Giants manager addresses rumors he may step down.
Frustrated by losses, hit by health concerns, skipper keeps ‘pushing forward’
SAN FRANCISCO — Sometimes it happens a few minutes before the first pitch. Sometimes it’ll be earlier in the day, before holding a lineup card in one hand and a pen in the other. More often, it’ll be an hour or so after another of those soul-emptying, one-run losses.
Bruce Bochy will shut his office door, shut his eyes and attempt to shut out all thoughts from a churning and restless mind. He will focus on his breathing, and nothing else.
He used to think that meditation was mumbo jumbo, until an acquaintance encouraged him to give it a try some months back. Now he believes in it. After the most trying 10 weeks of
his managerial life, he believes fiercely in it.
“You know, with all that’s happened in the second half, I’ve told myself to handle it the way you would want the players to handle it,” Bochy said recently. “That’s to let it go, and keep pushing forward.”
Instead, the Giants have retreated and then retreated some more, beyond any rational expectation. It should not happen like this. A team does not enter the All-Star break with baseball’s best record and then suddenly go 25-41. They do not set a three-month pace for a 102-win season and then play at a 101-loss clip in the second half.
If the Giants merely had bobbed along with a .500 record since the break, they would own a 90-66 record and stand in a flat-footed tie with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL West.
Instead, the Dodgers are division champions for the fourth consecutive season, and the Giants are in a three-legged limp with the Mets and Cardinals for the wild card. It’ll probably take a pair of series wins on the final homestand for the Giants to get there — and optimism seems a folly when they have won precisely three series out of 21 since the break.
No losing clubhouse is a happy clubhouse. Even for a manager of Bochy’s renown and accomplishments, steep stumbles lead to grumbles. It is a loosely guarded secret that his matchup-heavy management of the bullpen has caused disenchantment, if not confrontational fury, among most of his relievers, even going back to the first half.
Yet there are deeper concerns, expressed by opposing scouts and executives from other teams and even from within the Giants clubhouse, about the physical toll this season has taken on a 61-yearold manager who had unscheduled heart surgery in February 2015 and was hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat in Miami on Aug. 8.
There are some, in and out of the Giants organization, who have wondered privately if Bochy might even step down after this season, much as third base coach Tim Flannery did after winning the World Series in 2014, even though it would mean vacating a contract through 2019 that makes him one of the game’s most highly paid managers.
Bochy hears these concerns and this is his basso profundo response: “Really?”
“No,” he continued. “There’s no question in my mind. It’s what I love to do. I don’t know what else I would do if I didn’t do this. I mean, I could have stepped down and counted my blessings like Flan did, but I’m still hungry. I want to win again. And if that goes away, then so will I.”
Bochy has no greater confidante in the Giants organization than the man who hired him, Brian Sabean. Sabean would know better than anyone if the demands of the job had begun to overwhelm Bochy.
“I don’t get any of that, zero — zero percent,” Sabean said.
“I won’t speak to his health. That’s a personal thing. But all of us have to find different ways to decompress and move on to the next day. I’ve been here since 1993 and I’ve never seen stress like this that has been so maddening on a day-to-day basis.”
It almost would be easier if the rotation had crumbled from the top down, or the lineup sustained crippling injuries such as the shattered ankle that ended Buster Posey’s season in 2011, or if the Giants simply were getting boat raced night after night.
But the Giants have the worst post-break record among NL clubs (25-41) despite a run differential of just minus-16.
The Giants seldom get blown out — they have played 55 one-run games, better than a third of their season — but they are not winning the close ones any longer. They went 20-10 in one-run games before the break. They are 8-17 in one-run games since the break.
The bullpen has borne the blame for blowing a franchise-record 30 save opportunities this season, including nine in September. And it’s true, the Giants have lost a whopping nine games that they led entering the ninth inning.
But the Giants also have gone 0-61 when trailing at the start of the ninth. There is nothing the relievers could do about that. Nor could they help the fact that the Giants offense, which ranked fourth in the NL at 4.71 runs per game before the break, is averaging an NL-worst 3.83 runs since then.
“One run, almost? That’s a huge difference,” Bochy said. “In a lot of these tough losses, I know we look at the relievers. But I think we have to look at it as a group. There’s times we could have put the game away, we didn’t do it, and when you keep it close, things can happen.”
And what about the constant flux in the bullpen? Has Bochy trusted matchups at times when he should have trusted his men?
“They’re human, these relievers,” he said. “Obviously you’d like to have set roles for these guys, but they have to be earned and you have to make adjustments.”
Sometimes Bochy’s best guy has been an odd selection — leaving in Santiago Casilla to face Arizona’s Jake Lamb — that led to some upturned eyebrows within his own clubhouse.
But Sabean does not grade his manager harshly.
“Whether it’s him or anybody else, you realize it’s beyond your control,” Sabean said. “When it’s gone as far sideways as it has, and we’re talking the entire ballclub, there’s only so much you can do. I think you realize it’s up to the players.”
The players realize what is at stake now. So does Bochy. He will close his eyes and take a deep breath before delving into these final six regular-season games against the Rockies and Dodgers.
And however the season ends, he will take lessons into 2017.
“Oh yeah, you never stop learning in this game,” Bochy said. “Every year is different, whether it’s the game itself, or dealing with players. I don’t care how good you think you are. You never arrive in this game. That goes for the players. The same goes for coaches and managers.
“But you know what? You believe in them, and you look at it as a challenge. Hopefully we get to where we want to go, and it’ll be more rewarding as a result.”