Tony Vitello Got Run in the First Inning on a Check Swing, and I Am Not Even Mad

Two outs, top of the first, Logan Webb on the mound, and the manager of a 54-78 baseball team is already yelling at first base and heading for the clubhouse. I've spent four months wanting him to act like he cared. Careful what you ask for.

I had the Wednesday getaway game on my second monitor with the sound down, the way you watch a 54-78 team in the last week of August, and I only looked up because somebody in my group chat sent four exclamation points and nothing else.

Top of the first. Two outs. Runners on first and second. Webb throws Eugenio Suarez an 0-1 sweeper and Suarez goes after it, and he goes after it the way you go after a pitch you've already decided to hit, and Ben May at first base says no, he held up. Ryan Blakney behind the plate takes about one second of Tony Vitello screaming get it right from the top step and throws him out of the ballpark.

First inning. Two outs. Fifty four and seventy eight.

So Vitello came out and gave the crew a little more of it, then walked off and sat in the clubhouse for the last eight and a half innings of a game nobody in America needed. Fourth time he's been run this year. First one since Kansas City in July, the one where the second base umpire invented a shove and the whole thing came apart two pitches later.

My problem is that I've written four columns since May about this man being too passive, too quiet, too willing to say the right thing after another one got away. I wrote in August that I was done hearing that it's his first year. I wrote that he has no idea what he's doing with this lineup. I've been asking for a pulse since roughly the Fourth of July.

That was a pulse. Loudest he's been all season and it took him eleven pitches.

I loved it, and I want to be honest that I loved it, because the alternative is another one of those pressers where he talks about the guys competing and we all pretend that's a plan. A manager twenty four games under .500 has two things left he can actually do in a baseball game. He can protect his young pitcher and he can protect his hitters. Webb was standing out there with two on and two out and a bad call had just handed Cincinnati a fourth out, and Vitello decided the crew was hearing about it right then instead of politely in the sixth.

Now the other half, because I'm not stupid about this.

You don't hand your team to the bench coach for eight innings in August over a two out check swing. Not in this specific season. This roster is being held together with tape. Carson Whisenhunt's elbow is gone and he's getting cut on. Adrian Houser grabbed his arm the very next night. Adames is down with the elbow, Bericoto with the knee, Brubaker with the ribs, and Bryce Eldridge is away from the team on the bereavement list carrying something a lot heavier than baseball. Half the names in that dugout were in Sacramento three weeks ago. Those guys need somebody standing there.

Was the call wrong? Sure looked wrong to me, and it looked wrong at full speed with the sound off, which is usually the tell. Suarez broke his wrists. First base umpires have been giving hitters that one since I was a kid freezing at the Stick in a windbreaker in July, and they'll be giving it to hitters long after I'm gone, and this was the top of the first inning of a getaway day game between a fourth place club and a Reds team playing out its own string.

What I keep landing on is that this is what a rookie manager looks like at game 132. In February he was the guy from Tennessee who won everything in the SEC and talked about culture. In August he's a man who has watched two starters grab their elbows in two days, can't get a check swing call in his own ballpark, and something in him just went. I've been that guy in a work meeting. Not proud of it. It's never really about the thing that set it off.

Buster already said he's back next year, so none of this is a job question, and I've made my peace with that even though I didn't like the hire and said so the week it happened. He's the manager. Fine. Then be this guy. Be the guy who yells at Ben May in the first inning, and then be the guy who's still yelling next April when it costs somebody something, because a temper you only find in the last three weeks of a lost season isn't a temper. It's a mood.

The Giants were still playing while I wrote this, up two on the Reds, Webb running his own game from the mound with his manager watching a clubhouse television like the rest of us.

Which might be the most 2026 thing that's happened all year. The manager got thrown out of the first inning and the team looked completely fine without him, and I honestly don't know which half of that sentence I'm supposed to be upset about.

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