Landen Roupp Showed Up Tony Vitello on the Mound, and That One Moment Explains This Entire Giants Season

A pitcher with a 4.22 ERA glared at his manager, shook his head and waved him back toward the dugout in front of everybody. Nobody in that ballpark was surprised, and that's the problem.

Eight to nothing. At home. To Detroit. On a Saturday afternoon at the most beautiful ballpark in America, in front of people who paid actual money, and the only thing anybody is going to remember from it's a pitcher with a 4.22 ERA standing on the mound telling his manager to go away.

If you missed it: Landen Roupp walks three men in a row in the sixth. Three. In a row. Tony Vitello comes out to get him, which isn't a controversial decision, it's the only decision, and Roupp gives him a look. Shakes his head. Starts scraping the dirt off his cleats like a man being asked to leave a bar. Then puts his hands up at his chest and waves his own manager back toward the dugout. Stay there. I've got it.

He didn't have it. He had walked three straight guys.

And here's where this fan base is supposed to get mad at the pitcher, and honestly I'm not. I'd rather have a guy who hates coming out of the game than another polite arm handing over the ball with a shrug. "As a competitor I kinda wanna try to clean up my own mess," is what Roupp said afterward, and fine, good, be a competitor. Logan Webb has been a competitor here for years and has somehow managed it without ever waving a manager off in public, but fine.

The part that actually matters is what happened next, which is nothing. Vitello got to a microphone and said Roupp is the "exact kind of guy you want to coach." That's it. That's the response. Your pitcher publicly told you to stay in the dugout in front of a sellout crowd and a television camera and your answer is a compliment.

You want to know why nobody on this team plays like it matters? That's why. There's no cost to anything. There's no line. Bruce Bochy would have handled that in about four seconds and none of us would have ever heard about it, because the players knew exactly where the line was and none of them wanted to find out what was on the other side of it. This man doesn't have a line. He has a personality and a smile and a set of quotes, and a roster that has clearly worked out that the quotes are all there is.

That's the thing that got exposed on Saturday, and it's bigger than one pitcher having a moment. Players don't do that to a manager they're playing for. They do it to a manager they've already stopped hearing. You can talk yourself into a rookie manager learning on the job right up until the day one of your own guys waves you off the mound and the rest of the dugout doesn't so much as move.

And it isn't as if he has earned the benefit of the doubt with the actual job. The lineups have been indefensible all year. He hit Bryce Eldridge leadoff, which is a thing a man does when he has confused being unpredictable with being smart. He sat Eldridge in a one-run game against Texas and then had to use him off the bench anyway to tie it, which is the single most Vitello sequence of the season, wrong on the decision, bailed out by the kid, still lost the game. Every week it's a new batting order, new positions, guys hitting in spots that make no sense for the roster or the ballpark, and no visible idea underneath any of it.

Add the ejections. Add the bullpen, which he has burned through all season with no apparent plan for who pitches when. Add a clubhouse that just watched a twenty-something starter show him up on national television and pay absolutely no price for it. That isn't a rebuild problem. That isn't Buster Posey's fault, and believe me, there's plenty on that list that is. That's a manager problem.

We said this was a mistake when it was announced. We said it again when the lineups started arriving. It has been a bad year for being right about this team and this is one more.

So here's where it lands. This season is gone, it has been gone since July, the veterans are on other teams and the only reason left to watch is to find out which young players are real, and we can't even get a clean answer to that, because they're being used by a man who changes his mind every night. Our rebuild page spells out what 2027 has to look like. Step one isn't a free agent. Step one is deciding whether the person filling out the lineup card is somebody this roster will actually run through a wall for, because Saturday was the answer to that question and the answer was no.

Eight to nothing, and the story was the manager getting waved off his own mound. The rest of the year is in the season hub, and everything else we've written about this mess is on the Giants hub.

More coverage: Bay Area Sports section · Bay Area Sports · Bay Area Sports Blog home