Fire Tony Vitello. In a Season From Hell, This Game Was the Whole Thing in One Inning.

Reds 10, Giants 9. A six run lead in the ninth, gone. Twenty four saves in forty four chances on the year. The same organization had the fourth best bullpen in baseball twelve months ago. One thing changed.

Ten to nine. That's the final. They led it nine to three going to the ninth inning and they lost it, and I've slept on nothing, cooled down about none of it, and I'm not going to pretend to be measured six paragraphs from now.

Fire him.

I've been circling this since June and writing around it like a coward, saying he's learning, saying it's year one, saying give the man his rookie season. I'm finished with that. If you want one game that explains this entire year of San Francisco Giants baseball, you got it this afternoon, and it came with a bow on it.

Here's the sequence, and I want it written down.

Two outs in the top of the first, the manager gets himself thrown out screaming at Ben May about a check swing on Eugenio Suarez. Six hours later, ninth inning, six run lead, Eugenio Suarez hits a grand slam that erases the whole afternoon. The manager isn't in the dugout. He's watching it on a clubhouse television because he spent his one afternoon of visible passion on an umpire in the first inning of a game between two teams going nowhere.

Dylan Smith got one out. He gave up four hits doing it and he took the loss. That's the ninth inning of a six run lead.

And the thing I want to be precise about, because people keep telling me it's a talent problem, is the number.

Twenty four saves in forty four chances. Read that again. This team has been handed a lead in the ninth inning forty four times and has held it twenty four times. Last year the same organization ran the fourth best bullpen in baseball at a 3.48 ERA. This year it's 4.33 and twenty second. Same building, same pitching development people, largely the same arms plus more. What changed is who decides when they come in and when they come out.

That's not variance. Variance doesn't cost you twenty games in one specific inning.

Watch how he does it. He rides a guy who's cooked because he doesn't want to burn somebody, then he panics and burns three of them anyway. He goes to the reliever the matchup chart says and ignores that the guy has nothing on the ball that day. He warms people up and sits them down and warms them up again. He pulls a starter who's cruising and then asks four relievers to cover what one guy would have covered. Logan Webb gave him six innings, five hits, two runs and six strikeouts today, and by the end of the night five different arms had touched that game and the lead was gone.

Relievers are not interchangeable and they are not machines and the good managers in this sport know exactly which of theirs is a lie on a given afternoon. Bruce Bochy built three parades on that skill. It's the one job a manager actually does that shows up in the standings, and Tony Vitello is dreadful at it, and he has been dreadful at it since April, and nobody in that organization will say so out loud.

Buster already announced he's back for 2027. I know. I've read the quotes and I understand the logic and I think it's wrong. You don't hand a second season to a man because the first one was going to be bad anyway. The record isn't the case against him. Fifty four and seventy nine is what a torn down roster looks like and I'm not blaming him for the trade deadline or for Whisenhunt's elbow or for the fact that half the lineup was in Sacramento in June.

The case against him is that the parts of this job that don't require talent, he's also losing. Lineup construction. Bullpen sequencing. Being in the dugout in the ninth inning. That's the stuff a manager owns completely, and every single one of those has been a problem since spring.

Meanwhile Rafael Devers hit his 29th today, third day in a row, and Jonah Cox put one 421 feet into the seats, and Shay Whitcomb went deep too, and Drew Gilbert came off the bench and cleared the bases. None of it matters. None of it survives the ninth inning of a team run by this man.

That's what a season from hell actually feels like from the couch. Not the losing. The specific, repeating, grinding way this team finds to lose, where five guys do their jobs and one inning eats all of it, over and over, since April.

I've got thirty games left of this and then an offseason of hearing that year two is when it clicks.

It won't. Fire him.

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