On Saturday, there was baseball. The San Francisco Giants defeated the Seattle Mariners 10-5, and they did it in comeback fashion. They’re on pace for an undefeated Cactus League, which would be the first undefeated preseason in baseball history. Don’t assume that they could carry that undefeated preseason over into the regular season, though. That would be ridiculous.
Even if there’s nothing permanent we can learn from the first exhibition game of the year, it’s the first five words that matter: On Saturday, there was baseball. And this time, the first game of spring isn’t just a signpost on the road to Opening Day. The baseball serves a much deeper meaning than that. Because now that the baseball’s here, we finally have reasons to form an opinion on new San Francisco Giants manager Tony Vitello.
Oh, not because of anything that happened in this game, specifically. But because there’s baseball, actual baseball, which is the only reason to have an opinion about a manager in the first place. You know, baseball. Who’s in the lineup, who’s out of the lineup, who appears motivated and who is already planning a Hawaiian getaway in October. Nothing too interesting happened along those lines on Saturday, but it was still a baseball game, and there are hundreds more to come. You stack those suckers up like shawarma meat, and the next thing you know, you’ll be shaving off all kinds of juicy takes about your new manager.
Those takes will have to do with baseball. It will be refreshing.
Before the Cactus League actually started, you were already supposed to have opinions on Vitello. Here’s what he means. Here’s what the Giants are trying to do. Here’s how likely that is/isn’t to work. I wrote something about fundamentals because of Vitello’s experiences teaching them to college kids, but it’s not like I wrote it because I knew how he teaches them and whether those methods will be applicable to major leaguers. We still don’t have an idea. That’s what the baseball’s for.
Everything up until now? About as useful as a single spring training at-bat in terms of predictive or descriptive value. Take, for example, the parsing of Vitello’s comments on Monday. Those comments were an oddly impassioned reaction to standard hot-stove language and practices, and they came from someone with little to no familiarity with hot-stove language.
That last sentence is something that everyone can roughly agree with, and it made for the bland foundation of the dish. It was the plain noodle waiting for a sauce, the vodka ready for its mixer. Now that everyone had the base ingredient, they could add whatever weirdo ingredients they wanted. If someone has been waiting to share a spicy jalapeño martini (with a SPAM™ tortellini garnish) of a take about the new manager, this was their chance. Anything went.
Depending on what you were reading or listening to, the episode was evidence for Vitello:
• having thin skin
• being stuck in the past
• regretting his decision to manage the Giants
Unless it was evidence that:
• the media is out to get him
• people don’t understand him yet
• Major League Baseball fans don’t understand ball like college fans do
But, again, all of those opinions reflected as much on the people making them as the subject of the opinions. If you don’t care for the food metaphors, think of the opinions being like the pareidolia people experience when looking at clouds. The louder someone yells that a cloud is shaped like a whale, the less you think about the cloud, and the more you think about that person’s issues with whales.
Tennessee fans loved Tony Vitello. How the Giants perform under his watch will determine whether Giants fans have the same affection. (Peter Aiken / Getty Images)
My contribution to the discourse: Imagine someone who keeps his word. More than that, doing so is a part of his personality. It’s how he was successful at his job, which was traveling around the country and making promises to kids and their parents. He could look them in the eye and give him his word and tell them that he can help achieve their goals if they’re willing to put in the work.
Now imagine this person had the opportunity to benefit himself at the expense of some of these promises. Not in a bad or a craven way — it’s benefitting himself in a way that everybody will eventually understand — but that’s still the calculus here. He got an opportunity, and it came at the expense of what he’d promised a lot of people. He promised it because he believed it.
If you’re this kind of person, you’re not used to dealing with guilt. It can manifest in unusual and uncomfortable ways, especially when you’re going through one of the most stressful periods of your life. Vitello’s lingering concerns with how he left Tennessee might tell us something, but it’s likelier to tell us how he’ll respond to future scenarios where he feels guilt and regret instead of telling us how he’ll motivate Rafael Devers on the 11th day of a 12-day road trip.
You have to admit this description makes at least a little sense. Is it actually the best description of what happened? You fool. You’ve learned nothing. While I’ll stand by my reading of the situation, all it’s doing is describing what I want to see. It’s also reflecting what I’d like to think is my personality, even if that’s debatable. It’s also worth noting that I’m an unserious and trusting person who’s too quick to assume that people are acting in good faith. I’ll probably end up publishing my Social Security Number on here one of these days. As someone who can’t think more than two steps ahead, I sure hope people aren’t more complicated than my description of Vitello.
Vitello’s opening comments on Monday were unexpected, but I was ready to forget about them by the time the press scrum ended. Maybe not forget about them entirely, but jot a tiny note down in the corner of a notebook, just in case it comes up again. That’s it. That’s all you can do in the first couple weeks of a manager’s career before he’s managed a single game, because you have so little information about what actually matters. Heck, you’ll still have far too little information about a lot of this stuff even a few years in. It’s why the reaction to the Bob Melvin firing was more confusion than elation.
The real story of the 2026 Giants and their new manager is just getting started, and you’ll have a much better idea of how it’s going with each successive month. And right when you think you know exactly how it’s going, something will happen to change your mind. The Giants exercised Melvin’s $4 million option on July 1. There simply wasn’t that much baseball between then and his sacking, so you know these things can change quickly.
All you need is baseball. Sweet, sweet baseball. Not only is it fun to watch and/or listen to on a weekend afternoon, but it’s also going to give us everything we’ll need to know about the Giants’ new manager … one agonizingly slow baseball game at a time.