Bruce Bochy is in an odd position, tasked with managing an odd San Francisco Giants team. For a few more days, at least.
There’s a lot to balance. And he has many reasons to not balance it well.
And yet here he is, like those college classmates of mine that were obsessed with slackline (is that still a thing, this old man asks?), adeptly balancing something that most of us could not.
Consider what Bochy has been asked to manage: a beloved, big-market team with rapidly declining attendance rates; the largest collection of players ever to appear on a National League roster, yet with a core of proven, paid players; exciting prospects who need to be developed for years when someone else will be the manager; a team good enough to play meaningful games for nearly five months, yet bad enough to not go all-in on winning.
That’s a lot. And it’s a lot to balance. And he’s done so masterfully.
Bochy won’t be managing the team in 2020. On paper, the development of Mauricio Dubón and Jaylin Davis and Shaun Anderson shouldn’t matter to him. The let’s-take-a-peak approach to guys like Cristhian Adames and Wandy Peralta doesn’t need to be important.
The skipper would be forgiven for throwing out the guys he’s spent years with, making his managerial life a little less frustrating, and adding a few extra ticks to his historic win column.
But he’s not. He’s putting effort into giving future talents their opportunity to develop and showcase.
By the same token, you would understand if he gave full reign to the September call-ups, letting them run around like unsupervised children, trying to appease the front office even if he annoys the veterans in the process. What does he care? He’ll be sipping wine in San Diego in a week, anyway.
Yet he hasn’t. He’s kept the older players involved, engaged, and prioritized, even batting Brandon Crawford at leadoff on Wednesday, just because Crawford told the media he’d like to.
After nine years, confirmation that Bruce Bochy reads what I write: pic.twitter.com/54Kf0HXjTh
— Alex Pavlovic (@PavlovicNBCS) September 25, 2019
And you could certainly forgive Bochy for mailing it in. He’s got three World Series rings. He’s got 2,000 wins. The Giants are eliminated.
Yet there he was on Tuesday, trotting out 13 pitchers - tying a record he set just a few days prior - hell bent on finding any competitive advantage necessary. And, a day later, there he was again, using four pitchers to get through the seventh and eighth innings - not because the pitchers he used were failing him, but because he saw a sliver of an advantage to be taken.
There are reasons for the eliminated Giants to win. Among them:
- Instill good habits and a winning mentality in the youngsters
- Increase the win total for pitches to free agents
- Increase the win total for pitches to season ticket holders
- Winning is fun
Only one of those really impacts Bochy, and while the enjoyment of winning is likely his primary driving force, it feels like the other areas matter to him, too.
For a team that’s supposed to be bad, the Giants have done a fair amount of winning. For a team that’s losing, there sure are a lot of smiles in the dugout, from the rookies to the veterans, to the coaches. For a team that’s bracing for the future, there sure are a lot of encouraging developments tucked next to long-term financial commitments.
And in the middle of it all, one manager who has balanced it all beautifully.