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.
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