SAN FRANCISCO — In the midst of what could be Bruce Bochy’s most frustrating season as an MLB manager, the veteran skipper has yet to let it show much on the field. He’s not exactly the boisterous type, but it’d be understandable for anyone in charge of a 38-63 club that’s massively underperformed to lose his cool every once in a while.
Bochy let loose a bit Monday night and earned his second ejection of the year just two innings into a blowout 10-3 loss at the hands of the Pirates. After a 1-0 curveball from Matt Cain to Andrew McCutchen seemingly dropped into the strike zone and was called a ball, the outfielder found himself with a sweet hitter’s count. Two pitches later, with the count sitting at 3-1, McCutchen drove another hanging curve over the fence in left and buried the Giants in a 6-0 hole.
Cain promptly let home plate umpire Chris Conroy know of his displeasure with the earlier ball call, among other calls from the first two innings of the game. Conroy jawed back, Bochy ran out to protect his pitcher and the rest was history.
Pitching coach Dave Righetti even earned himself a late-game ejection, his first in 10 years, in the top of the ninth, which Bochy said was likely due to the same frustrations San Francisco dealt with all night. After the game, Bochy made it clear he thought Conroy had a rough game behind the plate, but was quick to point out that there were plenty of other reasons for the loss.
“I don’t think he had a real good night to be honest, as far as consistency,” Bochy said of Conroy. “But that had really nothing to do with what happened tonight. We gave up three-run homers. Sometimes you deal with someone who’s a little bit off, and I think it’s fair to say he might’ve been tonight, but both sides were a little bit frustrated. But again, it comes down to making pitches.”
Cain’s hanging curves to McCutchen in the second weren’t the only pitches that looked fat to Pittsburgh hitters. The Pirates knocked 13 hits in the game, including another three-run homer late from Jordy Mercer that put things out of reach for good.
And because it was another listless night from the Giant offense, the incident with Cain and Bochy early on provided some of the biggest fireworks of the game for San Francisco. Cain, curt in his discussion of the incident’s particulars, was complimentary of how his skipper handled his interaction with Conroy, though it mattered little in the way of the game’s outcome.
“He’s gotta be able to do that,” Cain said of Bochy. “I mean, I was already heading away from the situation, but he’s trying to keep his players in the game, and I think that’s what a good manager does. He does a good job of being able to protect us and try to get us out of situations that we’re heated, and in the middle of a situation like that where I was probably a little more emotionally connected than we needed to be. So he does a good job of kind of being able to be the buffer.”
