Forgive me for getting enthusiastic about this one, as a result of even in sports activities, it’s not daily that probably the most fascinating consequence occurs. However the Giants are, in response to The Athletic, “closing in on” hiring a brand new supervisor: Tony Vitello.
Two offseasons in the past, I wrote in regards to the 5 classes of main league supervisor: The new assistant to a profitable skipper; the grizzled baseball lifer; the entrance workplace liaison; the latest ex-player who’d been talked up as a future coach since his late 20s; and Aaron Boone.
Vitello is none of these issues. After I run the participant linker for this publish, Vitello’s title just isn’t going to return up in daring. Not solely has he by no means performed within the majors, he’s by no means drawn a paycheck from an expert baseball crew in any capability — not as a participant, or a coach, or a scout, or a particular assistant.
Vitello has spent his complete grownup life working in school baseball: First as an assistant at Missouri, TCU, and Arkansas, and for the previous eight seasons as the top coach at Tennessee. There, he’s made three journeys to Omaha previously 5 seasons, together with a 60-win nationwide championship marketing campaign in 2024.
Within the different large North American males’s sports activities leagues — the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLS — there’s not less than some teaching crossover with their NCAA Division I counterparts. In any of these sports activities, a coach with a monitor document and profile like Vitello’s can be a shoo-in for skilled consideration. And we’re seeing motion between MLB and NCAA groups for help roles and assistant coaches today: Reds pitching coach Derek Johnson is the previous pitching coach at Vanderbilt, and the Detroit Tigers employed pitching coach Chris Fetters straight after his Michigan Wolverines performed for a nationwide championship. Present Georgia head coach Wes Johnson famously went from the College of Arkansas to the Minnesota Twins and again to school with LSU.
However Vitello will likely be blazing a brand new path.
Brewers supervisor Pat Murphy is the one present (pending Vitello’s rent being made official) MLB bench boss with Division I head teaching expertise. The final crew to rent a university head coach straight for a significant league managerial job was the Yankees, who poached Dick Howser from Florida State for the 1980 season.
Neither of these conditions are similar to Vitello’s. Murphy, who resigned from Arizona State in 2009 amid recruiting scandals, spent the subsequent six years as a particular assistant and minor league supervisor within the Padres group, rising briefly to the publish of interim supervisor of the large league membership for 96 video games after the midseason firing of Bud Black. From there Murphy joined the workers of Craig Counsell — his former participant at Notre Dame — in Milwaukee, and spent eight years because the Brewers’ bench coach earlier than succeeding Counsell in 2024.
Howser spent eight seasons within the majors as a participant, then 10 extra because the Yankees’ third base coach. His tenure as a university head coach consisted of all of 1 season and 64 video games; he was a professional baseball lifer who went on sabbatical.
So what makes Vitello so particular?
The phrase “school coach” conjures up a particular picture for plenty of folks. The 2010s have been a confluence of two necessary developments in baseball historical past: First, the mainstreaming of unbiased, statistically-focused and access-agnostic baseball evaluation on the web. Lots of people got here into the game with little persistence for obtained knowledge. Second, the early 2010s have been the final hurrah for the technology of coaches who had constructed school baseball right into a severe nationwide sport.
I’m speaking coaches like Mike Martin, Augie Garrido, Mark Marquess, Wayne Graham, Jack Leggett — guys who had been round because the Nineteen Seventies, and have been nonetheless displaying up in Omaha by the tip of the last decade. To present you a way of how lengthy a runway we’re speaking about: Graham, who performed for Casey Stengel throughout his main league profession, had 5 of his former gamers make their main league debuts within the 2020s.
These guys are folks heroes, however they have been large on obtained knowledge. They bunted so much. They have been largely dismissive of analytics and detached to the affect of workload on their pitchers’ well being. In an period with no NIL cash and restrictive switch guidelines, a lot of them ran their clubhouses in a way that may merely not fly with grownup skilled gamers.
So individuals who haven’t up to date their priors since 2016 will hear “school coach” and instantly assume that Vitello is an irredeemable hardass who’ll make Willy Adames drop 30 sacrifice bunts a yr and put on out Logan Webb’s elbow by Memorial Day. Particularly as a result of Vitello may be, properly, somewhat choleric.
See, the person completely loves getting thrown out of baseball video games.
Tony Vitello will get ejected within the rubber match vs Auburn. Vitello let EVERY umpire know the way poorly they’ve been at their jobs throughout what has been perhaps the worst umpired collection shortly.
His fifth ejection and first in 2 years (Mizzou 2023). #Vols pic.twitter.com/GVPCQKl1sM
— Harrison Cordell Fant (@Fantavious9) Could 4, 2025
Is that going to fly within the majors?
To not toot my very own horn right here, however whereas quite a lot of MLB writers are going to be asking themselves who the hell Tony Vitello is, I wrote a 3,000-word function about Tennessee in July, primarily based on interviews with a number of of the Volunteers’ high draft prospects, in addition to Vitello himself.
The quick model is that Vitello’s Tennessee groups wouldn’t be recognizable as a university baseball crew to somebody who got here to the longer term from 2015. They play an aggressive, firewagon model of baseball outlined by large energy on the plate and large fastball velocity on the mound. Vitello’s nationwide championship crew from 2024 scored 657 runs in 73 video games; that’s extra runs than 5 main league groups scored in a 162-game season. And their 184 homers would’ve ranked within the high half of the key leagues. In my function from July, I famous that 17 pitchers who’d performed in school throughout Vitello’s tenure had hit 100 mph within the majors within the first half of 2025; 5 of these performed for Vitello at Tennessee, together with Garrett Crochet, Chase Burns, and Chase Dollander. Three pitchers from this draft class — Liam Doyle, Marcus Phillips, and Nate Snead — hit 100 mph for Tennessee this previous season.
