PEORIA, Ariz. — Maiden voyages often begin with a christening and a shattered magnum. Tony Vitello’s first nine innings in a professional uniform included a foul ball off the shin.
“I’ve had a broken face twice from baseballs, both times as a coach, and I got one off the shin pretty good over here,” said Vitello, who couldn’t evade a foul ball in the fifth inning Saturday at Peoria Sports Complex. “I’ll be standing in a different place next time.”
Everything about where Vitello stood Saturday was different. The San Francisco Giants’ Cactus League opener against the Seattle Mariners was also the first spring training exhibition game their new manager had attended in any capacity. Over Vitello’s nearly 25-year collegiate coaching career, which included eight resurgent and resplendent seasons at the University of Tennessee, the last thing he had time to do in February or March was take a leisurely timeout to suck down a few beers in the Florida or Arizona sunshine. His playing career ended at the University of Missouri. He never had a stint as a pro scout or roving instructor or special assistant. He was not a pro in the strictest sense but he embraced his profession, which was to help develop young college athletes, nudge the most talented ones into the major-league draft, hopefully watch them take flight from there, then stay to feather the nest for the next crop of recruits.
Blade Tidwell and Drew Gilbert were two of those Tennessee players Vitello helped to send into pro baseball. On Saturday, with both of those players on the Giants’ travel roster, Vitello officially met up with them and relocated that nest to the highest branch on the tree. He did not windmill his arms or harangue the umpires or shout encouragement or engage in theatrics during the Giants’ 10-5 victory. He merely stood on the top step of the dugout, sometimes holding up a clipboard to shade his face from the slanting, afternoon sunlight, and did what he’s always done.
Intently watch every moment.
“He’s just locked in, every pitch,” said Tidwell, who displayed a wipeout slider while striking out three in a scoreless inning. “He always says, ‘Whoever locks in and has the most confidence for the most amount of pitches wins most of the time.’ So he lives it out.”
Even the pitch that resulted in a bruised shin. Vitello said he tracked Nick Margevicius’s changeup a little too long in the fifth inning, and he didn’t have enough time to react when the foul liner made eyes for his legs. Giants right-hander Hayden Birdsong took a few lumps as well, facing six batters and recording just one out in the first inning. Birdsong walked two, gave up two ground-ball singles that found seams and served up a grand slam to Miles Mastrobuoni. The national anthem singer had barely walked off the field before Vitello had to stride to the mound to take the baseball from a Giants pitcher for the first time.
The afternoon got better from there. Vitello didn’t have to step on the grass to take the baseball again. Tidwell was the most impressive of the nine Giants pitchers who held the Mariners scoreless the rest of the game, but all of them acquitted themselves well. Caleb Kilian, who returned on a minor-league contract more than four years after the Giants traded him to the Chicago Cubs, touched 99 mph with his fastball. Left-hander Juan Sánchez worked out of a jam with some guidance from catcher Jesús Rodríguez, whose poise drew praise from Vitello. Nick Zwack, a roster filler from minor-league camp, recovered from a dropped fly ball in the outfield to finish a scoreless ninth and send Vitello into his first victory handshake line.
Vitello, true to form, had a line or two in his brief postgame scrum with reporters, too.
“Any time you’re keeping score you want to win, (but) everybody knows what you’re working towards here,” Vitello said. “There’s a bunch of objectives that supersede the scoreboard. But I’m just happy for the Zwack attack there at the end. A little adversity, and he kept his composure.”
Vitello has remarked several times that any one of his viral, crowd-surfing videos at Tennessee were the culmination of thousands upon thousands of moments of focus and quiet study and the businesslike mechanics of building a program. Perhaps that’s what we saw Saturday.
