Tony Vitello Has No Idea What He Is Doing With This Lineup, and Bryce Eldridge Batting Leadoff Is the Proof

Sixty different batting orders in seventy-seven games. Eight different leadoff hitters. And now he has stuck a twenty-one-year-old middle-of-the-order bat in the one hole because he "flirted with the idea." This man is clueless, and it is a real, measurable reason this team has never once found a groove all season.

Bryce Eldridge is hitting leadoff. Read that again.

The lineup card in San Diego has Bryce Eldridge batting first. Bryce Eldridge. Twenty-one years old, six-foot-seven, the biggest power bat this organization has produced since Posey, a kid whose entire professional value is that he drives baseballs into the seats and drives in runs. Eleven home runs. A .350 on-base percentage. A .445 slug. A 122 wRC+. That is a three-hole hitter or a four-hole hitter for the next decade, and Tony Vitello has him leading off in August of a season that ended in June.

And do not tell me this came out of nowhere, because Vitello told everybody it was coming back in June. He went on the radio and said, and I quote, "He's too good. He's ready to take on any responsibility you want to give him. We even flirted with talking about the one-spot." Flirted. That is the word he used. That is the actual thought process. Not a plan, not a philosophy, not an analysis — a flirtation. A guy sitting in an office deciding that the best way to develop a young power hitter is to move him around until something happens.

Sixty lineups. Seventy-seven games.

Here is the number that should end the conversation about whether this is a real problem or just fans grumbling: through seventy-seven games, Tony Vitello had written out sixty different batting orders. Sixty. In seventy-seven games. He has used eight different leadoff hitters. Four different players have taken at least forty plate appearances out of the top spot, which along with Seattle is the most in the entire sport.

You know what good teams do? They write the same nine names in the same nine spots and let the guys go be baseball players. The Dodgers know who hits first. The Brewers know who hits first. Every team that has been to the World Series in the last ten years has known who hits first. The Giants have had eight guys do it and one of them is now a twenty-one-year-old first baseman who has never led off in his life.

And people wonder why this offense never gets going. Hitting is timing, rhythm and repetition. It is knowing when you are due up, who is on base in front of you, what the pitcher just showed the guy ahead of you. When you scramble that every single afternoon, you get exactly what we have watched all summer: sixteen runs on a Wednesday, two hits on a Friday, absolutely nothing you can build on.

He benches the hot hitters. On purpose.

The lineup shuffling would be annoying enough if it were only about the order. It is not. Vitello has repeatedly sat down the guys who are actually swinging it well. There was the night he benched both Eldridge and Jung Hoo Lee — the two hottest hitters on the roster at that moment, both of whom had just gone off against Colorado over the weekend — and started Buddy Kennedy at DH instead because a lefty was starting. Left-handed hitters had actually been doing fine against that pitcher. Eldridge has had good at-bats against lefties all year. None of that mattered.

And here is the punchline: when Eldridge and Lee finally came into that game against a right-handed reliever, they both drove in runs. Immediately. The matchup logic that got them benched was wrong in the analysis and then wrong in the result, in the same evening, in front of everybody.

There is no explaining that away. Anytime Eldridge is out of the lineup the fanbase riots on social media, and Vitello acts like the reaction is the unreasonable part. It is not unreasonable. We are watching a team that is seventeen games under .500 sit its best young hitter for Buddy Kennedy.

And the front office has already thrown him under the bus

The part of this that tells you everything about where it is headed: general manager Zack Minasian made a point of saying publicly that Vitello is the one making the lineup. That is not a defense. That is a man calmly stepping out of the blast radius. When your own GM volunteers to reporters that the lineup card is entirely the manager's doing, the organization has already decided whose problem this is.

Which brings me back to the thing I wrote when they hired him and got yelled at for writing: this was a bad hire. Taking a college coach out of Tennessee and handing him a major league roster with Devers and Adames and Arraez and a generational first-base prospect on it was a gamble that had no upside and a very obvious downside, and we are living in the downside. He was not ready. He is still not ready. He has spent a full season proving it in the most visible way a manager possibly can, which is on the lineup card, every single day, where all of us can see it.

This is not the only reason the season is gone. It is a real one.

Let me be honest about the rest of it, because I do not want to be the guy who blames the manager for everything. The bullpen has been an open wound since April. The rotation has had three different starters fail to get out of the fourth inning in the last two weeks. The front office built a roster with obvious holes and then acted surprised when the holes showed up. Vitello did not do any of that.

But a manager's actual job — the small list of things he genuinely controls — is the lineup, the bullpen usage and the clubhouse. He has been bad at the first one in a way that is statistically measurable and has been bad at it for a hundred and eleven games. Sixty lineups in seventy-seven games is not creativity. It is not "playing the matchups." It is a man who does not know what his best nine are, in August, and is still trying to find out by guessing.

Buster Posey has a trade deadline to get through on Monday. After that, somebody in that building needs to take a very hard look at whether this experiment gets a second year, because I have watched every game of this thing and I do not see a manager who is learning. I see a guy shuffling a deck and hoping.

Bryce Eldridge is hitting leadoff. In two weeks he will be hitting sixth. That is the whole season in one sentence. Go Giants — I mean it, even now, even like this.

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