It\u2019s time to meet the managers.<\/p>\n
Tony Vitello had never visited spring training, much less worked in professional baseball.<\/p>\n
Craig Stammen?<\/p>\n
He hadn\u2019t coached or managed anywhere \u2014 unless we count his gig with a 7-and-under team in tiny Versailles, Ohio.<\/p>\n
Vitello\u2019s Giants came to the East Village on Monday to open a three-game series against Stammen\u2019s Padres three games into each team\u2019s season.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the lowdown on the journey ahead between these outlier managers:<\/p>\n
Stammen has the faster car, although not by much.<\/p>\n
The Padres\u2019 bullpen gives Stammen, a former reliever, the only great unit among the two teams.<\/p>\n
Mason Miller strikes out almost everyone. Lefty Adri\u00e1n Morej\u00f3n, coming off a dominant season, has added velocity. And now Jason Adam, who has a long record of consistent success, is close to returning in his comeback from a thigh injury.<\/p>\n
As Stammen knows, a bullpen like this one can double the perceived IQ of any manager.<\/p>\n
The second-best unit among the Padres and Giants?<\/p>\n
A Padres outfield of Ramon Laureano, Jackson Merrill and Fernando Tatis Jr.<\/p>\n
Attention, next Padres owner: if Laureano\u2019s open to it, a contract extension may be a good idea.<\/p>\n
Stammen had the advantage of working a few years in San Diego\u2019s front office and pitching in the big leagues for more than a decade.<\/p>\n
Vitello has gone from managing the high-powered Tennessee Volunteers to opening his first major league season against New York Yankees pitchers who appeared in October form.<\/p>\n
It was so lopsided that giving aluminum bats to Giants hitters may not have resulted in any wins.<\/p>\n
Unable to handle the Yankees\u2019 heavy doses of velocity, the Giants scored just once, losing all three games.<\/p>\n
Just like that, shovels of dirt began to descend upon Vitello\u2019s club as it came south to San Diego.<\/p>\n
The Giants became just the 10th team to start 0-3 while scoring no more than one run, noted Sports Illustrated\u2019s Tom Verducci.<\/p>\n
None of the previous nine, he added, made the playoffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 2016 San Diego Padres,\u201d are the only other team to start 0-3 with one run or less at home, Verducci wrote. \u201cThey finished 68-94.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vitello\u2019s Giants are more talented than the \u201816 Padres, who also had a rookie manager in Andy Green.<\/p>\n
San Francisco has sizable home run power potential, led by veterans Rafael Devers, Willy Adames and Matt Chapman. Atop the rotation, Logan Webb and Robbie Ray stack up with many teams\u2019 duos.<\/p>\n
It is the team\u2019s makeup, though, that the rookie manager said encourages him the most about the journey ahead.<\/p>\n
\u201cLeadership,\u201d Vitello, 47, said in the dugout Monday before hitting fungos. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a different type of leadership from a bunch of different guys. I can go all around and pick out specific instances, but the big thing is, we\u2019ve got proper leaders on the pitching side and also on the position side.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou get a little adversity, or things don\u2019t go the way you want,\u00a0 you have an opportunity to do two different things: get further apart, or get a little closer together,\u201d he said. \u201cI get a sense that it\u2019s a group that\u2019ll grow closer as the season goes on.\u201d<\/p>\n
I could be way off base, projecting the Padres for 86 wins, a few more than the Giants. Fangraphs.com\u2019s analytics like the Giants a little better than the Padres, projecting 82 wins to 80 wins. ESPN\u2019s baseball panelists forecast 83 wins from each team.<\/p>\n
Vitello guided Tennessee to its first national title two years ago. He greatly impressed Giants general manager Buster Posey, the catcher on San Francisco\u2019s three World Series winners. Posey bought out Vitello\u2019s contract, saying that an unorthodox hire was needed. The Giants\u2019 financial investment in Vitello, then, is greater than what Stammen commanded after A.J. Preller moved him from the front office to the manager\u2019s job.<\/p>\n
Neither rookie manager should lack for wise counsel.<\/p>\n
Where Stammen can turn to former longtime Scott Servais and Bud Black, both Padres special assistants. His Giants counterpart can sound out ex-managers Ron Washington and Jayce Tingler on his staff, plus special assistants Bruce Bochy and Dusty Baker.<\/p>\n
But the 40-man roster appears ordinary once again for a Giants franchise that has won 79 to 81 games each of the past four years. The Padres seem to have more depth.<\/p>\n
Lauded by Posey for his high energy, ability to connect with people and his competitiveness, Vitello will be worth what the Giants paid to get him out of his Vols contract if he can squeeze out a few victories beyond what Posey had in mind from other candidates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s time to meet the managers. Tony Vitello had never visited spring training, much less worked in professional…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2407],"tags":[5,853,4,43,137,18,4339,4338,185],"class_list":{"0":"post-653714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego-padres","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-latest-headlines","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-padres","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-san-diego-padres","14":"tag-sandiego","15":"tag-sandiegopadres","16":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116321601732383906","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}