Shift in Joc Pederson’s swing gets job done as Dodgers beat Giants, 3-1, to win series

Joc Pederson swears he tried to shorten his swing and drive the ball up the middle in the fifth inning Sunday night when the Dodgers slugger found himself in a 2-and-2 count against hard-throwing right-hander Jeff Samardzija, with a runner aboard and his team down by a run.

Yeah, right, said those who watched Pederson swing from his heels in 2015, an all-or-nothing approach that yielded a rookie season of extremes: 26 homers but 170 strikeouts, fifth-most in the major leagues. He was an All-Star in July and lost his everyday center-field job in August.

But that’s Pederson’s story, and he’s sticking to it, even if the result of his new “two-strike approach” was a prodigious two-run home run to right field that catapulted the Dodgers toward a 3-1 victory over the San Francisco Giants in Dodger Stadium.

Kenta Maeda survived a 24-pitch first inning in which he walked two — one more than he walked in 12 innings of his first two starts — to throw seven innings of one-run, four-hit, seven-strikeout ball, improving to 2-0 despite having his season-opening scoreless streak snapped at 142/3 innings.

Chris Hatcher threw a one-two-three eighth; Kenley Jansen added a scoreless ninth for his fifth save, extending the Dodgers bullpen’s string of consecutive scoreless innings to 14; and Yasiel Puig manufactured an insurance run in the seventh with some bold baserunning.

But the Dodgers would not have won two of three games against their National League West rivals had Pederson not walloped a 95-mph fastball from Samardzija, turning a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 lead.

“I’ve been working hard all off-season on becoming a better line-drive hitter, making more contact,” Pederson, 23, said. “That was the last thing on my mind right there, to hit a home run. I was trying to choke up and put a good swing on it. I guess it worked out well.”

Pederson turned viciously on the pitch, which was on the inner half of the plate, launching it 393 feet, with an exit velocity of 105 mph, for his second homer.

“He threw some good pitches down and away, nothing in,” Pederson said of Samardzija. “There was a pitch I could handle, and I didn’t miss it. You have to capitalize when you get a mistake, because there’s not very many of them.”

Pederson looked overmatched in the seventh inning Saturday night, striking out on four pitches against Giants starter Johnny Cueto. He popped out against closer Santiago Casilla with the potential tying run at third and one out in the ninth inning of a 4-3 loss, his average falling to .242 with a team-leading 14 strikeouts.

That prompted a question to Manager Dave Roberts before Sunday’s game: Is it important for Pederson’s confidence to keep him in the lineup after his rough game Saturday? Roberts wasn’t ready to kick the kid to the curb.

“I really didn’t think about not having him in there today, whether he got no hits or four hits [Saturday],” Roberts said. “It’s a long season. He’s working hard. He popped the ball up in an RBI situation. He feels terrible about it, but today, he’s ready to go.”

After hitting 20 homers through June 2015, Pederson hit .170 with six homers in 266 plate appearances from July 1 on. His biggest challenge this winter was trying to pinpoint what he did wrong in the second half.

“I needed to slow things down, make some mechanical changes that put me in a better hitting position to be able to recognize pitches better,” Pederson said. “These pitchers are good up here — they can locate. They showed me I need to make adjustments. It’s part of the game. I learned from it.”

mike.digiovanna@latimes.com

Twitter: @MikeDiGiovanna