The San Francisco Giants lost five straight games heading into Sunday’s contest against the Colorado Rockies. While Rafael Devers has turned his season around to some degree, the same cannot be said of manager Tony Vitello, whose antics have put him between a rock and a hard place. Vitello’s hiring was a controversial one to begin with, as he had no big-league experience but thrived at the collegiate level with the Tennessee Volunteers. Buster Posey surely couldn’t have seen this season’s struggles coming.

Vitello hasn’t maintained his composure well this season, and it’s starting to impact the Giants clubhouse as this season fades into obscurity. Posey himself has stayed relatively quiet on Vitello’s future, and if Giants fans had their way he’d likely be a one-and-done manager. Vitello’s players, to their credit, have stayed together…until now. Over the weekend, the first-time MLB manager questioned his players’ effort and pride, a tactic that may have worked for him in Knoxville but will surely backfire in a larger market like San Francisco.

Tony Vitello betrayed the trust of Giants players

The Giants took a 6-3 lead in Friday’s game against the Rockies, but eventually blew that advantage in an 8-6 defeat. They fell behind quickly on Saturday in Colorado as well.

There’s only so much a manager can do to shoulder blame when his players aren’t performing up to par. However, blaming them to the media isn’t going to sit well in the clubhouse.

“We need to take a little more pride, I think, in how we…It’s ideal to not have last night occur, but bounce back,” Vitello told the media. “I got the vibe like we were in a position to do that. The first six outs we had at the plate would say that, but getting in a hole makes it a little tougher after that.”

Vitello isn’t necessarily wrong in his commentary of the Giants’ play of late, and even what he perceives as a lack of effort. However, he’d be wise to keep that criticism internal and call clubhouse leaders into his office to better apply that feedback.

Are bigger changes coming for the San Francisco Giants?

Speaking of fair criticism, this is one the players could surely push back onto their first-time manager: Vitello is in over his head. The Giants have already reassigned third-base coach Hector Borg in a wake-up call of sorts. If that doesn’t work — and the five straight losses suggest it hasn’t — then perhaps larger changes are looming.

Posey could opt to sell at the trade deadline. While Devers and Willy Adames are likely here to stay thanks to their large contracts, Robbie Ray is an attractive trade asset for contending teams and is on the final year of his deal. FanSided’s Chris Landers ranked Ray ninth on his trade deadline big board just last week.

“Ray…is an open and shut case: He’s in the final year of his five-year contract, and while he’s no longer the power pitcher he was in his prime, he’s still got gas left in the tank as a No. 4 starter who could even pivot to a valuable bullpen role in the postseason,” Landers wrote.

Posey and the Giants should not rush to panic and fire Vitello in season. Doing so defeats the entire purpose of hiring him. Vitello is learning on the job. Perhaps he’ll find his footing in the dog days of summer. Criticizing his own players, who thus far have had his back, isn’t a step in the right direction.

More MLB news and analysis:

Advertisement

Add us as a preferred source on Google

Follow

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Greg Lindgren, a 57-year-old bar operator from San Francisco. He co-owns 15 Romolo, The Cordial, Rye Cocktail Bar, and the events company Rye on the Road with Jon Gasparini. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

In San Francisco, you throw a rock, and you hit a laptop.

We started in the industry at the adolescence of the 1.0 boom. I have friends who worked for Webvan. Over the years, we’ve worked for all of the household names in the PayPal Mafia that survived the first crash and created the second wave.

When we opened Rye, we went to Google ourselves. The first result was a Yelp review. This was 2006. The person who made the review was the sixth hire at Yelp. I recognized his name, because there’s a lot of convergence between real-life social and tech.

We have a warehouse in SoMa. We’re a half block away from where Twitter was founded. This building was a temporary place where Airbnb, pre-IPO, was building its business. We get mail for Brian Chesky.

We’ve had a front row seat. “Silicon Valley” is a documentary. It’s a lot of fun to watch and be a part of it.

