Iassogna. Then the Royals lifted Hernandez as an injured pitcher and replaced him with Yarbrough, a left-hander, leaving the Giants on the wrong side of a platoon advantage.
Kapler explained it as an unfortunate miscommunication. Iassogna took responsibility for the error, telling a pool reporter, “It was a very small mistake that turned into a two-minute delay – and I tell you, we go so quickly now, two minutes feels like 10 minutes.”
— Anthony DeSclafani hurled 6 1/3 innings of one-run ball, striking out seven, as he lowered his ERA to 0.73 through two starts. DeSclafani, who has been calling his own pitches with the PitchCom system, said “my pitches are doing what they did back in 2021.”
— Darin Ruf, signed to a minor league contract on Saturday, is likely to report to Triple-A Sacramento, Kapler said.
— Rehabbing catcher Joey Bart and recently-signed Gary Sanchez split time between catcher and designated hitter for two games with Triple-A Sacramento this weekend. Bart went 3-for-7 and Sanchez went 1-for-7. Bart is eligible to be activated off the 10-day injured list on Monday. “Everything is on the table,” Kapler said.
— The National Baseball Hall of Fame requested the baseball used to throw the first pitch by Sean Manaea during his start on Saturday, when he and Sabol formed MLB’s first-ever Samoan battery. The ball will be sent to the museum in Cooperstown, New York.
— Before the game, the Giants optioned utility man Matt Beaty to Triple-A Sacramento and recalled outfielder Heliot Ramos.
