Red Sox 3, Giants 2: Tony Vitello Gave Away Another Ninth Inning at Fenway, and I Am Done Hearing That It Is His First Year

Two nothing into the ninth at Fenway. Three outs to get. He left one man in too long, sent a spent kid back out, ran a left hander into a wall of right handed bats, and then loaded the bases behind a pitcher who couldn't throw a strike. Same movie. Millionth time.

Two nothing. Three outs. That's all this baseball team had to get, in a ballpark where we had already done every hard thing there was to do, and I sat there at almost midnight watching Tony Vitello walk out to that mound and I said it out loud to an empty room. Don't touch it. Please. For one night in this entire miserable summer, don't touch it.

He touched it. He always touches it. Red Sox three, Giants two. Walkoff. Bases loaded, ground ball, catcher off the plate, crew chief review, ballgame over, everybody go home.

I'm not going to be measured about this one. I've been measured about it since April and it has gotten me absolutely nowhere.

Start with what got thrown in the garbage, because that's the part that actually hurts. Blade Tidwell went five and two thirds innings at Fenway Park and gave up three hits and nothing else. Seven strikeouts. Zero runs. A young pitcher on a lost team walked into the oldest, loudest, most hitter friendly bandbox in the American League and put up zeros for two hours. Willy Adames hit a solo home run off Patrick Sandoval with two out in the first. Andrew Knizner led off the third and hit another one. Two nothing, and honestly, on a night when your starter is dealing like that, two runs is enough. It has to be enough.

Vitello came and got Tidwell with two outs in the sixth. Fine. I'll even give him that one. The kid is young, the pitch count was climbing, that's a defensible baseball decision. Write it down and circle it, because it's the last defensible baseball decision anybody in that dugout made all night.

Now the eighth, and this is where my blood pressure starts going. Carson Seymour had gotten the last out of the sixth and worked a clean seventh. Then Vitello sent him back out for the eighth. Gasper doubled. Sogard walked. Two on, nobody out, tying run standing at the plate, and only THEN does the manager decide he has seen enough.

That's the whole problem with this guy in one sentence. He never gets a reliever out one batter early. He gets him out one batter late, every single time, and then hands the mess to the next man like it's a gift he's proud of.

Dylan Smith got the gift. Rafaela singled to left and loaded the bases with nobody out, and then that kid did something genuinely heroic. He struck out Wilyer Abreu. He struck out Willson Contreras looking. He got Rutschman to fly out to center. Bases loaded, nobody out, at Fenway, in a two run game, and he walked off that mound having given up nothing at all. That's a big league inning. That's the kind of inning you build a bullpen around.

So what does Tony Vitello do with the kid who just did that? He sends him back out for the ninth.

Sit with that for a second. Your rookie right hander just threw the highest leverage inning of his life, escaped a bases loaded nobody out fire at Fenway Park on adrenaline and fumes, and your response is to run him straight back out there to close a two run game. Not because it's smart. Not because the matchups say so. Not because anybody in that bullpen was unavailable. Because it's easier than having a plan.

Smith walked Durbin to lead off the ninth, because of course he did, because he had nothing left, because he had already spent every bullet he owned thirteen pitches earlier. Any human being with eyes could see it. And now, NOW, Vitello comes out to get him. After the walk. Always after. Never before. Never once all season has that man made a pitching change before the damage instead of after it.

Then he brought in Sam Hentges. A left hander. At Fenway Park. With that wall sitting out there in left field like an open invitation to every right handed hitter in the building. Into a spot with a runner already on and nobody out and a two run lead that was suddenly made of glass.

Hentges hit the first man he faced. Two on, nobody out. Monasterio grounded into a fielder's choice, one out, runners at the corners, and for about ninety seconds I let myself believe again, which was stupid of me, because I've been punished for believing all summer.

Eli White came off the bench and dropped a single into center field and it's two to one. Then Nick Sogard, on a full count, hammered one off the Green Monster and it's two to two and Fenway is shaking and I'm standing in my own living room at midnight yelling at a television like a lunatic. Not at Sogard. Not at Hentges. At the man in the dugout with his arms folded who put all of it in motion.

And then the intentional walk. Tie game, winning run already ninety feet away, and they put Ceddanne Rafaela on to load the bases and get the force at every base. I understand the textbook. I've read the textbook. I've watched Bruce Bochy do it and win a World Series doing it. But the textbook assumes you have a pitcher on the mound who can locate a baseball, and Sam Hentges had just plunked a guy and given up a wall scraping double to a right handed hitter and couldn't have found the strike zone with a search party and a flashlight. Loading the bases behind a man who can't throw strikes isn't strategy. That's a manager praying.

Abreu hit the ground ball. Bryce Eldridge dove and made a spectacular play and got up and threw home and Knizner came off the plate by about an inch and the run scored and the review upheld it and that was the ballgame. The twenty one year old made the only correct decision anybody in a Giants uniform made in that inning, and it still wasn't enough, because the six decisions before it were all wrong.

