Tony Vitello's comments on Rafael Devers situation speak to larger Giants problem

After SF Giants slugger Rafael Devers openly defied manager Tony Vitello on Sunday when Vitello tried to remove him from the game with a pinch runner, the discourse has been ablaze. Is Vitello to blame? Is Devers just a bad egg? Vitello's comments on the incident point to a bigger issue at hand.

Vitello told reporters after the game, "I’d rather have guys like Webb that you have to rip them off the field, as opposed to vice versa.”

Sure, that's a good sentiment that you want competitors who don't want to come out of the game. Yet, that's not what that was with Devers. He was openly insubordinate and basically disrespected Vitello to his face by wagging his finger at him.

That crossed a line and even if Vitello thinks it's not the best time to publicly reprimand him in front of reporters, it's really questionable whether anything will be said behind the scenes either.

Vitello said he and Devers talk every day and seemed to suggest that nothing needed to be addressed. It's that sort of willful ignorance of what everyone saw that makes one wonder why Vitello was even hired in the first place.

Vitello was put in a position to fail from the start by the Giants

He was just put in a position to fail from the beginning. How was he expected to come in and command the respect of a clubhouse with multiple veterans making hundreds of millions of dollars? In their eyes, he's just some guy from college. If the team won straight out of the gate then that could have earned him a lot of buy-in but the team got off to a dreadful start and it really hasn't gotten much better.

Clearly, Vitello does not feel comfortable reprimanding players when they should be reprimanded. He did not bench Willy Adames or go after him too hard when he made an egregious mental mistake by forgetting how many outs there were while on the bases against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

He didn't really hold Chapman to account when the veteran third baseman very publicly called out Casey Schmitt on the mound back in San Diego.

Now, he is failing to hold Devers to account after his misbehavior. It's a narrow line to walk and Vitello has tried his best, even some insiders like Ken Rosenthal have defended Vitello after the Devers incident, but would this sort of stuff have been tolerated under Bob Melvin? Probably not.

It's just clear that Vitello's messaging or whatever the vibe in that clubhouse is does not jive the way it should. Who knows if that will bring about a change at manager after this season but all of this is just such a bad look for everyone involved and the Giants as a whole.

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