Who is to blame for the Giants' hilariously incompetent start to the season?

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When a team is this much of an outlier or an extreme, it’s only natural to point fingers. But it’s also necessary at this point. This is the kind of bumbling that needs to be identified and quarantined as quickly as possible. Nobody is immune from speculation. Everyone gets a flashlight in the face and asked a direct question: What did you have to do with all this darned bumbling? The manager will receive a lot of the criticism, and Tony Vitello has done plenty to earn it. Strategically, he manages like someone who hasn’t absorbed a lot of Major League Baseball over the last couple decades. Apparently, the difference between college and the majors is more analogous to the differences between Italian and Spanish than the ones between American English and British English. It’s not a dialect difference, but an entirely different language, perhaps. You cannot tell me that a standard, boring, central-casting manager would have the Giants’ record at 18-13 right now, though. You can’t do it. There’s no reason to think that if the Giants 3D-printed a Jeff Torborg-type to say “give ’em heck” or whatever, that the season would have been saved. This scenario assumes the Giants’ problem has been guff this entire time, and if there were an experienced manager in place, he’d make sure there is absolutely no guff. And also, not nearly as much bumbling. Please, don’t forget the bumbling. No, as with almost everything in a baseball-related context, the players on the field should take a lot of the criticism, considering they’re the people actually running the bases poorly, hitting baseballs poorly, throwing baseballs poorly, et cetera. The Giants are a veteran team that came into this season with the highest expectations for themselves — they absolutely saw the Blue Jays’ pennant last season and thought it wasn’t so out of reach. It looked like a realistic goal. Instead, just look at what they’ve done. They’ve bumbled all over the place. The bumbling should be hurting their pride, and if I know athletes, it absolutely is. It’s consuming them. They hate it more than you do. It’s embarrassing to get a mousetrap stuck on the end of one’s nose on national television, over and over again. So if there’s something to take hope in it’s this: The players who spent most of their very successful, very lucrative careers not embarrassing themselves would very much like to get back to that status quo. The Giants’ best players performing up to their previous standard is still the team’s best hope. Right now, the team is like the classic joke. They just need to take the darned banana out of their ear. Something else to point a finger at, and rightfully so, is the relatively uninspired offseason. Offseason starting pitcher signings Adrian Houser and Tyler Mahle have still combined for one quality start in 12 tries, and their ERAs look more like Barry Bonds’ slugging percentages, which is never a good sign. Harrison Bader finally gave the Giants a defensive center fielder who actively helped prevent runs, and then he gave them all back with his bat, twice over, before going on the IL. A bullpen that looked like it was rounding into form blew a pair of ninth-inning leads on Thursday, which reminds everyone that the offseason plan for the bullpen was somewhere between a shrug emoji and free jazz. Luis Arraez has been just about the only good part of the entire season, so the offseason wasn’t all bad. But most of it has been so far. Similar to the passage about the standard, boring manager up there, though, this is a problem that goes far beyond a single offseason. Take a spin around the top free agents and tell me which one has the Giants playing like a normal team right now. It’s not Kyle Tucker, and it’s certainly not Bo Bichette. Edwin Díaz isn’t likely to pitch again for months, so he wasn’t going to fix this bullpen on his own. You can swap out one of the starters with Dylan Cease and get the Giants a couple of extra wins at a much, much larger commitment and risk, and they should have signed Tyler Rogers to an extension years ago, but even with the benefit of hindsight and nailing an unlikely string of free-agent wins, this isn’t a team that was different free agent or two away from contending. So this is a reminder for a certain type of fan, a person with a particular way of looking at the world. This is the person who sees a mess and asks “Who’s responsible?”, singular. There is someone to blame, a rotten plank to remove. For a lot of these people, it’s the manager, but it can also be a struggling player or two. For some of them it’s the front office or the ownership group or both. Occasionally, you’ll see different types of the same person, arguing passionately on behalf of their rotten plank, yelling at each other in the comments of these very articles. It’s your right as a sports fan. This type of person needs to read this, because it seems like it might be important going forward: It’s not the manager. It’s not the offseason. It’s not the high-paid player whose personality bothers you the most. It’s not the front office. It’s all of it. Everything is all so, so, so bad, everywhere you look, and it’s so unexpectedly and almost hilariously awful. It’s the third-base coach not seeing a ball squirt away in the outfield at the worst possible time. It’s a catcher — an experienced one! — spamming rock over and over again in a game of rock-paper-scissors, then getting burned when one gets thrown right down the middle. Patrick Bailey’s pitch calling has never been an issue around these parts. Now that’s getting screwed up? And how. The only explanation is that the Giants are contagious right now. The Phillies started their decline right after they left San Francisco. The Mets did, too. We’ll see what happens to everyone after this road trip, but maybe every team the Giants play should take some vitamin C or something, just to be sure. There’s so much bumbling that it’s bled into the rotation, the coaches’ boxes, the bullpen decisions, the lineups, the rookies, the veterans, the All-Stars, the utility players, the suits up top … all of it. Everyone looks so unprepared, so surprised, so incapable of winning baseball games, even though most of them have been rather helpful until just recently. It’s all so bad. That’s the message here, then, the simple request for someone who usually finds someone to blame: Spread this blame around. Spread it far and wide, wrinkling your nose and furrowing your brow the whole while. It’s not something that could have been fixed by Bob Melvin, Branch Rickey or a circa-’93 Greg Maddux. It’s something that needs to be figured out in a closed-door meeting or session with a hypnotist or an exorcist or … something. I’m picturing something like Frank Sinatra giving Nikita Khrushchev an ultimatum. Ring-a-ding-ding for you bozos, indeed. It’s a mess so varied, so danged egalitarian, that it’s almost impressive. Even when something goes right (Casey Schmitt hitting laser beams) it goes wrong (Schmitt occasionally forgetting how to run). There’s no way to go other than up, though. Except for maybe down. Yeah, actually, there’s still plenty of room down there, so don’t tempt fate. Still, keep in mind that while a couple of these things were supposed to go wrong, and there would have been plenty of blame to assign anyway, it’s still remarkable how bad everything looks right now. It’s bordering on performance art. Last year at this time, a lot of Giants fans thought they were watching a contender. They were not. They were watching a team that would stumble so badly that they would waste their hot start entirely. It would be so danged symmetrical and only fair to give Giants fans the reverse experience the very next season. It would also be cool if the Giants could invent cold fusion and use the profits to pay Tyler Rogers next time, which is a scenario that feels about as likely from here. But, one game at a time, the Giants will do their best to convince you that they’re not the most incompetent bunch of goofs who ever goofed, and maybe they’re right. That was the plan from the start, anyway. Stop the bumbling, and it all goes away. Preferably yesterday. Please. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms