How losing has affected Giants and manager Bruce Bochy.
Amid some clubhouse discontent, manager remains eager to return
Nobody takes losing harder than the manager, and Bruce Bochy has had a lot of long nights this season. The Giants are winding down their worst season in 32 years, and Bochy wears it daily.
Constantly, he mulls over ways to get more production from the lineup, more consistency from the bullpen, more durability from the rotation and more sharpness from the defense.
Bochy also has to manage a clubhouse filled with diverse personalities, which is tougher when a team loses. Indeed, The Chronicle has learned there is some frustration in the room over how Bochy interacts with the players.
The season weighs on the 62-yearold, as any 57-91 team would weigh on a manager, especially one who has tasted success this decade to the tune of three World Series titles and reached the postseason as recently as last year.
Bochy has been trying to exercise patience and believe in a brighter future. He hasn’t let heart-related issues distract from his daily duties and vows to return in 2018 and do what he can to return the Giants to prominence.
“Yeah, that’s my plan,” said Bochy, whose contract runs through 2019. “This would be the last way I would ever want to go out. Everybody wants to go out on top. To go out at the bottom, that would be the worst way anybody would want to go out. Sometimes you don’t have that choice.”
“It’s been a tough season ... which means tension runs higher. Patience wears thinner. Is there more tension? You know what? I hope so. I hope it’s healthy tension, that is.” Bruce Bochy, Giants manager
In Bochy’s world, he couldn’t imagine doing anything but managing the Giants, their struggles and southernmost place in the standings notwithstanding.
“It’s what I love to do,” he said. “Anybody doing what he loves to do is in a fortunate situation. People think about what they would do when they retire, what they would enjoy. If I retire, I would want to manage. “This is my passion, my love.” General manager Bobby Evans said he sees Bochy as the right man to guide the Giants back to contention.
“Of course, we’re looking forward to having Boch back next year,” Evans said. “It’s a team effort here, a team effort to get things right. He leads the staff, leads the clubhouse. We’ve got to do everything we can to get back where we should be, and we need to get better in lot of areas.
“We feel fortunate to have the stabilizing presence of Bruce Bochy running our clubhouse and running the game. That gives us a lot of confidence before we get to the rest of it. That’s a big factor for us.”
Players consistently have praised Bochy’s managerial style over the years. But in seeking comments from several for this story, The Chronicle discovered a reluctance by some to offer a fullthroated endorsement of the manager’s interactions with players.
Two Giants players, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the topic, offered specifics, saying Bochy has turned more negative over the past two seasons, particularly in the dugout.
“It seems like nothing we do is good enough,” one player said.
The other player, confirming his teammate’s assessment, said, “There’s just been a different vibe.”
Both were asked if they were just seeing a natural frustration with losing, but each said they sensed a change in Bochy during the first half of 2016, when the Giants were building the best record in the majors.
That feeling is hardly unanimous. Bochy has support within the clubhouse, and nobody can question the Giants’ level of effort on the field even as the end of the nightmare season draws near. That reflects on the manager.
Bochy was taken aback when hearing sentiments of some of his players.
“It’s been a tough season,” he said, “not just a tough season, but last year, a tough second half, which means tension runs higher. Patience wears thinner. Is there more tension? You know what? I hope so. I hope it’s healthy tension, that is.
“I want there to be a sense of urgency to turn this around. I want us to be feeling it because this is not what we want, not what our fans want, not what our investors bargained for.
“With that said, we work very hard to create a culture of candor here. I would hope that our players would feel comfortable talking to me directly. My door is always open. I care about how these guys are doing. I want them to play for something bigger. I want them to care about each other and how our fans are doing.”
Brian Sabean, executive vice president of baseball operations, who hired Bochy in October 2006, was told some players reacted coolly to questions on the manager.
“Well, that’s their own business,” Sabean said. “I think it’s the product of a really bad season. When you’re this bad, we’re all this bad. Including the guys that play the game. So unless you’re looking in the mirror themselves, it’s kind of shortsighted. Pass the buck.
“Boch comes from a military background, and he doesn’t want to pass the buck or assign blame to anyone else. But it’s frustrating. I’ll put it like this: When you’re winning, you can’t wait to play the next game. Doesn’t matter who you’re playing, or where, you can’t wait.
“When you’re losing, or you lose like us, you want the friggin’ season to be over. But somehow, because you’re immersed in such a quagmire, it’s like they’re adding games (to the schedule). So of course, it’s frustrating.”
