The Giants officially introduced new manager Tony Vitello at a press conference on Thursday. San Francisco hired the 47-year-old away from the University of Tennessee, where’d been arguably the best college baseball coach in the country. He signed a three-year contract that reportedly pays $3.5MM per season and comes with a vesting option for 2029. According to Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area, the option would vest if the Giants make the playoffs in 2028.
The hire will cost the Giants quite a bit more than $3.5MM in the first season. Maria Guardado of MLB.com was among those to note that the Giants also covered Vitello’s $3MM buyout to get out of his contract at Tennessee. John Shea of The San Francisco Standard observes that they’re also eating $4MM in dead money after exercising their 2026 option on Bob Melvin’s contract in July.
Moving on from Melvin to Vitello will wind up costing the Giants $10.5MM in year one. Of course, firing Melvin and hiring Vitello were two separate decisions. Pavlovic writes that president of baseball operations Buster Posey had decided to move on from Melvin well before the end of the regular season, even though they didn’t make the move until the first day of the offseason.
The Giants picked up Melvin’s option on July 1 but went into a tailspin over the next six weeks. They sold at the deadline after a 9-15 showing in July, and it seems that more or less sealed Melvin’s fate. Pavlovic suggests that the Giants might have made a change even if they’d manage to snag the final Wild Card spot (though one imagines a deep playoff run would have changed the calculus). The Giants finished the season at .500, and the Mets’ collapse allowed an 83-win Reds team to sneak into the postseason.
Posey credited general manager Zack Minasian with first suggesting the possibility of making a run at Vitello. “There were some rumors (in 2024) that teams were wanting and trying to talk to him, and I thought about it for us just as we started to get to work on building the list,” Minasian told reporters, including Pavlovic. “It was a name that I thought would be interesting to talk to Buster about individually, as opposed to just sending over ’here are the 30 names we have.’ I mentioned to him that I think Tony would be really interesting to talk to. I don’t think it took him long to respond with, ’Yeah, I think he would be.'”
That didn’t ensure Vitello would get the job. The Giants are known to have also interviewed Rangers special assistant Nick Hundley, Royals third base coach Vance Wilson, and future Angels managerial hire Kurt Suzuki. Shea reports that they also conducted a formal interview with former Orioles skipper Brandon Hyde. It was already known that Posey and Hyde had spoken but wasn’t clear until today whether that was an official managerial interview or a chat about some other potential role. Hundley was widely viewed as the early favorite, but he took himself out of consideration because of family commitments.
Vitello told reporters that he has had preliminary conversations as he puts together his first MLB coaching staff. Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic covers a few possibilities. He notes that Vitello was a college teammate of Twins bench coach Jayce Tingler, who’d managed the Padres between 2020-21.
Tingler was Rocco Baldelli’s top assistant in Minnesota for the past four seasons, but the Twins fired Baldelli and tabbed Derek Shelton as their manager. Meanwhile, Baggarly relays that the Giants could look to bring back former outfield/first base coach Antoan Richardson. Richardson held that role for four seasons before leaving to take the first base coach job with the Mets in 2024. It was reported this week that he would not be back in Queens because the sides were unable to agree on a new contract.
Good for him. He succeeded at the highest level he’s been at and now is getting a chance at the next level.
I hope he does well enough for Giants fans to be happy. And only well enough to fight San Diego for second place in the NL West annually.
I suspect that there will be a lot of collaboration on the staff and likely some carryover. I’d be very surprised if J.P. Martinez isn’t retained as pitching coach. While he may have no MiLB/ MLB experience this article suggests he was very much on MLB’s radar.
The NL West and baseball in general, is better when the San Francisco Giants are relevant.
It’s interesting to learn that other teams were interested in Vitello in 2024.
As long as Matt Williams is gone all will be fine with whomever they bring in.
From the article: Posey was ready to move on from Melvin before the end of the season. However, on July 1, they picked up his option.
We should assume this added to the price of paying him to go away. If they had concerns, why not assess before picking up the option? What does this say about the business judgement of Posey?
Furthermore how does Posey belong in that job? Sure he was a great catcher but cmon man.
It was a very poor business decision.
It’s possible that there was some form of contractual language specified in said contract that required a decision to be made by July 1st. That’s the only thing I could see being a reason why they would tentatively pick it up. But you make a good point: why even do it if you’re uncertain? And I cannot fathom that one.
In MLB to leave a manager in a lame duck status is a faux paus. Most every team will ensure their manager is signed through at least the next year’s season.
This provides both the manager and the players security, knowing who will remain in charge for the foreseeable future.
(Notable exceptions: Kurt Suzuki just signed a one-year deal to manage the Angels. And back in the 2000’s, Jim Leland insisted he be signed to a series of one-year deals as manager of the Tigers, as he contemplated retirement each offseason.)
If you don’t sign the manager for next season, even when you are unlikely to actually retain him, then you risk undercutting his authority in the locker room.
What’s more, his salary does not count in the payroll calculus. And every team has dead money being paid out several times over. Add it up, and this is all just the cost of doing business.
Except most teams do that before the season starts. Not 3 months into the season. The team was playing better then. That’s why it happened.
I like the hire, SF is going out of the box while bringing in a top college coach. We shall see how it turns out. But woof, costing 7 million more than you are already paying Vitello. While those were separate moves I sure hope he delivers. This is like paying 3 managers at once
Giants have plenty of money. They won’t lose any sleep over this.
I didn’t realize they had picked up Melvin’s option on July 1st. But looking back on things, I’m kinda surprised. Sure, you can say they fell apart in July… but it looks like the slump started in June. They start a 3 game set against the Dodgers on June 13th, winning game one. They’re now 12 games over .500, tied for NL West lead, and 3.5 games up on the Brewers who are clawing to get into the race.
The rest of June they go 4-11 and what a difference two weeks makes. They’re 5 games over .500, third place in the NL West and 8 behind the Dodgers, and now 1.5 games out of the wild card race. And those two weeks should have been a cakewalk, discounting the last 2 losses to the Dodgers. They added a slugger and played 13 games against sub-500 teams mostly in San Francisco where they had a dominating 22-11 record as of June 15th. The only series they won was against Boston, interestingly enough.
To go from having a chance to snatch the NL West title and confident enough at add to the payroll long term with Devers to suddenly floundering. Kinda seems like no matter what the situation was, picking up Melvin’s option… just weird.