Prompt:
I don’t understand why none of the beat reporters asked Bochy about pitching to Goldschimdt in the 6th with a base open in a tie game
— Neil (@sfgiantsfan021) April 11, 2018
One of our primary duties as a baseball fan is to question the manager. To a fault. We are all supposed to think that we could do a better job than the bum standing at the top of the dugout stairs.
This is largely because we put so much of ourselves into our fandom. We project some part of our psyches onto our favorite players and our favorite team. Also, a lot of us simply love the smell of our own farts and believe our intelligence to be superior to others’. At least, that's how it all seems to me...
What does any of that have to do with Bruce Bochy turning the game over to Sam Dyson and Josh Osich? Well, clearly, he should not have done that. He should have known what we already knew and kept those guys out of a pressure situation in the middle of an inning. These same beat reporters who "stood down" in relation to questioning Bochy after the game yesterday were previously our primary source of information regarding the idea that the Giants might consider cutting Dyson before the start of the season due to his terrible spring training performance. So, it's very possible everybody agrees with you (and me) about Dyson and they all have an eye on the situation. Nothing more needs to be said right now. Perhaps.
We are the ones with a "customer service" mindset. We are looking for relief from poor performances to satisfy our desires. But Bochy has to look at the situation from a managerial position. His employees are struggling, and he just needs someone to man the front desk area. Preferably, someone who already knows the layout and understands the organization.
The beat reporters know this, so why would they harp on the matter? There is nothing Bruce Bochy can do about the middle of his bullpen at the moment and the Giants have only played 11 games. Change is inevitable, and grousing about relief pitchers being bad is unprofessional in that these pitchers are inherently the worst possible pitcher to be on a major-league roster. They are relievers because they were terrible starters. There is something fundamentally wrong with how they play the game and so they are relegated to a small unit of time in which to appear and impact a major-league game. Everybody already knows Dyson and Osich are trouble.
But then why not just walk Goldschmidt in the sixth? Bochy doesn't tend to issue intentional walks, and it seems that leaving in a pitcher to get himself out of a jam is a win-win for him in the clubhouse. It is too early in the season to demonstrate a complete lack of faith in a guy; it would be detrimental to his authority.
Relief pitchers don’t want to be judged on their failures or even their last pitch. They really don't want to be judged at all, because they are pitchers, the only infallible people on planet Earth besides the Pope. Bochy is trying to win games, in theory, but he’s also got to ride a bus or hop a plane with these same people, and if he wants any of that to go smoothly or even improve the chances of either of those guys pitching better a week or two from now, then he has to treat them how they want to be treated, which is as human beings and not random events generators. Which is, essentially, how we see them.