SAN FRANCISCO — Michael Morse is built like a tight end and has spent nearly a decade going through grueling offseason workouts alongside football players, including 49ers running back Frank Gore. Morse’s gridiron memories aren’t exactly fond ones, though.

“I blocked them out,” Morse said, laughing. “This is a part of my memory I don’t get to.”

There’s a good reason for that. In a football-mad district near the Florida coast, Morse’s Nova High team went the entire 1999 without scoring. The offense didn’t even cross the 50-yard line until the final game of the season.

“Half of that is probably on me,” Morse said. “I was the quarterback.”

Years later, as the Giants’ new left fielder, Morse isn’t having any issues offensively. He is hitting .350 through the season’s first two weeks, is tied for seventh in the National League in RBIs (10) and ranks ninth in slugging percentage (.600).

“He has really done all that we thought he could do for us,” said manager Bruce Bochy, who has written Morse’s name onto the lineup card 12 times in 13 games. “He’s a big, strong guy with a lot of power, but he throws out good at-bats.”

Bochy pushed hard for Morse in the offseason, even as the Giants bumped up against their payroll limit and general manager Brian Sabean said publicly that he wasn’t sure he would be able to give Bochy an everyday left fielder he so coveted.

There were many reasons the Giants fell off a cliff in 2013, but one of the biggest issues for Bochy was trying to squeeze drops of production out of a struggling group of left fielders. Nine players manned the position in 2013, combining for a league-worst .651 OPS and just five homers.

In Morse, who played for Bochy during a 2011 exhibition series in Taiwan, the Giants saw Pat Burrell 2.0, a thumper who could lengthen the lineup and wouldn’t shy away from the unforgiving dimensions of AT&T Park. Morse, seeming stubborn at the time, insisted after he signed a one-year, $6 million deal that his power numbers wouldn’t be affected by the alleys, wind and fog. He’s been right so far.

A 449-foot blast off Arizona Diamondbacks right-hander Bronson Arroyo last Wednesday was the sixth longest homer at AT&T Park since the start of the 2010 season.

A night later, Morse rocketed a ball off the bricks in right-center, 410 feet away. The double would have been a home run in 29 other parks, but Morse was ecstatic about the go-ahead, two-run double, as he showed with a high karate kick as he touched second base.

That last part is another reason why Morse has settled seamlessly into a clubhouse that embraces characters. The 32-year-old uses 80s megahit “Take On Me” by A-ha and “Blow The Whistle” by Oakland rapper Too Short as his walk-up music, has a twisting warm-up swing called the “samurai cobra snake,” carries his bats in a humidor that was a gift from Ichiro Suzuki and already has joined the scooter craze that Hunter Pence started.

“He’s been a good fit,” Pence said. “He plays with intensity and he works out hard, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

Pence might as well have been describing himself, so it’s easy to see why the two outfielders hit it off from their first day together and have joked that they’re in a budding bromance. After his first week at AT&T Park, Morse said he feels right at home, crediting a fan base that is singing along to “Take On Me” and a roster that “gave me the feeling that I belong.”

That feeling wasn’t a surprise to Morse, though. As he was trying to move past an injury-riddled 2013 season during which he hit just .215 with 13 homers for the Seattle Mariners and Baltimore Orioles, Morse took to heart the advice of former Giant Mark De Rosa, who insisted that San Francisco was the place to go. Morse also listened to Gore, who raved about how much the city embraced the Giants.

The running back and left fielder have been working out together for years at Bommarito Performance Systems near Fort Lauderdale, a training ground for NFL draft prospects and stars such as Maurice Jones-Drew, LeSean McCoy and Matt Forte. Morse was one of the first baseball players to join the training program, and at 6-foot-5, 245 pounds, the player nicknamed The Beast blended right in.

Can he hang with the football players during workouts?

“Yeah,” Morse said, pausing. “Until we start running, and then you can forget it.”

His baseball team is just fine with that. Morse was brought to San Francisco not for his legs but for a bat that has been exactly as advertised.

For more on the Giants, see Alex Pavlovic’s Giants Extra blog at blogs.mercurynews.com/Giants. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/AlexPavlovic.