THE FATHER HAD seen this look many occasions earlier than: the jaw set, the darkish eyes narrowing, the posture tense. This is the transformation the son undergoes each time he loses: the optimism, often about three ft thick, is changed with a brittle sulk, as if the second he is lower than utterly consumed by shedding is the second he’ll develop into without end outlined by it.
Greg Vitello watched his son, Tony, handle the San Francisco Giants in opposition to Team USA on a superbly wonderful March Tuesday afternoon at Scottsdale Stadium in Arizona. All spring coaching video games are exhibitions, however this recreation, an exhibition inside the exhibition season, contained a number of layers of insignificance. There was a gaggle of massive league superstars in the third-base dugout. On the first-base aspect, a Giants roster depleted by seven of its personal World Baseball Classic gamers. But as the rating acquired worse and worse, as 5-1 develop into 7-1 turned 13-1 on its method to 15-1, Greg stored trying down at the dugout, watching his son’s bearing tighten as if cranked by an invisible wrench. He observed Giants gamers inching their method to the far finish of the dugout, a tide ebbing from the pull of his son’s depth.
“They don’t know what he’s all about yet,” Greg says. “It’s going to take them a while, probably until they start playing real games, but that showed me they’re starting to figure it out.”
The father laughs a bit of as he finishes saying this. He is aware of his son, the first individual to soar straight from school head coach to main league manager, has by no means been content material to be a personality in another person’s script. Tennessee had not been to a College World Series in 12 years when Vitello was employed as the head coach in 2017; the Volunteers made it thrice in his eight seasons and received it in 2024. His groups had been brash and loud and infrequently prepared to cross the permeable barrier that separates sportsmanship from its reverse. And the father laughs as a result of he can see the thunderheads forming in the distance and is aware of earlier than anybody that it is time to put together for what’s coming.
“Yep, they better be ready,” he says. The giggle once more.
The checklist of nevers is lengthy. Tony Vitello by no means performed skilled baseball, by no means coached professionally, by no means wore the uniform of any skilled crew in any capability, by no means coached a participant from a Latin nation, by no means a lot as attended a spring coaching recreation earlier than he managed one on Feb. 21. As an assistant at TCU greater than a decade in the past, he spent 36 hours with the Texas Rangers at spring coaching, however he would not keep in mind a lot about it besides that he could not even keep for a whole exercise.
Vitello is as shut to a tabula rasa as exists in skilled sports activities. The scouting report is skinny: intense, aggressive, energetic. Beyond that, who is aware of? A wiry and youthful 47, he kinds his longish curly hair in a method that appears completely, and deliberately, fitted to a baseball cap. His beard is country-singer manicured, his eyes by no means relaxation, and his tooth are white sufficient to learn by. Before the first full-squad exercise, with anticipation colliding in the air with uncertainty — “First day of school,” reliever Tristan Beck termed it — Vitello stood in entrance of his gamers in the clubhouse and gave a speech that careworn the worth of being an excellent teammate. Later that morning, he took the discipline sporting an infielder’s glove that seemed pristine, straight out of the field, as if he’d heard the sounds of baseball inside Scottsdale Stadium and determined to see in the event that they’d let him play. (“Always ready,” pitcher Robbie Ray says, laughing.) Vitello made his method round the discipline, repeatedly smacking his proper fist into the palm of the glove, a water bottle in every again pocket, adopted by a documentary movie crew led by Colin Hanks. It was an enormous day, and earlier than it was over, he hopped in line and took floor balls at first base throughout PFP drills. Managers historically cowl much less floor, content material to lean on the batting cage. But there was Vitello, darting round like a fish in a tank.
“It’s like he’s everywhere at once,” shortstop Willy Adames says. “He’s at the cages, and then you look around and he’s at the backfield looking at guys taking ground balls, and then 10 minutes later he’s watching guys running the bases. It’s not something a lot of managers do.”
The father describes it this fashion: “A new era of manager for a new era of player.” But the man who employed Vitello, Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey, says, “That’s an interesting take. It’s not something I considered going through the process.”
Greg coached soccer and baseball at De Smet Jesuit High School in St. Louis, and he did it nicely sufficient and lengthy sufficient to be inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. He coached Tony in each sports activities — “He was a much better baseball player,” Greg says — and largely they might speak about recreation technique and lineup development, however often the drives house could be tumultuous. The crew did not have a bus, so Greg and Tony would journey to and from highway video games collectively in the household automotive. Once, when he was a senior, Tony barked at an umpire after a recreation, inside earshot of his father. Greg let his son know that the coach was the solely individual licensed to handle the umpires, and he punctuated his message by slamming his fist on the dashboard so exhausting the radio popped out of its console and hung by its wires, like a tongue.
“The rest of the ride was quiet, as I recall,” Greg says.
Which is to say these two have been by means of all of it earlier than, and as Greg tried to coax his son out of the primordial darkness that engulfed him after the loss to Team USA, he emphasised the wildly unequal expertise degree in the respective dugouts.
“I get that you’re upset,” he mentioned, “but that was a baseball dream team over there.”
