How new Giants manager Tony Vitello prepared to make MLB history vs. Yankees

SAN FRANCISCO — When Tennessee athletic director John Currie called Tony Vitello in the summer of 2017 and asked him to interview for the head coaching job, Vitello didn’t have much time to think. Everything was coming at him quickly, but as he packed for the interview, he figured he should be prepared for what might happen if all went well.Vitello grabbed the only orange shirt he had, a Nike golf polo he occasionally would wear on recruiting trips because it kept him cooler than some other options in his closet. Currie soon offered Vitello the job, and a day later, he sat down at a table at the airport to sign a life-altering contract. He knew exactly what to wear.“I thought, let’s get this going with some orange,” he recalled this spring. “And little did I know, I offended everybody in Vol nation.”As the ink dried on that deal, Vitello learned a valuable lesson about pantones. That shirt was closer to the orange worn by SEC rival Florida than to Tennessee’s shade, but it didn’t take long for everyone to forget the fashion faux pas. Vitello quickly turned a bottom-tier program into a contender, and eventually a national champion for the first time. He’s now set to attack an even tougher task.Vitello on Wednesday will become the first to manage a big league game without prior professional experience. He will do so in the first game of the entire MLB season, and the first game ever televised by Netflix, which is treating this like a World Series broadcast. The New York Yankees will be on the other side.If that pressure has started to weigh him down, it did not show when the Giants returned to Oracle Park on Monday afternoon.Vitello went through his usual routine, which for him means he was seemingly everywhere. He met with the front office before batting practice and then the broadcasters, and when players took the field, he moved around endlessly, standing behind Willy Adames as he took grounders and watching on the grass Heliot Ramos take fly balls. He stopped to talk to some of his new coaches as players took swings and then went over for a check-in with Ron Wotus. If you ignored the hoodie that is so often pulled snugly over his Giants cap, Vitello looked just like any other big league manager. For the Giants, that’s a welcome sign. Vitello’s spring started with three national reporters in camp — a rarity around these parts in recent years — and endless questions about what he is trying to accomplish. But for the most part, with one notable exception, it ended up being a quiet six weeks in Scottsdale. Vitello put his head down and focused on the work, which is what he believes got him here in the first place. Twenty-five years ago at Missouri, he figured out that that was the only way.Vitello is the son of a longtime coach in St. Louis, but that didn’t lead to college stardom. When he got to Missouri as a walk-on, head coach Tim Jamieson told him that on any day, he might tap him on the shoulder and let him know there was no longer a roster spot available.“In order to make sure I didn’t get that tap, I didn’t think I could outperform anybody, but I could outwork anybody,” he said on Monday’s Giants Talk podcast. “And then I thought if I was a good teammate, to the coaches (and) a conduit of the coaches, but also to the rest of the team, it would be tough to get rid of me. The teammate thing has been my real path to where I am now, just studying it, knowing what it looks like, trying to be it myself.“It’s something I’m very, very passionate about.”Vitello talked often this spring about good teammate behavior, and if you’re looking for a secret sauce, a reason why Buster Posey took a leap of faith last October, that’s a major ingredient. The front office did not do Vitello any favors in the offseason, building veteran depth instead of chasing the top of the market. The bullpen is a massive question mark, which is suboptimal for a first-time manager who will be judged in large part on how he fares in the late innings.But Posey, Zack Minasian and the rest believe Vitello will make the difference for an organization stuck in mediocrity. When they met with some agents over the winter, they talked of how the new staff alone could be worth enough wins to get the Giants back to the postseason.It will take six months to figure out if that’s true, but it was clear this spring that a lot has changed. There’s only so much you can do with big leaguers, especially the established ones making &dollar;20-plus million, but Vitello made subtle alterations to the way the Giants prepared for the season.Their live batting practice sessions included fielders, turning them into more productive scrimmages. When players took fly balls, music was blasted as loud as possible to simulate crowd noise and make it harder to communicate on balls hit into the gaps. One day, Giants outfielders did their drills as “Welcome to the Jungle” shook the ballpark’s windows. Vitello did not have enough time in the offseason to go back and watch every 2025 loss, but improved outfield defense is one area he targeted. Vitello might have hit more fungoes than any manager in the Cactus League, and he often teamed up with bench coach (and former Missouri teammate) Jayce Tingler to hit fly balls and pop-ups that normally would come from a machine. They prefer doing it that way because of the way the ball spins off a bat. Vitello likes throwing BP himself because he thinks it gives him the best view of a hitter’s swing.During one early scrimmage, a sinker shattered a bat, leaving a large shard in the grass a few feet away from Matt Chapman. The hooded figure who emerged from a pack of players and jogged out to pick it up was the boss.