Bochy could step away today and go to the Hall of Fame. His three World Series championships, 1,846 wins and impact on more than one generation of players, coaches, front offices and fans put him in a top tier of managers. But he wants more. Former Giants third-base coach Tim Flannery, Bochy’s longtime confidant, said his old boss has an unwavering drive to compete and likens him to Bobby Cox, a Hall of Fame manager who kept his “A” game until retiring at 69.
“We’re coming back from the first World Series, the trophy’s in first class,” said Flannery, recalling 2010. “He pulls me aside in the shadows and said some very sincere and emotional things to me. He says, ‘This is all I ever needed,’ pointing to the trophy.
“Now I know he’s full of s—. He wants four of them, five of them. That’s the guy you want to manage. He’s not looking to get out of there.”
Bochy’s heart issues surfaced each of the past three seasons, including in April when he had an ablation procedure to repair an abnormal heart rhythm. He missed two games.
He missed one game last year with a heart arrhythmia that led to a change in medication, no procedure. In February 2015, he had an emergency procedure to insert two stents into a blocked artery.
“In all my years, I think I’ve missed three games. There are guys who missed more than that going to graduations.” Bochy said. “I think that shows I’m fine. I’m dealing with something that’s not uncommon.”
Terry Francona, Dusty Baker, Jim Harbaugh and Gregg Popovich are among other managers/head coaches with heart-related issues in recent years, none suggesting retirement is any closer as a result.
Flannery, who retired after the 2014 season to pursue his music career, said Bochy has a keen ability to compartmentalize, which helps handle the day-to-day grind, put tough losses behind him and limit the stress.
Indeed, to Bochy’s credit, he did not appear frazzled after two ugly losses in Chicago over the weekend in which the Giants were outscored 21-2. Then again, the Giants have exhibited ineptness all season. What good is stressing at this point?
“His daily routine of dealing with all that comes with it never changed,” Flannery said. “He’s always the same off the field. After the game, he’ll vent, but he can turn the page and walk home after the game, get up and come back the next day and do it again. It’s how he’s built.
“He’s made up differently, and he can probably handle it better than I could. He wants to do this. This is what he wants to do forever. That wasn’t me.”
Bochy has drawn from previous managing downers to deal with this season’s woes. He lost 96 and 98 games in consecutive years in San Diego, and things weren’t a whole lot better his first two years in San Francisco.
His first couple of years as a minorleague manager provided the biggest lesson.
“My first year in rookie ball, we won the Northwest League championship. You think, well, this isn’t that hard,” Bochy said. “The next year, we were just awful in A-ball. I probably learned more things that season than any other.
“One is developing the patience. Not that you sit back and accept it, because we’ve had more meetings internally this year with ownership, staff, even the players than in winning seasons. They’re not all positive meetings, trust me. It’s about trying to shake things up.
“But you realize in this game, every year is different.”
This year was more different than most. Nobody could have anticipated the abundance of events that led to the demise.
Madison Bumgarner fell off a dirt bike. Johnny Cueto and Mark Melancon missed ample time with injuries — and weren’t particularly good when active. The bullpen was a mess. Most every hitter not named Buster Posey had a subpar year. Most top prospects were hurt. Left field, in Bochy’s words, was “a black hole.”
Most burdensome were the losses that should have been wins and the constant failures to compete offensively. The Giants are last in the majors in home runs and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) and second-to last in runs scored.
Their failure to score four runs in games has been telling: They’re 44-21 when scoring at least four and 13-70 when scoring fewer.
“Not to understate it, it’s been a difficult year for everybody,” Bochy said. “I don’t think anybody saw it happening. It shows how difficult it is to keep winning. It hasn’t been easy on anybody. The fans, ownership, front office, staff, players.
“What I learned, probably as much as any year I’ve been here, is how great our fans are. They’re constantly telling me, ‘Hey, we’re hanging in there with you.’ It’s really been amazing, and you’re disappointed to not play better ball for them.”
Winning is what continues to drive Bochy. Or at least the anticipation of winning. This is his 11th season in San Francisco — only John McGraw (31 years) lasted longer as a Giants manager — and already he’s foreseeing far better days in Season 12.
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think we had a chance to win next year,” Bochy said. “Sure, we have a lot to do to fix some things, but I look at this year as more of an aberration. What could go wrong, went wrong.
“It’s not like we have to do a lot. We have some tweaking to do, don’t get me wrong, but with the core group that has accomplished some amazing things, we’re not far despite how awful this season’s been.
“I think all of us should look back at what we could’ve done better. Myself, each player, staff, front office. We all have a finger in this on what we could learn from to be better in 2018.” Chronicle staff writers Ron Kroichick and
Bruce Jenkins contributed to this report.