They Ran Ron Wotus at the Lineup Card. The Game Hadn't Started Yet.

Doubleheader Saturday at Oracle, Game 1, and before anybody threw a pitch Alan Porter tossed the senior advisor who walked the card out to home plate. I had to rewind it. I thought I'd misread the graphic.

Every season has a moment where you tell yourself okay, that's the strangest thing that'll happen to this team. And every time, this club leans in and says hold on a second.

Saturday, doubleheader against Arizona, Game 1. The cards go out to home plate the way they've gone out to home plate since before any of us were born. Ron Wotus walks them out. Ron Wotus, who's been in this organization roughly as long as I've been alive, who coached third base here, who's run drills in Scottsdale for two decades, who is now a senior advisor and mostly a guy in a polo with a fungo. He and Alan Porter get into it at the plate. And Porter runs him.

Before the first pitch.

I laughed. I want to be honest about that, because I've spent the whole week furious at this team and Saturday afternoon I stood in my kitchen and laughed out loud. There's a point where a season stops being infuriating and turns flat out bizarre, and we crossed it somewhere between the lineup exchange and the anthem. Sixty years of my family watching this franchise and nobody in it has seen a guy get thrown out for handing over a piece of paper.

You know exactly why it happened, though. This wasn't about Saturday at all. Friday night was still sitting in everybody's chest.

Ten to six, and the whole thing turned on a five run third that shouldn't have been a five run third. Blade Tidwell had Nootbaar struck out, 1 and 2, fastball, done, walk off the mound. Porter called it a ball. Nootbaar doubled two pitches later. Then Arenado chops one down the third base line and the ball lands in foul territory in front of a park full of people who all saw the same thing, and Alex MacKay calls it fair, and nobody can do a thing about it because that one doesn't get reviewed. Another double. Carroll hits a two run homer, Tawa hits a three run homer, six to two, and the inning never should have gotten past the first out.

Vitello let Porter have it from the dugout and got run for it. Then Webb got run with him, and Logan Webb had never once been thrown out of a baseball game. Eight years. Never. That's how bad that half inning felt from the bench.

So Saturday the card goes out with the senior advisor instead of the manager, and even he doesn't make it to first pitch. That's a whole clubhouse still carrying the same grudge, passing it hand to hand like a baton, and a crew that knew perfectly well what was walking toward the plate.

Vitello said afterward that you can't change the past, that he just wants to win, that you might as well be authentic about who you are. I've been hard on him all week and I'm not taking a word of it back, because he keeps getting himself ejected from games his team is losing and keeps skipping the innings that actually decide them. But I'd be lying if I pretended the fire is the only thing wrong here. Friday night those calls were genuinely bad and everybody in the building knew it in real time.

What a year, man. A six run lead handed back in the ninth on Wednesday. The manager gone in the third on Friday with our best pitcher walking out behind him. Wotus ejected at the lineup exchange on Saturday. Nobody scripts that. Nobody would.

My buddy texted me a screenshot of the ejection with no words in it, just three question marks, and that's the most accurate piece of Giants coverage anybody's produced this month.

Underneath the laughing, though, something meaner is sitting there. This is what it looks like when a season has gotten completely away from a team. The winning stopped a while ago and now the arguing is the product. We're not talking about Eldridge, or the rotation, or what any of this means next April. We're talking about who got tossed and when and by which umpire, and there are still weeks of this left on the schedule.

I'll watch the second game. Obviously I'll watch the second game.

Just tell me who's allowed to carry the card out.

More coverage: Giants · MLB · Bay Area Sports Blog home