It has been difficult to find much criticism for Bruce Bochy in the last 25 years, given that he has become a popular fixture in two cities, one by winning championships and the other by letting it get close to one. He rarely missed a moment, or failed to understand when a moment was about to arrive.
Until Tuesday night, that is. Tuesday night was the game he should have saved for Sunday, the day he actually retires from managing.
Sunday's is the game that should have lasted 16 innings and 5 1/2 hours, not Tuesday's 8-5 loss to Colorado. Sunday's is the game that needed 13 pitchers to cover up the fact that the offense only put four runners in scoring position. Sunday's is the game that should have featured both Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner going yard. Sunday's is the game in which Bochy emptied out his roster to chase a game his team ultimately lost, because Bochy's career was defined in considerable part by the old adage "I managed good but they played bad."
Here is not where you will get one more rummage through the Bochian archives. That has been done more than enough, and it always reaches the same conclusions — he was an exemplary manager who was thought of highly enough that he was allowed to weather difficult times in San Diego and San Francisco without being part of the modern-day hot-seat mentality. He was among the most successful of a dying breed — the manager who runs his team without making a fetish of showing you that he runs it. He was strong enough yet flexible enough to keep all but a few players either in his corner or unwilling to complain about his authority, and confident enough to deflect credit toward those who performed the deeds he asked them to perform.
But he really did blow the Sunday thing by doing it five days early. This game would have been perfect then because it would have provided us with a game Bochy treasured so much that he managed it twice, and showed him at his crab-like scuttling best, walking to the mound in his inimitable gait seven more times to turn one pitcher into another. His lineup card was a bloody mess, with 29 names on it, all of them showing him doing what managers do — calculated guesses on someone else's ability to succeed in a specific circumstance.
Tuesday was a festival of managing. Sunday's will be a pile of gifts from a grateful team and its fans, followed by a typical season-getaway day — two hours and eight minutes of working fast and not letting pitches go by. There are fish to catch and golf balls to lose and years of family time to catch up to on Sunday, a life that doesn't have the daily intrusions of baseball. No wonder players want to play fast and leave faster.
But for Bruce Bochy's last game, there should have been some lingering and one last appreciation of how he quilted a game. That was Tuesday, though, and because he is not one to show off when everyone is looking, he won't do that again just to prolong his goodbyes. He'll know that getaway day, even this last one, is meant to be done at pace. People have stuff to do, and he will be mindful of that directive.
But he will draw out that last clubhouse beer a bit. Some things cannot be rushed, and a beer is most of them. Bruce Bochy can regret not finishing his career five days earlier five years from now. Or ten. Or forty. It'll just be a rare missed opportunity for a man who used his opportunities well.