The Giants took advantage of a misplay or two, but there were plenty of highlights on the hitting side. New center fielder Harrison Bader attacked a high fastball for a double, and top prospect Bryce Eldridge might have had the most impressive swing of the day, taking a short and direct pass while hitting an opposite-field double on a 98 mph fastball from Seattle closer Andrés Múñoz. Gilbert got a couple of late-inning at-bats, lined an RBI single, scored a run and fist-tapped his former coach on his way down the dugout steps.
Vitello’s first comment upon accepting the Giants position was to tell people in Knoxville that he’d taken a job “to babysit Drew Gilbert.” So for Vitello’s first game in Giants orange, it was fitting to share it with the player whose energy and precociousness he credited with turning around a Tennessee program that had never experienced or even imagined winning a College World Series title.
A Cactus League-opening victory is hardly a first step toward a championship season. It was a good start, though, for everything it was not in addition to everything it was. There were no miscommunications with the lineup card, no summoning a pitcher who hadn’t warmed up properly, nobody batting out of turn. When it came to the mechanics of running a game, the toughest part might have been finding a place to stand among Ron Washington, Ron Wotus, Jayce Tingler, Dave Righetti and every other member of Vitello’s coaching staff and the Giants’ legion of spring training special instructors.
“Most of it’s the unfamiliarity of the lead-up,” Vitello said. “Once the game starts, I realize we have jobs to do — some of the guys are more active whether they’re on the field or relaying signals — but a lot of our work as coaches is done before the first pitch, and then the players decide it. There were several things I was trying to do and it wasn’t my role anymore, and some things I made sure I needed to do, one of them last minute. Nothing crazy.
“The lead-up was more of a learning experience than the actual baseball, but plenty to learn from during the game, too.”
The Giants learned something about the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system. Catcher Daniel Susac won a strike for minor-league pitcher Tyler Vogel with a successful challenge in the first inning, but Susac guessed wrong when he tapped his helmet after ball four to Leo Rivas in the fourth inning. Giants center fielder Jared Oliva exhausted the team’s second challenge when he appealed a strike in the eighth. But this is the time to experiment, so Vitello said players have been encouraged to be proactive and not leave challenges on the table.
The Giants have a different kind of challenge that isn’t going away anytime soon. Birdsong’s fastball sat at 96-98 mph and had the late life that gives him such a high ceiling as a starter or multi-inning reliever. But he did not throw his short slider for strikes and did not appear enthused about being asked to continue trying to develop the pitch to enhance his curveball and changeup.
“I didn’t throw a single cutter-slider thing for a strike, so that’s something next bullpen I’ll be working on,” Birdsong said. “It’s finicky. Good some days, not so good some days. We’ll find it.”
Why is that pitch so important?
“I’m not really sure, honestly,” said Birdsong, who gave up on the pitch when he couldn’t master it last season. “I tried to bang it, and (assistant pitching coach Christian Wonders) and them came in and said, ‘Let’s work on it. We think it’ll help you out.’ I’m in on it. I like the idea of it, and I like having another pitch that goes that way.”
“It wasn’t a consistent shape (last year),” Birdsong continued. “In my brain, I’m like, ‘Why wouldn’t I just focus on the pitches that I have and maybe we’ll go back to it?’ But I’ll work on it, and hopefully we’ll work it in.”
Birdsong said he has no idea how much his pitch count will be stretched out this spring. The same is true for most of the younger pitchers on the 40-man roster. Clearly, Vitello and his coaching staff are seeking to keep all options on the table while they watch and evaluate each mound session and exhibition inning.
Tidwell has been a starter throughout the minor leagues and during his time at Tennessee, but he gave off some serious Robb Nen vibes while dominating with his slider and splitter. He wasn’t accustomed to coming out of the bullpen for an exhibition game. But it didn’t take long before everything felt familiar on the mound again.
When Tidwell came set and paused to look at a base runner, he heard Vitello’s voice from the dugout.
“All right, focus on the hitter.”
“Same stuff he used to say when I was pitching in college,” Tidwell said. “So it was funny. He’s always got a bunch of one-liners up his sleeve.”