Vitello navigated the switch portal in addition to any coach within the nation. And he advised me his mannequin for man-management wasn’t Garrido or Graham and even his dad, a Corridor of Fame highschool baseball coach. It was Joe Maddon, who gained a World Sequence with the Cubs, with a tenet of: “If you happen to don’t struggle me on the large stuff, I gained’t struggle you on the little stuff.”
With all of the sources which have poured into school baseball over the previous decade, when it comes to cash, services, and know-how, the highest SEC packages — like Tennessee — are skilled operations in all however title. And Vitello, together with his $3 million a yr wage, will get paid accordingly.
Over the previous 5 years, the Volunteers have gained so much, and crowed about it. That’s endeared Vitello to his gamers, and made him extremely polarizing within the school baseball world at massive. I don’t know if Vitello goes to be any good at managing an expert baseball crew, however I do know he’s going to enter this job on Day 1 as one of the best supervisor within the league on the mic, to borrow a professional wrestling idiom.
That’s an enormous a part of why I’m so excited on the thought of Vitello being unleased on skilled baseball. He’s good sufficient to select his spots, and he would possibly hold his head down early on, however he has the early Jose Mourinho Troll Gene.
The leisure issue doesn’t finish there. I mentioned Vitello was polarizing earlier; I’m on the optimistic finish of the magnet. His groups play baseball the way in which I feel baseball should be performed, with bravado and panache, they usually’ve kicked ass and brought names from Oxford to Omaha doing issues this fashion.
Above all, that is novel. Is Vitello assured to be a greater rent than the new bench coach? Completely not. However Buster Posey, for good or in poor health, just isn’t a standard president of baseball ops. It’s good that he’s committing, and hiring an unorthodox discipline supervisor.
I’m not apprehensive about Vitello’s baseball credentials or his folks expertise. However he’s not going to have a expertise benefit like he had at Tennessee, and he’s not going to have the ability to construct his personal roster the way in which school coaches do. He’ll solely be capable of use such instruments as Posey and GM Zack Minasian give him.
In the end, I feel there are three areas which might be going to make or break Vitello as a significant league coach, assuming he results in San Francisco.
First: Energy and conditioning. Highschool recruits and transfers climbed over one another to play for Vitello at Tennessee as a result of it turned generally known as a spot the place you possibly can add a grade to your uncooked energy within the weight room or 10 mph to your fastball within the pitching lab. Doyle, Phillips, and Snead have been all velo bounce guys, and when requested about them — together with in his interview with me — Vitello gave the credit score to Quentin Eberhart, the Vols’ director of baseball sports activities efficiency.
I don’t know if the identical strategies will work on 32-year-old large league veterans as 19-year-old school children. At any price, a university conditioning program is normally about constructing. An expert conditioning program additionally has to account for surviving a 162-game common season, in a physique that doesn’t bounce again in addition to a youngster’s does. I additionally don’t know if it’s potential to construct the identical sort of benefit within the majors by not skipping leg day. Both means, the Giants are going to get their coaching and medical staffs squared away.
Second: Main league pitching improvement. Vitello’s pitching coach at Tennessee has been Frank Anderson, father of former A’s left-hander Brett Anderson. He’s finished a terrific job at Tennessee, each when it comes to successful on the school degree and getting his gamers prepared for the draft.
However what Tennessee does on the pitching aspect is not going to work within the majors.
There’s quite a lot of messy deliveries, quite a lot of dangerous fastball shapes, some control-over-command… stuff which you could get away with even within the SEC, however that can get you lit up once you’re going through Shohei Ohtani or Fernando Tatis Jr. with the division title on the road. Vitello’s obtained to return to the skilled recreation understanding what gained’t switch from school, and his pitching coach rent could be the primary indication of whether or not he’ll achieve success or not.
The third factor that’ll decide Vitello’s success or failure: Analytics, and the combination of identical. Vitello’s not some innumerate caveman; I’ve no purpose to doubt that he’ll comply with the numbers when there’s a bonus to be gained there. What considerations me is the deadly flaw in any quantitative evaluation: That “analytics” are a garbage-in, garbage-out enterprise.
Giants followers will discover that Vitello just isn’t the primary tanned-and-toned out-of-left-field managerial candidate their membership has kicked the tires on this decade. In 2021, the Giants’ resident brains-in-jars cooked up a swing path evaluation that gave supervisor Gabe Kapler a crystal ball when selecting matchups. The outcome: Nearly each participant in a platoon-heavy lineup had a profession yr, and the Giants gained 107 video games.
Distinction that to Kapler’s first season as an enormous league supervisor, 2018. The Phillies’ inside defensive analytics percolated up some figures that made it appear like Scott Kingery was a greater defensive shortstop than future Gold Glove winner J.P. Crawford. The Phillies, anticipated to contend early in Bryce Harper’s tenure, went one recreation underneath .500 over Kapler’s two seasons in cost, and to today there are some corners of the Delaware Valley the place saying Kapler’s title out loud will provoke a struggle.
Briefly: Vitello goes to need each edge he can discover. (And if the purpose is to beat the closely overpowered Dodgers in a good struggle, he’s going to want it.) The Giants want to supply evaluation he can belief, and ensure they put the best folks in his ear to assist him soak up and disseminate that info to his gamers.
There’s so much to love about this rent. Vitello goes to be at house because the frontman for a significant league crew. He’s an ideal motivator who’s fashionable together with his gamers. A discipline supervisor who’s used to appearing as a de facto GM would possibly mesh rather well with Posey, an government who’s extra snug the nearer he will get to the sphere.
However I don’t know how that is going to go. That uncertainty — and the truth that the Giants are courageous sufficient to embrace it — is what I like most.
