Flores and Conforto have a blast

The early offensive frames for the San Francisco Giants on Friday night alternated between stranding runners against the Texas Rangers’s starter Michael Lorenzen, and Wilmer Flores launching solo homers to left.

Michael Conforto flew out with a runner on to end the 1st. Flores took a 3-1 sinker over the wall in the 2nd. In the 3rd and two on, Conforto lifted another fly to center for the second out, and Jorge Soler grounded out to end the frame. Flores again deposited a 2-1 cutter, thigh-high and down-the-middle, into the bleachers to lead off the 4th. Conforto worked a one-out walk to load the bases and boot Lorenzen from the game in the 5th, but again, a scoring opportunity went unrealized when reliever Jonathan Hernández fanned Jorge Soler, then Flores to escape the jam.

Texas rode the momentum of a stymied Flores to piece together two runs on three singles against Logan Webb in the bottom half of the inning. With the game tied, it wasn’t until the 7th that the heart of the order came through with a crooked number blast.

Facing David Robertson with 1-on and 1-out, Conforto whiffed on a store-brand cutter right over the plate. A complete mistake in location, a pitch he should’ve obliterated, but he saw it too big and hacked big, putting him in a 1-2 hole. The over-swing appeared to focus Conforto. Easy takes on the next two pitches set-up a full count, and Robertson, for some reason, gave the Giants’ left fielder the chance to make amends. Same pitch, same location, and this time Conforto loosed a platonic swing.

Easy and concise, his barrel cruised through the zone to break the tie and give San Francisco a 4-2 lead they’d only add to in the 8th.

As a team, San Francisco left 11 men on base and went 1-for-8 with runners in scoring position (a hit that didn’t come until the 8th). Numbers that haven driven players, coaches, and fans crazy in losses, but Friday turned out different. All is forgiven and forgotten with that one consequential swing.

The 2-run homer was Conforto’s 8th of the season and first since returning from the IL. Nearly a month had passed since the lefty had collected an RBI.

Flores’s two solo shots doubled his season total and was his 9th multi-HR game of his career. Though not great for the team as a whole, LaMonte Wade Jr.’s hamstring injury has clearly been a boon for the veteran—his slow start due to being stuck between a rock (OBP king Wade) and a hard place (DH Soler), making it difficult for Bob Melvin to find him consistent at-bats.

The three homers the Giants lifted in Friday’s win were their second consecutive game with as many long balls. The last time they yanked as many in two games was in the thin air of Mexico City back in April of 2023.

Logan Webb has thrown 7 complete innings in his last three starts. Rangers bats didn’t do much against him, managing only one hit while striking out five times through the first four innings. For most of the game, Texas worked from behind in the count. 20 of the 26 batters Webb faced started in an 0-1 hole. The mix once again highlighted his sinker, a trend he’s established in recent starts after multiple outings in which he felt his change-up usage had become predictable, and the pitch itself becoming less effective without an established fastball to play off of.

The mix kept the Rangers guessing. While only missing 8 total bats in the evening, Webb collected 24 called strikes, 18 of them coming with the sinker. A willingness from the home plate umpire to extend the strike zone certainly helped Webb’s cause, but what made the right-hander’s outing successful was his ability to exploit those malleable corners.

The sinker on the inside corner that Adolis Garcia swung through in the 4th was stacked perfectly on top of Webb’s previous inside breaking ball that was called strike two. The plate shaved a seam off his 3-2 change-up to Robbie Grossman in the 7th—his sixth and final K.

The only time Webb wandered out over the plate was in the 5th, and even then the misses weren’t terrible. The Rangers’ 2-run, 4-hit rally that inning was made up of all singles, three on the ground, one broken bat bloop and a sacrifice fly.

Nathaniel Lowe’s lead-off single—the first time the lead-off man reached against Webb—was on an up-and-in sinker that he muscled away from the defense, leaving his bat at just 80 MPH. The follow-up hit by Wyatt Langford would’ve been at least a fielder’s choice (if not a two-fer) if Brett Wisely was pinched more towards a true double-play depth. Langford’s speed allowed him to stretch the indistinct bounder into a double and would later score the tying run at the time.

The elevated change-ups to Grossman on the sacrifice fly, and to Ezequiel Duran on his RBI single, were Webb’s worst offerings. The one he threw to Josh Smith, however, was perfect: below the knee offspeed that exploited Texas’s aggressiveness in the inning. Smith rolled into first to end Texas’s only offensive threat of the night.

While Flores and Conforto continue to find their form at the plate, Heliot Ramos continues to ¡vamos!, collecting 3 more hits and an RBI single, raising his season batting average to .320 (.931 OPS) with 20 runs batted-in

Tyler Rogers pitched a perfect 8th, and Camilo Doval, making his first appearance since possibly the worst outing of his career against New York, rebounded with a perfect 9th, K-ing Lowe on a knee-high slider to secure his 10th save of the season and the 5-2 win.