Fifty two and seventy seven. Twenty five games under .500. Twenty three and forty four on the road.

Now let me talk about the thing that has actually been eating me alive for weeks, which isn't the loss. It's the excuse.

"It is his first year."

I hear it every time. I hear it from callers on the radio. I hear it from beat guys who should be asking harder questions. I hear it from friends of mine who know baseball and know better. Give him time. He's learning. It's a rebuild. He has nothing to work with. Be patient. Be fair.

No. Absolutely not. I'm done with that, and it isn't close.

Being new doesn't explain leaving Seymour in for two extra batters. Being new doesn't explain sending a kid back out for a second inning after he just threw the most stressful thirteen pitches of his professional life. Being new doesn't explain running a left hander into that specific spot in that specific ballpark against that specific pocket of the order. Those aren't advanced concepts. That isn't some doctorate level bullpen calculus you pick up in year four. Every single person watching that game on television saw all three of them coming before they happened. I did. You did. My old man, who's seventy eight years old and has been watching this team since Candlestick had wind that could knock a hot dog out of your hand, called me in the eighth inning and told me exactly how this was going to end, and he was right down to the reliever.

If the fans in the living room can see it and the man being paid to manage the San Francisco Giants can't, that isn't inexperience. That's just not being good at the job.

And I want to be honest about the other thing, because it's the part that really gets under my skin. First year managers are supposed to get better as the year goes. That's the entire premise of the pass everybody keeps handing him. He hasn't gotten better. This is August. This is game one hundred and twenty nine. The bullpen decisions are exactly as bad as they were in May, and if anything he has gotten more stubborn about them, not less.

And don't get me started on the lineups, because that has been just as bad and almost nobody wants to talk about it. Andrew Knizner went three for four tonight with a home run. He hit ninth. Dead last. Meanwhile Rafael Devers hit second and went nought for four. Victor Bericoto led off and went nought for four. Christian Koss and Drew Gilbert, hitting seventh and eighth, went a combined nought for eight with four strikeouts between them. That's a third of the lineup contributing literally nothing, and the one guy who was actually squaring baseballs up all night got the fewest possible trips to the plate because he was buried at the bottom of the card.

This isn't new. This is the exact same thing I wrote about when he hit Bryce Eldridge leadoff, and the same thing I wrote about when he sat Eldridge against the Rangers and Eldridge came off the bench and tied the game anyway before the ninth inning threw that one away too. There's no pattern to any of it. There's no philosophy underneath it. There's a man with a lineup card and a pen and apparently no firm idea which of his own players are good.

Eight hits tonight. Two runs. Nothing after the third inning. Six straight innings of a professional offense doing absolutely nothing against a pitching staff we had already gotten to twice. I'm not letting the hitters off the hook and I never do. But you know what covers up a quiet offense? A manager who protects a two run lead. Get nine outs. That's the whole job on a night like this one. He couldn't do it. He hasn't been able to do it all year.

And here's the run of it, in case anybody has lost count, because I haven't. Basabe ties it in San Diego and the ninth inning throws it away. The Rangers walk us off three days later. We lead the Rockies in the sixth and the staff sets fire to the whole afternoon. Colorado back in July, same sickening story. Seattle, when we gave back a three nothing lead and I sat down and wrote that I was sick of writing this column. And now Fenway.

That isn't variance. That isn't bad luck. That isn't a small sample. Six or seven different relievers have been the guy who gave it up this summer, which means the common factor isn't any one of those relievers. The common factor is the person deciding which one of them is standing on that mound and exactly when.

I didn't want this hire. I said so the day it happened, and I said it again when he told us himself that he wasn't ready, in his own words, out of his own mouth, before he ever managed a game. And then in the middle of this month he stood at a podium and called what he had just watched a junior high performance, and Buster Posey turned around and confirmed he's back next season anyway.

Buster. I love you. I'll love you until the day I die for 2010 and 2012 and 2014, for what you did in that uniform and what you meant to this city and what you meant to my family. But this was a mistake. This hire was a mistake. And staying loyal to a bad decision isn't loyalty, it's stubbornness, and the longer you sit on it the more it's going to cost this franchise. You've a twenty one year old first baseman who's going to be a star in this league, and right now you're about to hand him a second full season of learning big league baseball from a man who can't run a bullpen. That's how you waste a young player. That's precisely how you do it.

Tony Vitello won a lot of games in Knoxville. Good for him. Genuinely, good for him, that's a hard job and he was excellent at it. This is a different job. This is a job where the game speeds up on you in the eighth inning and you have to know, cold, before anything happens, which arm goes where and when it comes out and who's warming behind it. He doesn't know. He hasn't known since April. And after a hundred and twenty nine games there's no version of "first year" that covers it any more.

Thirty three games left. I'll watch every one of them, because that's what we do, because that's what being a Giants fan is. The season is in the hub, the roster is on the depth chart page, and everything else lives on the Giants hub.

But I'm not clapping. And I'm not giving him a pass. And the next person who tells me it's his first year is getting this entire column read to them out loud, slowly, from the top.

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