Giants’ Belt expected to miss time with concussion symptoms

SAN FRANCISCO The Giants will have to do without Brandon Belt at first base for at least a little while, so look for Buster Posey to get a chunk of games at first base in the near future.

Belt came out of Friday’s game after eight innings when it became clear that he wasn’t over head and neck issues that developed when he slid into a knee at second base Tuesday in Cincinnati.

As a result, Posey was moved to first base for Saturday’s game against the Diamondbacks with Trevor Brown, a converted utility infielder, making his major league debut catching. The Giants have been weaning Brown away from the infield since 2012, and this season he was strictly a catcher at Triple-A Sacramento.

Posey, the backbone of the Giants’ lineup, will get first crack at first base, if only to take some of the pressure off his legs after a season of catching.

“It will be a break for him, and we’ve got three catchers here now,” Bochy said. “So I’d say you’d probably see Buster at first base quite a bit.

As for Belt, the Giants don’t know if he will be able to play again this season. They hope he will, but they already have two other players, Nori Aoki and Gregor Blanco, who are slow to come back after concussion problems.

“He said he felt a little weird yesterday, then it got a little worse in the game,” Bochy said. “It’s a little hard to figure out how long to take. Obviously you want to be cautious, but how cautious? When he passed all the tests, he was cleared to play. Now he’s got to be cleared to play again. Until he is, he won’t play.”

Brown, the team’s 10th-round pick in the 2012 draft, played all over the infield during his time at UCLA, but the Giants drafted him with the idea of him being a catcher some day. He was behind the plate for 14 games in both 2012 and 2013, but come 2014 he was catching most of the time, getting 63 games split between Class-A and Triple-A.

This season he started 67 games behind the plate at Sacramento with a slash line of .263/.319/.343.

Bochy, a former catcher himself, likes the thought of trying to convert players to catching.

“More than anything it’s about how agile he is. This gives him a little more flexibility to make it to the Major Leagues,” the manager said. “When you take a guy and convert him to catcher, has to be someone you think can handle it. It doesn’t always work, but he’s a great candidate to do this. I take this personal, because I’m a catcher.”

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