The trend toward abstaining from drinking has been ongoing for a while. Around the time that people started looking at alternative forms of eating, they were toying around with cutting back on alcohol.

It’s been gaining momentum over the last few years. It’s not just health, and it’s not just trying to have that edge.

There’s a new gold rush happening. The miners in the last year and a half are mostly young men. Some of them are abstaining from a health-maxxing standpoint. Other people just didn’t drink; they’re already of that generation.

There’s a herd mentality to tech, especially when so many people have arrived so recently. Smart people adopt this lifestyle and say, “I need to signal to everyone around me that I have all the edge, and that we’re not going to succumb to distraction.” One of the things in that conversation is alcohol consumption.

Those same people are taking other things. It’s more of an older generation, but people of the VC class are getting one-shotted on ayahuasca.

There are still groups that hit it hard. An example: young parents. When you have kids, you stop going to bars and restaurants, and you hunker down for a few years. Once their kids are preschoolers or elementary schoolers, those parents come roaring back. It’s like they’ve been let out of prison.

The same thing holds true for various tech cultures. We work with a company that’s in-person five days a week and is heavily sales-driven. They built a whole bar within their corporate headquarters, and we’re the contract bar that services that. There’s a social bonding aspect.

Mocktails are all the rage at tech events

More than a few years ago, we saw the writing on the wall, and that’s when we went into mocktails.

We work with a company that’s a household name. We’ve gone there on several occasions with beer, wine, and a cocktail available. We’ll watch as the mocktail that we brought is the thing that everybody’s drinking. We’re happy to be there.

Everything is better and more professional by having a service like ours there, whether or not they’re drinking alcohol at 4 in the afternoon. It helps with breaking the ice to have something in your hand. It’s not going to be a cigarette, and you can only have so much caffeine.

The people who assemble these events look at reactions. It’s similar to having a cool photo booth; it’s something people remember.

The business model hasn’t shifted. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve been hired to do just non-alcoholic drinks. There has not been a reduction in price or a rejection of the offering as people change their event curation.

So far, companies are not fixating on: “Hey, we noticed that a lot of people are drinking less alcohol.” They’re asking: “Did we have a great event? Did we get everyone together, whether they drank sparkling water or an old-fashioned?”

That’s what we see in the current landscape. It hasn’t slowed our business down.

(KRON)– An 18-year-old is dead, and several others are injured after an early morning crash on eastbound I-80, near the 7th street off ramp in San Francisco’s SoMa district, according to California Highway Patrol San Francisco (CHP SF).

The crash occurred around 1:00 a.m. between a tractor-trailer, a Recology truck semi, and a grey Chevrolet Camaro, according to CHP officials.

Police said the Camaro was traveling eastbound just west of 7th Street when it made an illegal lane change to the right, colliding with the tractor-trailer as it was approaching the off-ramp.

Both vehicles crashed into the sand barrels at the top of the 7th Street off-ramp, officials said. The tractor-trailer continued onto the offramp, where it came to a stop, blocking all lanes.

After hitting the sand barrels, the Camaro continued, launching over the off-ramp bridge railing, where it dropped 25 feet and landed in the San Francisco Police Department Impound parking lot beneath the off-ramp and hitting several vehicles in the impound yard, police said. The Camaro landed upside down on top of another car.

Police said four people were inside the Camaro. The driver, an 18-year-old man, had moderate injuries and managed to get himself out of the car, police said. The right front passenger, a 17-year-old male, suffered moderate injuries as well.

The two rear passengers, both 18-year-old men, suffered major injuries. One is being treated at a local hospital, and the other was pronounced dead at 1:50 a.m. at the scene of the crash, police said.

The other three passengers in the Camaro were wearing seatbelts, and the 18-year-old who died was not wearing a seatbelt.

CHP SF officials do not believe alcohol or drugs were a factor in this crash.