ORLANDO, Fla. – San Francisco Giants manager Tony Vitello is the first to admit it: He’s still navigating his transition from the college grind to the major leagues as the calendar flips to mid-December. But MLB’s hectic winter confab – where his days are filled with meetings, evaluations and hotel lobby networking – offered up another dose of his new reality.
“It’s interesting. It’s kind of chaotic,” Vitello said to a scrum of reporters at the Signia Hotel for the Winter Meetings in Orlando. “Being part of the Giants, I feel an extreme amount of pressure to do something.”
Vitello was speaking about the many awards Giants folks have won this week, beginning with Jeff Kent’s Hall of Fame induction and ending with Duane Kuiper’s potential induction as a Ford C. Frick Award nominee.
The magnitude of the job will hit in waves, and he still characterizes himself as a guinea pig for any potential college-to-pros pipeline. One thing he’s made sure to do is find a way to connect with Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy, the only other current MLB manager who coached in college.
Careful not to break competitive boundaries, he has chatted with Murphy only through assistant pitching coach Frank Anderson and his son, Brett, who pitched under Murphy in Milwaukee. Through them, Murphy passed along a few nuggets of wisdom and assurance that Vitello will be OK.
“To be honest, (he’s preached) a confidence that there is a translation from the college game,” Vitello said. “When he was at Arizona State and Notre Dame, it was competitive at an incredibly high level – to an extreme, really. That should carry over at any level, you’d think.”
Vitello doesn’t appear short of confidence, but he’s on a mad dash this offseason to get fully immersed into MLB life. Until now, the first months of Vitello’s tenure have been all about building the foundation.
That has mostly meant building his coaching staff, which has been such a project that the Giants have yet to finalize it despite expectations the full group would be announced earlier this week. Consumed by that, Vitello has had little time left to fully soak in the roster – he’s still trying to catch up with text messages to players like Matt Chapman, he said.
Buster Posey and general manager Zack Minasian have fielded – and mostly dodged – questions about how they’ll fill the roster gaps and squeeze more juice out of the players they have in order to build on a disappointing 81-81 season in 2025. The basic needs are clear: a pitcher or two in the rotation, perhaps an outfielder. Most importantly, they want to build an infrastructure that can make the players already in house better.
Vitello still has mental strings attached to the college game and is clearly still getting acquainted with the team he will be managing next season. He drew a familiar parallel when asked about the state of the Giants’ roster.
“I think it’s a really fun roster when you look at it,” he said. “It almost has a parallel to a college team because there’s high turnover with guys getting drafted or graduating. You’ve got a solid group of guys that are solidified as, the very least, this is your role. We expect them to be there every day. And there’s also open competition in several spots, whether it be on the position side or the pitching side.
“So I think the combination is good, to already have a quality roster. The whole point of recruiting or front office conversations we’re having here is where we can improve things. An emphasis of our conversations up there is how we can improve the players we currently have. Sometimes that’s about a guy finding his true self or getting more experience.”
Once the coaching project dies down, Vitello has plans to visit Giants players in the Dominican Republic and Korea in the coming weeks. Baseball outside the United States is something of a foreign concept to Vitello, so to speak, as the players filtering in and out of college mostly hail from the U.S. Learning to manage players of different backgrounds is one of the other areas of inexperience he’ll be filling in.
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