“His battery doesn’t drain,” one of the coaches said of Vitello as he watched the scene. The intensity doesn’t die down, either. Two days after the scrimmage against Team USA, Vitello gathered the entire team around the pitcher’s mound at Scottsdale Stadium and loudly aired some grievances from the game. It was a scene straight out of a college practice, but it seemed to resonate.The most notable moment of the spring came during the second week, when Vitello sat down in the dugout for his usual morning session with reporters and asked when everyone thought he was going to get the Giants job. He remains upset that word leaked that he was the likely choice four days before he came to the decision and informed his team. During that three-minute cold open, he recalled how some of his Tennessee coaches saw a report in the middle of a practice at Knoxville and started “freaking out.”That conversation was poorly timed, coming not only months after he took the job, but also during a quiet period for the NFL and the NBA All-Star break. That allowed his quotes to dominate the news cycle in the Bay Area for a couple of days, but Vitello seemingly didn’t have regrets.The main takeaway from many fans who heard it was that Vitello needed to stop talking about Tennessee, and that wasn’t fully off the mark. His early sessions with reporters included more references to former Vols like Drew Beam and Christian Moore than Willy Adames and Rafael Devers, but Vitello is self-aware about it all. He would note how often he told certain stories, but over the second half of the spring, there was much less Vols talk. The constant Tennessee references do make a lot of sense, though. It’s all he knew for almost a decade prior to taking the Giants job, and he calls his time in Knoxville “the backbone of what got me here.” But Vitello doesn’t want there to be any doubts about how committed he is to San Francisco.“I say this humbly but I kind of didn’t know what the hell I was doing as a coach when I first started, so I had to figure stuff out. In doing so I’ve kind of come up with a standard that I have for myself as a coach, and one thing is, if I’m not all-in on what I’m doing then I’ll just retire,” he said on Giants Talk. “I’m cool with that. I don’t see that as an issue.”To be fair to Vitello, it would have been impossible to fully move past the Vols this spring even if he wanted to. Vitello was an excellent recruiter and opposing Cactus League teams were littered with his former players. One of them, Blake Burke, broke up a no-hitter the Giants were throwing on March 19.The stands at Scottsdale Stadium were filled with Volunteers fans and the parents of players from Arizona that he had recruited. After the Team USA scrimmage, a woman ran up as he walked off the field and said she was from Tucson. She then thanked him for the national championship. The success at Tennessee put Vitello on Posey’s radar, but it also made it that much harder to leave. Months later, he recalls that process as a “slow burn.” As fan bases in two states waited for a resolution, he spent time calling friends and mentors, looking for advice. Hours were spent watching TV and smoking cigars with strength coach Quentin Eberhardt, who eventually followed him to San Francisco. Eberhardt left Tennessee for the Chicago Cubs in 2021 before returning a few months later. He understood exactly what his friend was wrestling with. “Leaving Tennessee was the hardest thing I ever did,” Eberhardt said this spring. “Leaving Tennessee was heart-wrenching, and I’m just the strength coach, right? He was the head guy and we all got together because of him. His was multiplied by 100. It wasn’t easy and I told him it’s going to be the hardest thing you do. These are your kids, this was your life.”Like many others in Vitello’s life, Eberhardt didn’t try to influence Vitello’s decision. But when asked, he did have a message. “Go be great,” he said. “I didn’t even think I would be coming here with him, but the message was to go be great.”When Vitello looks back on those days and nights, he has one major regret. He never got a chance to really say goodbye to the Vols. Life moved on quickly. They had fall practices to get through and he had a press conference in San Francisco, and before long he was off to Seoul to have Korean BBQ with Jung Hoo Lee, and Santo Domingo, to join Adames and Devers at the best steakhouse in the Dominican Republic. A lot was thrown at Vitello over the winter, and that didn’t stop when he arrived in Scottsdale. He did find, though, that he has plenty of allies.Asked on Monday if he feels more prepared for all of this, Vitello noted that he has had long conversations with Wotus, Ron Washington, Dusty Baker, Bruce Bochy and many others. The Giants couldn’t have built a better support system.Vitello had hoped to save some of the texts and calls for Baker and Bochy, in particular. But early in camp, he found himself stumped one day.“I broke down and called Boch,” he said, smiling. Bochy plans to be in San Francisco often and Baker spent a lot of time in Scottsdale and is now a regular at Oracle Park. Both always are a call away, and Tingler and Washington are trusted allies on the new coaching staff. Wotus, the longest-tenured coach in franchise history, still is offering wisdom on a daily basis. Vitello said he has taken notes from all of the spring interactions, but once the lights turn on Wednesday night, it will all ultimately be on his shoulders. Posey is placing a huge bet that Vitello is the right man to lead the Giants back to glory, and the evidence will start to present itself in the coming days and months. Spring training was smooth and got the team in the right frame of mind, but now he’s in charge of decisions that might win or lose a game.Vitello feels he’s prepared for it, or as prepared as he can be. After months of flights and meetings and trying to make sure he knew the name of every person he passed in a hallway at Scottsdale Stadium, he was excited to settle into his office on Monday. It’s sparsely decorated, but that might be the case for a while. The focus has been elsewhere, and he now will have actual games to worry about. “When the game starts, it’s just the game,” he said. “I’m well aware there are ups and downs in this game and there will be on Wednesday, too, and decisions and frustrations and happiness — all that will come.“But it’s also why everyone is here. Yeah, there will be nerves for guys and things like that, but I think I’m as anxious as anybody for that to arrive.”Download and follow the Giants Talk Podcast

How new Giants manager Tony Vitello prepared to make MLB history vs. Yankees

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