SAN FRANCISCO — Willy Adames lost track of the outs earlier this month at Dodger Stadium. He became the first major-league player to commit 10 errors. He’s struggled with his attention span at times. He hasn’t always made the shrewdest decisions at shortstop or in the batter’s box, where his 33.2 percent chase rate is the highest of his career. For some, his cheerful gift of gab with opposing players has become a lightning rod for criticism amid a San Francisco Giants season shrouded in mistakes and misery. This much is fair game: He has been a $182 million franchise pillar the Giants haven’t been able to bank on.When the Giants’ latest chaotic calamity arrived in the eighth inning Wednesday afternoon, Adames was at the center of it.This time, he didn’t do anything wrong. Not his fault. Totally blameless.Adames got a huge break and represented the tying run when his sun-aided double dropped in left field with one out. He skittered halfway to third base when Luis Arraez hit a flare to center field, and the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Jorge Barrosa closed on it. It was textbook base running. The last thing Adames could risk was getting doubled off. And when Barrosa’s diving attempt came up short, Adames got the next part right, too. He cold-started to third, and he picked up third-base coach Hector Borg.Everything unraveled from there. Borg made the highly questionable decision to wave Adames home. The Diamondbacks executed a routine relay to the plate. In a cloud of dust, Adames was out easily.One pitch later, the Giants committed an even uglier lapse: Arraez danced away from second base and got picked off by Arizona right-hander Kevin Ginkel.Luis Arraez was picked off second base with two outs in the eighth, ending the inning with team RBI leader Casey Schmitt at the plate. (D. Ross Cameron / Imagn Images)Casey Schmitt has been the Giants’ best hitter all season. He never got a chance to swing the bat.The Giants still haven’t won a game in which they trailed after the sixth inning. They ran their way out of an ideal chance Wednesday, losing 3-2 and getting swept by Arizona in a three-game series for the second time in a week.The Giants had never been 0-6 against the Diamondbacks to start a season series. But does the opponent really matter when you keep beating yourself?“Just following Borgie’s decision,” Adames said. “It’s unfortunate we had that result at the plate and (didn’t) tie the game there. I don’t know. I don’t think that I could have done anything else.”You could argue that the Giants’ .293 on-base percentage, which would be their worst in the franchise’s San Francisco era, is the biggest anchor dragging their season to the bottom of the National League. If only that was the worst of it. When the Giants do get base runners, they act as if they’ve been deposited there from an orbiting spacecraft. As FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens noted, the Giants are 30th in base-running runs this season, which is quite a feat, considering they’ve had fewer opportunities than anyone to give away value.Base running basically gave away the game Wednesday.“A part of it is it needs to be revisited more,” said Giants manager Tony Vitello, asked to explain how the Giants became such an unproductive base-running team. “Just because you do things in spring training, you know, it could be anything: bunting, PFP (pitchers fielding practice), base running. Days go by, and you’re always sensitive to guys having their legs under them, but I think those things need to be revisited, whether they’re mentally or actually physically, with the reps. Part of the base-running thing, I think, is by nature, not having guys on base as much as we would like to earlier in the year. I think things are at least trending in the right direction, as far as on-base percentage. Not today in particular. It’s not what you want it to be, you know. And then, too, we’ve created a lot of problems by digging ourselves in a hole early and trying like crazy to get out. I think what we’ve all done is driven ourselves a little bit too crazy.”At this point, no idea sounds too wild to try to spark change in this moribund group. The problem is that the front office has already pushed every button from an organizational personnel standpoint. It traded Patrick Bailey. It promoted Bryce Eldridge. It even called up Victor Bericoto.The closest buttons within reach now involve the coaching staff. And as tough as it might be to single out the third-base coach, especially after he just missed four games after the death of his grandmother in the Dominican Republic, there have been enough questionable decisions to wonder whether a change in assignments is warranted. It’s a move the Atlanta Braves made at this time last season, when they reassigned third-base coach Matt Tuiasosopo and replaced him with Fredi Gonzalez.Borg was the last hire to join Vitello’s staff and was highly regarded while coaching his way through the Giants’ minor-league system. He’s a baseball lifer who has experience managing in winter ball and won an Olympic bronze medal while managing the Dominican team in the delayed 2020 Games in Tokyo.But when a team’s trust in a coach erodes — think about Adames’ scoring a run May 5 when he blitzed past Borg’s stop sign or Heliot Ramos’ appearing to complain about Borg’s decision to hold Drew Gilbert in the 10th inning of an April 30 loss at Philadelphia — it’s almost impossible to re-establish.Would decorated emeritus coach Ron Wotus, who handled Borg’s duties deftly over his four-game absence, be able to re-establish that trust? Or heck, if this whole thing goes sideways and the coaching staff loses all remaining credibility, would Wotus be a candidate to run the whole show on an interim basis?For now, Vitello has two-plus years on his contract, and he has a vote of confidence from president of baseball operations Buster Posey, who characterized his manager’s performance as “solid” during an interview on KNBR last week.Vitello, for his part, didn’t give the impression after Wednesday’s game that he would consider making major changes, saying, “I don’t think there’s a massive team adjustment that needs to be made.”“Sincerely, the effort’s pretty damn good,” Vitello said. “The attention span on some certain plays maybe has been lax, or maybe just grinding out a play that appears to be routine or appears to be average. But if you’re going whole group, nine innings, pregame, all those things, I don’t think there’s a massive team adjustment that needs to be made. I think some of the mistakes will happen, but you don’t want them to be on plays that in spring training you would call routine. Maybe it’s getting caught up in the score or the record, or just taking a pitch or two off. We can’t afford to do that at this point.”The Giants played Wednesday as if aggressive base running had been a pregame point of emphasis. Arraez stole second base in the first inning. Schmitt stole second base when a replay review reversed an out call in the third. It marked just the second time all season the Giants recorded multiple steals in a game. They entered with a major league-low 12 of them in 18 attempts.Neither steal resulted in a run, but the Giants did enough against Arizona right-hander Mike Soroka to take a 2-0 lead into the sixth, when Trevor McDonald threw an unfortunately timed wild pitch in the midst of the Diamondbacks’ three-hit rally. A sacrifice fly tied the score against McDonald, and Arizona used another sac fly in the seventh to push ahead with an unearned run after left-hander Matt Gage failed to field a dribbler to the first-base side of the mound.As in most of the Giants’ losses in a 22-34 season, there were multiple unforced errors. The base running in the eighth was merely the most obvious Wednesday. Vitello called Borg’s decision “the aggressive route.” But was it the right one?Vitello neither supported Borg’s decision nor criticized it.“For what it’s worth, we’ve taken as much time as anybody analyzing things postgame and reviewing things, and we’ll do that as well,” Vitello said. “But the easy answer, to be honest with you, is the right thing is usually the thing that works out, and sometimes we’re guilty of it not working out because of decisions, and then there’s even been some occasions where maybe you’d redo a decision, but the game or the instance works out for us.”This part doesn’t change: A 162-game season is the ultimate meritocracy. McDonald has performed well enough to keep his place in the rotation after Logan Webb returns from the injured list in Friday’s series opener against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field. Does that mean Tyler Mahle and his 6.04 ERA will be shuttled to a long relief role? Or will the Giants entertain a six-man rotation, perhaps because the Giants are already looking ahead to the possibility of ditching some of Mahle’s $10 million salary if he can rattle off a few solid starts? That will be revealed soon enough.But when someone in uniform performs, you owe it to him and to the organization to give him more runway. To do otherwise would be to undermine everyone’s trust in the meritocracy.And to keep giving runway to folks in uniform who squander opportunities? Same effect.