Tony Vitello meets with ‘junior college’ Giants after they drop season series to Rockies

SAN FRANCISCO — After every San Francisco Giants home game, while reporters file into the interview room, a media relations staffer places a sheet of paper on the dais for manager Tony Vitello. Sure enough, minutes after a 13-7 loss to the Colorado Rockies on Sunday, the box score waited for him.

And waited. By the time he picked it up, it was no longer warm from the copier.

Even the most experienced managers sometimes grapple with whether to hold a full-squad meeting after a difficult loss. The season is so long, and the losses will pile up even for the strongest of contenders. So, there’s power in picking your spots. Part of developing an effective voice as a major-league skipper is learning to wield it judiciously. If the manager fails to maintain perspective through the down times, how can anyone else?

Then there are games when the measured approach is not an option — and Sunday’s homestand finale only met the technical definition of a game because it counted in the standings. As a competitive event, it barely qualified. The Giants issued 10 walks. Eight of those base runners scored. JT Brubaker hit a batter with the bases loaded. The Rockies scored a run on a wild pitch that came to rest within a gimme putt of home plate. The Giants didn’t merely lose their fifth consecutive series. They lost a series to the Rockies, their heretofore helpless NL West brethren who, bless them, sometimes forget how to play baseball. They have been especially absent-minded during visits to San Francisco in recent years.

The season series results are in: Rockies 7, Giants 6. The Giants hadn’t dropped a season series to the Rockies in a full year since 2018, which was the season that got then-general manager Bobby Evans fired. Entering the weekend, the Giants had won 12 of their last 13 home series against Colorado.

This year, the Giants have become the team that sometimes looks like it has forgotten how to play baseball.

So, the box score waited. The time had come for Vitello to address the team.

“It had more the feel of a lower level, a junior-college game as opposed to a big-league game, with how some of the things transpired,” Vitello said. “And I was a JUCO guy, so I’m not disrespecting junior college.”

Even more pressing for Vitello? That Sunday’s game disrespected Giants fans.

“I mean, people paid money to sit through that,” Vitello said. “And other people … Wash (infield coach Ron Washington) has got to sit through that. And so, might as well sit through a meeting. I don’t know that anything genius was said, and there’s no point in putting on a tirade.

“It’s about today, and it’s not about any one person or any one loss, but it’s more about a theme … of clean baseball.”

The Giants received a stirring game from Rafael Devers, who hit the second splash home run of his career and also created a first-inning run after he hustled a double out of a bloop hit. The hustle out of the box was an encouraging moment for Devers, who on multiple occasions has made the mistake of standing in the box and not realizing that the wind often blows pop-ups back into fair territory at Oracle Park.

It was the kind of game the Giants envisioned last year, when they traded for Devers and took on his massive contract from the Boston Red Sox. Devers was intended to be the finishing piece of a lineup with the depth, experience and potency to carry the team to the postseason. Except Devers is now surrounded by kids and organizational depth pieces. Injuries and the trade deadline have dismantled what was supposed to be a group with remarkable day-to-day continuity.

Even if the lineup were fully assembled and productive, would it matter? It would’ve been impossible to overcome a pitching staff that continues to be so poor at controlling the strike zone. In a year filled with so many unsightly moments, the sixth inning might have been the ugliest yet.

Blade Tidwell appeared to be righting himself after a four-run second inning in which he walked two batters before giving up a home run to light-hitting infielder Adael Amador, and the Giants rallied to take a two-run lead after three innings. But Tidwell was dealing with back soreness, and Vitello said the coaching staff had monitored his drop in velocity. The Giants didn’t go any further with Tidwell after he issued a pair of one-out walks in the fifth.

Left-hander Sam Hentges lost the Giants’ two-run lead in the fifth, when the two runners he inherited from Tidwell scored on a double and a sacrifice fly. The Giants’ bullpen was just getting started. Hentges walked two of the four batters he faced to start the sixth. Then Brubaker entered the game and threw the wild pitch that bounded away by a few feet and escaped the attention of rookie catcher Drew Cavanaugh. Then Brubaker issued two walks and hit a batter. Left-hander Reiver Sanmartin replaced him on the mound and gave up a two-run single to Mickey Moniak.

“(Letdowns) are inevitable,” Vitello said. “Some of the things that pop up in a game go unnoticed when you win, or you get out of the jam, or something like that. But the one thing that’s unavoidable is usually the team that plays catch is the better team that day, and that includes on defense (by) making the average play. And on the mound, you’re playing catch with the catcher.”

On the wild pitch, Vitello called Zac Veen’s decision to sprint home from third base “a Christmas present and we didn’t unwrap it.”

“When you don’t play catch, then … we could stop the presser with that,” Vitello added. “You know, walk in the door and say that and be done.”

In the clubhouse, Vitello had more that needed to be said. Tidwell summed up the message as “have conviction in everything you do.”

“I think he did a good job,” said Tidwell, who played for Vitello at the University of Tennessee. “Everybody was locked in, and the guys were nodding their heads and stuff. So, I think everybody was on board with what he was saying.”

This will continue to be Vitello’s clubhouse. In a story published last week, Giants president Buster Posey told The Athletic’s Brittany Ghiroli that he remained confident in his unorthodox managerial choice. Vitello has two more years on a contract that will pay him $3.5 million per season. There’s vesting option language on a fourth year.

“I look at the job that Tony and his staff are doing, I don’t have any reason not to believe that what they’re doing isn’t gonna get us to a place where we’re playing more consistent, winning baseball,” Posey said.

The Giants are nowhere near meeting those standards now, and given where the roster is, it’s probably more instructive to dissect how they got to this point than to wonder how this pieced-together group will finish over the final six weeks.

Vitello didn’t need to refer to the sheet of paper in front of him as he met with reporters after Sunday’s loss. This wasn’t a game worth revisiting. His predecessor, Bob Melvin, had a ritual after every postgame session. Win or loss, proud or embarrassed, he’d crumple the sheet of paper into a ball and toss it in the wastebasket on his way out of the room.

The unspoken message: This game, for whatever progress or regress it represented, was over. It’s on to the next one.