Free fallin'

Those bad boys sure are standing in the shadows, aren't they?

A longtime manager gets fired, and as he’s packing up his office, the new manager comes in. The new manager thinks that this might be an awkward situation, but the old manager waves off any bitterness. “Part of the job,” he says, his gruff voice betraying a lifetime of chaw use. “Got something for you,” he continues. “Little gift. Three envelopes. When your season’s in trouble — real bad trouble — you open one of these babies up, and it’ll tell you what to do.”

The new manager is touched, and thanks the old one profusely. On his way out the door, the old manager shakes his hand and genuinely wishes him good luck. “You got a good group of guys here,” he tells his younger counterpart. “Hope you do better for ‘em than I did.”

The younger manager takes over, and at first things go well, but then the team hits a rough patch. It looks like they might pull out of it, but then they just take a nosedive en masse. There’s a new goat every night, and no one’s having any fun. One day the team forgets how to pitch, the next day they forget how to field, and the whole time they have no idea how to hit. Eventually, the manager, having tried everything he can think of, opens the first envelope.

“Call up a top prospect,” it says. Well, all right. The team does have an outfielder who’s tearing up AAA, and sure, he’s having some trouble laying off bad breaking balls, but it’s better than nothing, right? So the team calls him up, and it’s an immediate success. He homers in each of his first two games, doubles in the winning run in his third, and then smashes two homers in his fourth game. But eventually someone throws him a curveball in the dirt, and he swings right through it. Then everyone is throwing him curveballs in the dirt, and he just can’t seem to learn to lay off. The team’s flirtation with adequacy goes horribly wrong, and now they’re right back where they started.

The manager, at his wit’s end, opens the second envelope. “Shake up the coaching staff,” it says. He sighs, having already heard the pressure to do exactly that. The next day, he fires his hitting coach, bench coach, and fundamentals coach. The media frames it as a message to the players, and if so, it’s a pretty effective message, because the new lineup bangs out 12 hits and 11 runs on the first day and credits the new hitting coach with all of it. “That guy’s work ethic is unreal. He’s always the first one in and the last one out,” one player tells the media.

But like all good things, this one too is ephemeral. The team reverts back to its old ways, and soon, they’re worse than ever. Knowing it’s just a band-aid but he needs at least something to get him through these hard times, the manager goes into his office and finds the final envelope, safely hidden away. His heart pounding, he opens it slowly, cautiously. This is it, he thinks, closing his eyes.

When he opens them, he reads the words that he’s waited to hear this whole time. In the fluorescent light of his office, he gazes at the last shred of hope for this season and his job. It reads: “PREPARE THREE ENVELOPES.”

After yesterday afternoon’s dispiriting loss to the Padres, the Giants have now lost 8 of their last 9, dropping them to 14-23 on the season. Yesterday, they spent 5 innings getting shut down by Matt Waldron, who came into the game having allowed 15 runs in 13.2 innings this year, and exited having allowed 16 runs in 18.2 innings this year. Their offense, as discussed Tuesday, is an embarrassment. They’re tied with the Rockies in last place in the standings, but the Giants have a worse run differential. In fact, the Giants have the worst run differential in the majors. This makes sense, because the Giants also have the worst record in the majors.

I know that sounds grim, but here’s the bright side: they’re tied with the Rockies! They have a friend at the bottom, and that friend knows all about being the worst team in baseball. Hooray! It’s great to make friends!

Aside from discovering common interests with a longtime acquaintance, though, the news for the Giants is universally bad. At some point, owners and/or players and/or fans need to see some kind of change that makes it clear that the front office isn’t okay with this level of performance.

And for this team, there aren’t a lot of options for that change. They’ve already called up their top prospect. Their coaching staff is new, and probably too early into the year to change anything there. They’re just…bad.

Does this mean that Buster Posey is up in his President of Baseball Operations suite, blaming it all on Tony Vitello? Probably not, but he’d be remiss not to consider it. The Vitello hire was a big swing from an organization that, it turns out, is very bad at swinging the bat. Could it have just been a miss? Could he be the wrong guy to lead this team? It’s definitely too early to tell, but you have to at least consider it.

This was always the potential downside of hiring Vitello. Maybe his style just wouldn’t translate from college students to professional athletes. Maybe the learning curve was going to be too much. Maybe this just wasn’t going to be the right fit for him. Maybe he needed a couple years on a coaching staff before taking the big job, just to get acclimated. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Or maybe the team would be bad no matter who was managing, and Vitello is a convenient scapegoat. There’s no way to know!

All we know is this: Tony Vitello has not turned this team around. Maybe anyone else could. Maybe no one could. Maybe there’s a way to get through to Willy Adames that he hasn’t found yet. Maybe this is who Adames was always going to be in 2026. There are so many possibilities for what could have happened, and they’ve all collapsed down to this one. Do the Giants have the right guy in the dugout? Do the Giants have the right guy in the PBO suite? Is there something wrong with this team at its core?

These questions will always be unanswerable. But part of the manager’s job is to make it seem like things will turn around, both in the clubhouse and in public. Right now, it seems like this will never turn around. The appeal of Vitello was supposed to be that he could motivate guys in different ways, and instill a new kind of attitude in his team. That’s exactly what they need right now. It’s either time to shine, or time to write some envelopes.