SAN FRANCISCO — Tony Vitello did not grow up in the Bay Area, but he has experienced a few brushes with Giants baseball history.
Vitello was an impressionable 9-year-old sitting in the right field seats at Busch Stadium on the sweltering day in 1988 when Will Clark slid into St. Louis Cardinals infielder Jose Oquendo at second base and fists went flying. Years later, in 2014, Vitello was a connected college coach with seats behind home plate when Madison Bumgarner came out of the bullpen in Game 7 of the World Series, suffocated the Kansas City Royals, stranded the tying run at third base and clinched a championship.
“It was rather intense,” Vitello said on Thursday.
“Uh, yeah,” said the man seated to Vitello’s right, drawing a laugh from the assembly. “I’ll second that.”
Buster Posey, who caught Bumgarner that night and leaped into his burly arms, is putting down different signs now that he is the Giants’ president of baseball operations. Posey’s goal is nothing short of seeing the Giants record that clinching out again. And on Thursday, he introduced the manager he believes is capable of leading them there.
It’s someone who has seen the Giants at their scrappiest, at their toughest and at their most unyielding. It’s also someone who experienced those moments from the stands. The Giants are hiring a manager whose entire experience with pro baseball has been as a ticket holder.
“There’s going to be uncertainties and risk in any hire,” said Posey, after introducing Vitello as the 40th manager in franchise history. “This one’s probably more than a lot of other places we could have gone. But I’m betting on the person.”
The Giants are betting on a charismatic 47-year-old who went from role player at the University of Missouri straight into a college coaching career that started with the Salinas Packers, a wooden-bat summer team, and culminated with an eight-year tenure in which he transformed the University of Tennessee from a downtrodden program into a College World Series perennial powerhouse that walks the line between confidence and arrogance.
How unprecedented is this hire? When Vitello slipped on his No. 23 Giants jersey Thursday, it was the first time he wore a professional uniform.
“I never dreamed of being a Major League Baseball player,” Vitello said. “I think it was just so far above the clouds that I never even saw it. And for me as a coach, I was just kind of trying to make my way. I got thrust into a position at a young age that I probably didn’t even deserve (as an assistant coach at Missouri). So I was just trying to do a good job. And fortunately, it helped get me to the next spot, the next spot and the next spot.
“And eventually, this did become a dream. I decided if I was blessed enough to receive an opportunity, this is something I wanted to do before I was done coaching, and now I’m incredibly humbled and blessed to do so. So it is a dream come true, but it’s a very recent dream. It wasn’t one I’ve had for a while. And as much as I’d love to sit up here and promise things and pound my fist on the desk and all that, really, all I want to do is a good job.”
Vitello is the first college coach with no professional experience to be hired to manage a major-league club in more than a century. His transition will be unlike anything the game has ever seen. And both Vitello and Posey made a humble acknowledgment: They are just as curious as everyone else at how it’s going to play out.
“I think it remains to be seen, and some of it will just evolve naturally as we spend more time around each other and the staff is built out,” said Posey, asked how much autonomy Vitello will have. “Any great team that I’ve been a part of, people are pulling in the same direction. That’s the hope and the expectation here. Does that mean that we’re going to have perfect harmony all the time? No, it doesn’t, but we’ll all continue to learn and grow together as we go through this.”
“There’s so many unknowns,” Vitello said. “I can’t tell you what that (uncertainty) is for me, but (with) 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, the confidence is through the roof.”
Vitello is expected to win right away. The Giants are not a rebuilding club with a roster populated by recent draftees. They were in the market for a manager because the previous one, Bob Melvin, was fired for being two games under .500 in his two seasons with San Francisco. They did not hire Vitello as part of an experiment or because he’ll work cheap. Quite the opposite, actually.
The Giants had to meet a steep financial challenge to pry Vitello from a contract in Knoxville that included a $3 million buyout and a $3 million annual salary. He will make $3.5 million with the Giants — more than all but a few major-league managers — under terms of a three-year contract that includes a fourth-year vesting option.
When you combine the buyout, the salary and the $4 million the Giants owe Melvin next season, the Giants will pay out $10.5 million to the managerial position in 2026.
You don’t make that kind of commitment unless you’re certain you have the right person.
Tony Vitello watched Buster Posey win his third ring in person. Now, he’ll manage the team Posey puts together. (D. Ross Cameron / Imagn Images)
“I was looking for somebody that I felt like shared a similar vision, had similar ideals,” Posey said. “You’ve heard him talk about people over and over again, and to me, that’s your secret sauce. It’s the relationships you build. And so it was finding somebody that I think we matched up in a lot of those ways and that we can grow together. The hope is that this is a relationship that lasts a really long time.”
It was Giants GM Zack Minasian who first suggested that the Giants consider Vitello as they began to create their list of potential candidates to replace Bob Melvin. Both Minasian and Posey had spoken with Vitello this past summer before the Giants selected Volunteers infielder Gavin Kilen with their first-round pick. Minasian had scouted Tennessee players in years prior and came away impressed with how their program seemed to ooze with confidence and positive energy. Posey had a brief exchange with Vitello this past September when the Giants were at Coors Field and Vitello was checking in on five of his former Vols players, including Giants outfielder Drew Gilbert.
