Former Tennessee baseball head coach Tony Vitello was introduced as San Francisco’s manager in MLB on Thursday. He is the 40th manager all time for the Giants.
Vitello is the first college head coach to go directly to a MLB managerial role without prior professional experience.
Dick Howser was Florida State’s head coach in 1979 and served as the Yankees’ manager in 1980. He had prior MLB coaching experience before serving as the Seminoles’ head coach.
Vitello discussed being hired by the Giants and San Francisco president of baseball operations Buster Posey.
“A big X factor in this whole thing was being around someone like him,” Vitello said of the Giants and Posey. “To leave where I was at was not easy. We kind of touched on that already. It had to be a certain set of circumstances that would even be considered, and ultimately what this was about was, some personal introspective, two words that I diagnosed were risk and challenge, and they both are kind of the same thing.
“If you talk about risk, it kind of sounds like you can lose it all if it doesn’t go well. To me, this was more about a challenge. No matter how each day goes, and again to beat up the theme, I am very well aware there’s a higher sample size, so therefore more days, regardless of how it goes, are you willing to meet the challenge? What a challenge is, is something that you find out what you can and can’t do. That’s something we preached to our players all the time at Tennessee, so who am I to preach that but to not do it. When you head into a challenge, you want a level on confidence, and again there are so many unknowns. I can’t tell you what that level is from me, but the level of the people surrounding me here, whether it’s the roster, which is pretty good, or the other people in the organization, and in particular the guy sitting to the right of me (Posey), the confidence is through the roof.”
The 2026 MLB season will open with Vitello and the Giants. San Francisco will host the Yankees on March 25, 2026 at Oracle Park in San Francisco, California.
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