Giants Coach Ron Wotus Ejected Before First Pitch: What Actually Happened in San Francisco
Ron Wotus got ejected from a baseball game before it started. That takes real talent.
The San Francisco Giants third base coach was tossed on Saturday afternoon during the lineup card exchange at Oracle Park, before the Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks had thrown a single pitch. Third base umpire Alan Porter did the tossing. Video of the exchange shows Wotus and Porter jawing at each other over home plate, and Porter waving him off almost immediately.
The context tells you everything.
Porter was behind home plate for Friday night’s Giants-Dbacks game. Arizona won 10-6, but Porter’s night got picked apart by the umpire monitors online. According to Umpire Auditor, he missed 21 calls in the game, 18 of them in the first five innings, and had nine calls overturned by the automated ball-strike system, tied for the second-most this season.
You do not have to be Bruce Bochy to figure out what Wotus was saying to him during the lineup card exchange. Whatever it was, Porter had heard enough before the anthem.
The Giants should be furious, and not necessarily at Wotus. When a veteran coach with three World Series rings shows up 24 hours after your crew got embarrassed by ABS and immediately gets run over a pregame comment, that is a bad look for the umpiring crew. It reads like ego. Whatever Wotus said, he said it before pitchers were warming up.
Porter, 48, has been an MLB umpire since 2010. Wotus, 65, is a Giants lifer. He coached in San Francisco from 1998 to 2021, was part of the three championship runs, and had been a special assistant before taking over as interim third base coach in late May after the reassignment of Hector Borg. If any coach in that dugout has earned a wide margin from an umpire, it is Wotus.
Baseball has a real problem with pregame ejections when the umpire is the one carrying frustration from the night before. This should be an incident the league office reviews. Not to fine Wotus, but to check the tape and remind Porter that his job description does not include settling scores.
The bigger issue is what fans are watching. ABS is showing them, in real time, how many pitches umpires miss. Giants fans on Friday saw the challenge system flip Porter’s calls again and again. It creates a credibility problem that then bleeds into the next day. That is exactly what happened at Oracle Park.
For Wotus, this is not the first time he has been at the center of an ejection saga. He was famously ejected multiple times as Giants bench coach and became a bit of a folk hero for it. He knows the game, and he knows what buttons to push. He also almost never picks fights that are not worth picking.
He picked this one because his players deserved to hear him pick it.
Manager Bob Melvin will not say it publicly, but this ejection is going to land well with the Giants clubhouse. It sends a message that the staff is not going to sit quietly the day after an umpire torches your team. San Francisco is fighting for its playoff life in the National League Wild Card race. The team cannot afford to have another game slip away because of blown strike calls.
Wotus said the quiet part loud, and he did it before anyone threw a warm-up pitch. Whatever the fine is, it was worth it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