“As much as this feels out of the box, Tony’s name has been bouncing around Major League Baseball for a while,” Minasian said. “Tennessee’s program has been top-notch, which means there’s a lot of good players that we’re talking about year in and year out. I’ve been fortunate to watch them. And the nature of this job is you’re always evaluating everything. Not necessarily that you’re sitting there three years ago, watching Tennessee play Drew Gilbert in center field and (Chase) Dollander pitching, saying, ‘One day we’re going to hire Tony as a manager.’ But you get a sense of how he goes about it, his passion, his intellect, his care. He talks a lot about family. Those are things that we talk about.
“Starting the process, you really want to try and build as big a list as you can. There’s a lot of talented people out there, and as we started to go through it, I felt like we kept coming back to, ‘This one would be really interesting,’ and it just got even more and more interesting.”
Vitello was on a recruiting trip a few weeks ago when he received a text from Posey and an invitation to chat.
“I kind of said, ‘Oh hell, this could be something,’” Vitello said. “From there, it was awesome. They took their time, they gave me space, they gave me a bunch of information. And then the people that I was able to lean on were incredible to me.”
The Giants never formally offered the job to former Giants catcher Nick Hundley, but when he removed his name from consideration, Vitello was at the top of their list. Vitello had flown out to San Francisco for a full day of interviews and interactions with several members of the front office. When Posey tried to follow up, his calls usually went to voicemail. Vitello continued to recruit the showcase circuit, plan scrimmages and attend to the never-ending work of keeping the top spinning at Tennessee, where he is treated like a rock star.
“Honestly, that made me feel more confident in this decision,” Posey said. “This guy was hard to get a hold of because he was on the field all the time, or he was bouncing from city to city recruiting. Just because this was on his plate, he was still full-go with what his job was at Tennessee. I have a tremendous amount of respect for that.”
It was clear by Oct. 18 that Vitello was the Giants’ top choice. The following day, he and Posey moved toward a mutual understanding in a late-night phone call. Two days later, Vitello led an intrasquad scrimmage at Lindsey Nelson Stadium in Knoxville and hundreds of fans showed up to chant his name and implore him to stay. The next morning, Vitello informed his coaching staff at Tennessee that he would be accepting the job.
“To leave where I was at was not easy,” said Vitello, who had spoken to major-league teams about opportunities in the past but only engaged with the Giants this time. “It had to be a certain set of circumstances to even consider it. Two words are risk and challenge. If you talk about risk, it kind of sounds like you could lose it all if it doesn’t go well. But to me, this was more about a challenge. … Are you willing to meet the challenge? A challenge is (when) you find out what you can and can’t do, and that’s something that we preach to our players all the time at Tennessee. So who am I to preach that, but to not do it?”
The vitally important work has begun to fill out Vitello’s staff. Posey acknowledged that former Giants first base coach Antoan Richardson, who reached a salary impasse to return to the New York Mets, will be a consideration to return to San Francisco, where he could make an impact on the club’s substandard outfield defense and baserunning. Former San Diego Padres manager Jayce Tingler, who has known Vitello since they played together at Mizzou, would be an experienced resource as a bench coach. The Giants are talking to pitching coach candidates, but J.P. Martinez is well respected, under contract and would like to return.
Giants special assistant Dusty Baker is expected to be a critical resource while Vitello experiences coaching professional players — including highly-compensated veterans and native Spanish speakers from Latin American countries — for the first time. So will special assistant and longtime bench coach Ron Wotus. There’s a chance that Bruce Bochy will return to the Giants organization now that his tenure has concluded with the Texas Rangers, too.
Posey said it went a long way when Baker and Bochy, two of the most accomplished managers in major-league history, both endorsed Vitello for the job. The more vetting that Posey did, the more convinced he became that Vitello was the right candidate. At one point, Posey joked with Minasian that, “‘We need to find somebody that doesn’t like him, because everybody we call is just raving about this guy.’ I’m guessing we could probably find a few folks in the SEC. We just didn’t hit on the right ones.”
Vitello’s style wasn’t for everyone. He ticked off his share of opponents. He recalled his 9-year-old reaction to Will Clark and Ozzie Smith trading blows as “pretty awesome.”
“But you know, that was part of the appeal to me as well: He’s gonna be OK with ruffling feathers,” Posey said. “I don’t think he (says), ‘I’m gonna do this just to get under their skin.’ (But) if it’s something that happens organically because of circumstances? It’s sports, it’s entertainment. I mean, for me, there’s an argument to be made that we’re lacking that severely right now.
“All the young players will not like (this), but I don’t like guys hugging before the game. I don’t like it. As a fan, I want there to be a little bit of friction at times. … I wasn’t necessarily a guy that was going to cause friction, but I promise you, and you can ask people who came to the plate, I wasn’t being friendly. So there’s an edge to be had with that type of mentality.”
Now Posey has a manager who will encourage that mentality for as long as it can be sustained over a 162-game season.
“We’re in this together now,” said Vitello, “whether you like me or not.”