The Giants Blew Another One, and It Is the Same Sickening Story

Two outs from a win over the worst team in baseball, the bullpen handed it back. Rockies 4, Giants 3. If you are not furious yet, you have not been paying attention.

I am so tired of writing this column. Not the writing part. The living-through-it part. For the thousandth time this season the San Francisco Giants took a lead into the late innings, handed the ball to their bullpen, and watched the whole thing burn to the ground. Tuesday night it was the Rockies, the worst team in baseball, a franchise that has been road kill for months, and the Giants still found a way to lose to them 4-3 at Oracle Park. Two outs, that is all they needed. They could not get two outs. And if you have followed this team for more than a week, you already knew exactly how it was going to end the second the phone rang in that bullpen.

Here is the crime scene. The Giants led 2-1 heading to the ninth. All they had to do was close out three outs against a Colorado lineup that has spent the season getting no-hit, blown out and embarrassed. Instead they went and got Caleb Kilian, and Kilian did what this bullpen does. Mickey Moniak singled to start it. Then a walk to Troy Johnston. Then a bunt single from Jake McCarthy to load the bases, because of course the Giants could not field a bunt either. Kyle Karros ripped a two-run single to center to flip the lead. Cole Carrigg tacked on a sacrifice fly. Three runs, three hits, and Kilian did not record a single out before they finally went and got him. The bases were empty when the inning started and full of Rockies by the time anyone in that dugout reacted.

Three runs, no outs. Sit with that. This is a man they trusted with a one-run lead against the worst offense in the sport, and he could not retire one hitter. The Giants scratched a run back in the bottom of the ninth on a Rafael Devers sacrifice fly, which only makes it worse, because it means they were one competent inning of relief away from winning this game and did not get it. Antonio Senzatela, who came in at 8-1, gets the win he did nothing to earn. Juan Mejia slams the door for his fourth save. And the Giants trudge off having lost a game they had in their pocket to a team that has no business beating anybody.

So let me say the part I have been circling for weeks. Tony Vitello has no idea how to manage a bullpen, and I am done pretending otherwise. This is not a one-night thing. This is a pattern, night after night, the same fingerprints on every one of these losses. You do not get to the ninth inning with a lead against the Rockies and lose it because the baseball gods are cruel. You lose it because the person filling out the card keeps putting arms into spots they cannot handle, keeps waiting one batter too long to make a move, keeps treating high-leverage innings like they are interchangeable when everyone watching can see they are not. Vitello was a college coach eight months ago and it shows every time the game tightens up. The players are not good enough, fine, but a manager is supposed to squeeze every out he can out of what he has, and instead he leaves guys out there to bleed. He gets outmanaged in the ninth inning by the Colorado Rockies. Read that again.

And no, I am not letting Buster Posey off the hook, because the deeper insult here is the roster he built. Posey looked at this bullpen in the offseason, looked at a group with not one single trustworthy leverage arm, and decided that was fine. He decided the Giants could sleepwalk through a full season without a real closer, without a setup man you would bet a dollar on, without one reliever you actually want on the mound with the game on the line. That is not bad luck. That is a plan, an actual decision made by an actual person, and it was insane the day he made it. You cannot compete without leverage arms. Everyone in baseball knows this. Everyone except, apparently, the man running the Giants, who was supposed to be the adult in the room and instead handed his manager a bullpen made of tissue paper and asked him to protect leads with it.

The result is what we watched again tonight, and what we have watched all year. Good starts wasted. Leads that mean nothing because nobody can hold them. A team that could actually be a few games more respectable if it had even a league-average bullpen, sitting instead in the basement of the standings, losing to the Rockies of all teams, in the most predictable way imaginable. The blown saves are not flukes anymore. They are the identity of this franchise. This is who the 2026 Giants are: a team that finds the lead, then gives it back, then makes you feel stupid for having hoped.

And that is the part that is really getting old. The hope. Every few days they do something, a young pitcher looks good, a kid splashes one into the Cove, and you let yourself think maybe, maybe this is the night it is different. Then the ninth inning comes and the bullpen door swings open and it is the same horror movie with the same ending. It is exhausting. It is embarrassing. It is a joke of a year, and I am not going to dress it up as anything else. Losing to the worst team in baseball because your closer cannot get an out and your manager cannot manage and your front office never bothered to build a bullpen is not a rough patch. It is a season-long indictment of everyone in charge.

I will be back here tomorrow, and probably the day after, writing some version of this same column, because nothing about how this team is run tells me it is going to change. But I am not going to keep pretending it is anything other than what it is. This is a sickening, horrifying, deeply disappointing year, and the people responsible have names. Tony Vitello cannot manage this bullpen. Buster Posey never gave him a bullpen worth managing. And the Giants keep losing games they already won. Same old story. It is getting old. And somebody at 24 Willie Mays Plaza needs to be held to account for it, because the fans sitting through this deserve a whole lot better than what they are getting.

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