SAN FRANCISCO — Tony Vitello was a wildly successful NCAA head baseball coach, a tireless recruiter, a persuader who gripped every living room with a convincing sales pitch. With input from a departmental compliance officer or three, he had a sense for what rules could be bent, what rules could be broken, and what norms could be challenged, all in service of leading a rollicking bandwagon of college kids to unprecedented heights.So let’s put the first half of Vitello’s first professional baseball season in NCAA terms that the former University of Tennessee coach can comprehend:The San Francisco Giants, overseen by Buster Posey and managed by Vitello, have lost institutional control.How else to describe the past three months for a 32-46 franchise that failed so spectacularly with a win-now roster that it relegated itself to raising a white sheet by Flag Day, that is learning the disastrous consequences of putting country charm ahead of cunning, and that, prior to Tuesday’s homestand opener against the Athletics, found itself in twinned crisis mode that it somehow bungled on both ends?It’s anyone’s guess why the Giants made Posey available to meet with reporters in the home dugout when their president of baseball operations was unprepared to address one major brush fire (the insubordinate conduct of Rafael Devers, who apparently wants all the entitlements of being a franchise star without accepting the responsibilities) and was completely unwilling to answer questions about the much-more-consequential Pride Night controversy from June 12, which was back at low boil in the news cycle Tuesday after MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred blamed Giants officials for inadequately communicating uniform rules and regulations to players.Posey attempted to defuse the Devers situation from the ninth inning Sunday in Miami, when the first baseman made a show of protest over being lifted for a pinch runner — a petulant display that optically undermined the authority of a manager whose clubhouse credibility has been an open question from the moment he was plucked off a college campus to manage pro athletes.Curiously, Posey also acknowledged he hadn’t yet spoken to Devers about the incident.“I think everybody has to be themselves,” Posey said. “Ultimately, and I haven’t talked to Rafi about this, I do think he understands that there’s got to be some accountability, and you know, sometimes it’s not fun to stand in front of a microphone or a camera. But that’s something that he’s going to need to work on.”Either Posey got to Devers in the next hour, or someone else did, or the first baseman had a sudden change of heart about making a rare appearance at his locker, because he took a half-dozen questions from reporters and called the entire incident a misunderstanding. He said he apologized to Vitello on the flight back to San Francisco because it was “the right thing to do.” Devers devoted his longest response to lambasting the media for blowing the incident out of proportion.As crisis management goes, for a major-league clubhouse, this was pretty standard stuff. The fastest way to move past unpleasantness is to minimize and to make up.But the Devers flap isn’t part of a Department of Justice investigation. It’s not easy fodder for politicians seeking to insert themselves in the news cycle. It hasn’t touched a socially vital nerve within the community and fanbase. It hasn’t been co-opted by culture warriors. Formulating a response to the Pride Night controversy would require so much more soul and sophistication from the organization, and it was clear on Tuesday that the Giants were wholly unprepared for the moment.It was obvious that Pride Night would be the first, second and third issues Posey would be asked about. Yet after making a brief introductory statement, saying he understood there were strong feelings on the topic and that the organization would continue to have internal conversations about the matter, Posey said, “our focus is on the team right now, the upcoming draft, the trade deadline and trying to win games. Anyone who has baseball questions, I’m happy to take baseball questions right now.”Reporters asked a series of Pride Night-related questions anyway, none of them inappropriate or out of bounds. Posey deflected each time until the setting turned awkward. If this was how it was going to play out, if the Giants felt boxed in by pending investigations and not at liberty to challenge the critical assertions of a commissioner who appeared all too comfortable throwing them under the bus, then why not summon CEO Larry Baer to stand in front of the cameras and take the hit for the organization? Why leave the spineless stonewalling to Posey, who has limited executive training for these kinds of situations?