Tony Vitello must send a message after Willy Adames' unforgivable SF Giants blunder

The SF Giants got shut out by Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers on Wednesday night. While there may have been nothing the team could have done to overcome Ohtani’s dominance on the mound, shortstop Willy Adames’ baserunning blunder was simply inexcusable and manager Tony Vitello needs to send a message by benching Adames at least for one game.

Adames forgot how many outs there were in the top of the seventh inning. He was on second base and there was one out as Drew Gilbert drove a ball into the left-center gap. The center fielder caught it but Adames was already well around third base and the ball was back in the infield and he’d been doubled off before he could do anything about it.

Adames needs to be benched after awful mental error

To make matters worse, reporters on social media noted that Adames had his back turned to the action and was joking around with Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts before the play which suggests he may have been distracted or just was not paying attention. Video evidence seems to corroborate that.

To Adames' credit, he owned up to his mistake after the game but said forgetting the number of outs had nothing to do with him joking around with Betts.

Still, it’s a bad look and one the Giants would do well to correct. President of baseball operations Buster Posey has made it clear that he was not a guy who wanted to be buddy-buddy with opponents out on the field when he was a player. Not everyone is wired that way but there’s a point where Adames’s good-natured personality can become more of a detriment than a help especially since him laughing and joking with the other team is nothing new.

Wednesday night’s game was important. The Giants have looked better as of late but if they have any hope of salvaging this season after a dreadful start they need to get hot. Winning a couple of games in a row only to fall back into how they’ve looked for much of the year is not going to cut it.

Laughing it up with a rival player right before making a momentum-killing mistake is just inexcusable. 

That doesn’t mean Adames has to completely change his personality. His fun-loving nature with his teammates is part of who he is but it would not be out of bounds for Posey or manager Tony Vitello to sit him down and tell him he has to cool it with joking around with opponents especially during important moments in the game.

The Giants are trying to win games, not make friends. It would be one thing if the Giants had a winning record and Adames was living up to the $182 million deal he signed with the team but neither of those things is true.

He’s hitting .222/.253/.345 with three home runs and 11 runs batted in on the season. That’s with him hitting .333 over his last seven games so it tells you how badly he was hitting prior to the last week or so.

This is a chance for Vitello to lay down the law a bit. Sitting Adames tonight and having Casey Schmitt play shortstop is probably the right move. It can be justified as giving Adames a rest while simultaneously keeping Bryce Eldridge in the lineup which is what many fans want to see even though he’s struggling at the plate.

Just because the team won a few games in a row and doesn’t look like the complete dumpster fire it did a week ago doesn’t mean the messages have to end. Calling up Eldridge and Jesus Rodriguez was a message. Trading Patrick Bailey was a message. Benching Adames for a game could be a message as well.

This team needs to wake up and clearly Adames needs a bit of a shock to the system so he focuses more on winning rather than trying to cut it up with the other team.

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