Tony stared at his father, his brown eyes practically black, the pupils like darts, and mentioned:
“So what?”
HE WILL LOSE once more. He will lose many, many occasions. He will lose video games as a result of his crew performed poorly, and he’ll lose video games as a result of he made the mistaken determination at the mistaken time, and he’ll lose video games for no detectable purpose in any respect. He will lose as a result of the season is 162 video games lengthy and that is simply what occurs in baseball, and the solely method to survive is to determine which losses are value worming their method into your psyche, and which are not.
Vitello would not know what a regular-season recreation appears to be like like from the dugout, so he would not know which losses will carve a groove in his mind. It is mid-February, earlier than his crew would go 19-9 in Cactus League video games, and he is sitting in a small, windowless workplace in the Giants’ spring coaching facility, genially discussing all the issues that await him. “Each day comes with its own story, and you have to handle it as you see fit,” he says. “I don’t have an answer for people who want to know what it’s going to look like in August. I don’t even know what time I’m leaving the ballpark today. Probably grab some beef jerky for dinner and stay late. That’s what I did last night.”
He has constructed his model on charisma and vitality, and on a capability to learn a room and every of its disparate elements. But the room and the elements at the moment are completely different. College baseball occupies a uniquely purgatorial place in the athletic firmament. Bad groups are largely ignored, and the actually good ones — and their coaches — are exalted. The media panorama is an adjustment; Vitello admits to being unfamiliar with shut scrutiny, saying the media in Knoxville “were like teammates,” an evaluation a reporter who coated him there says “sounds about right.”
After Tennessee received the College World Series, different huge league golf equipment — ones Vitello will not title — inquired about his curiosity in managing. His agent, Jimmy Sexton, fielded most of their questions, and the thought started to take maintain. Vitello instructed Sexton, “I don’t want my baseball career to end without being a manager if somebody will have me in that role.” Posey, trying to reset his crew’s stagnant tradition, was impressed throughout an off-the-cuff assembly with Vitello at a Giants-Rockies recreation in Colorado final yr, and when Bob Melvin was fired final fall after consecutive 81-81 seasons, Vitello turned a candidate.
“In a short amount of time, I went from never thinking about it to some people saying, ‘Dream come true,'” Vitello says. “I’m not being abrasive, but it was never a dream.”
Vitello was richly compensated at Tennessee — $3 million a yr — which created the leverage to develop into baseball’s highest-paid first-time manager at $3.5 million. (The Giants additionally paid the college $3 million to buy out his contract.) Reporting at the time indicated Posey was contemplating Vitello and former Giants catcher Nick Hundley, who took a job in the Rangers’ entrance workplace.
“One thing Tony told me early on was, ‘I’m not telling these guys to be this way. I’m just trying to get who they are to come out, whatever that looks like,'” Posey says. “That’s an attribute Bruce Bochy had. You’re not trying to mold people a certain way. You want their personality and their abilities to come out and give them the freedom to play fearless.”
The hiring was a shock on many ranges, one being the two males at the heart of it. Posey, the future Hall of Famer who performed in San Francisco with unassuming and impassive excellence for 12 seasons and three world championships, and Vitello, the fiery school man who confronted the problem of imbuing that fireplace into adults, lots of whom have multimillion-dollar assured contracts. Hunger ranges range.
And so, as Vitello contemplated the Giants’ provide for 4 fraught days alone in his Knoxville rental, he had questions. He referred to as associates who performed in the huge leagues, together with Max Scherzer, whom he coached at Missouri. “I needed answers to things I couldn’t see on TV,” Vitello says. What does it sound like? What does it really feel like? He needed to know what sort of conversations happened after video games, and the way a gaggle of grown males would react to his typically goofy humorousness.
He requested Shawn Kelley, a former huge league reliever, “Some of my jokes are pretty bad, like dad jokes, are these guys going to want to punch me in the face?” Kelley apparently gave Vitello the go-ahead to proceed, as a result of Vitello says, “I think my jokes have worked out about as well as in the past. I’m definitely starting to figure out who the good teammates are, because a couple of guys have had my back. I told one joke that fell on deaf ears, and [reliever Matt] Gage gave me a sly smile, and maybe just a noise. I don’t know if it was a chuckle, but anything to let you know they’re listening is good.”
He made some adjustments. Spring coaching was faster and louder. Melvin was a profitable manager who trusted the old-school playbook. Vitello, along with his glove and his questions, would not even know the place to discover it. He believes that he can swing a couple of video games by means of the power of his character, that conserving the vitality and dedication degree excessive for 162 video games can function a firewall in opposition to shedding streaks and sagging morale. “He will teach them there are no days off,” Greg Vitello says. Tony used 81-81 as motivation all through the spring, insisting that spotlight to element, and typically merely consideration, can flip three or 4 of these 81 losses into wins, and convey with it a spot in the playoffs.
“I saw that guy bring it every single day — fall, winter, spring, summer — over three straight years,” says Giants outfielder Drew Gilbert, who performed for Vitello at Tennessee. “So if he can bring even a percentage of that over the course of 162, look out.”
Gilbert was the image of the brash Tennessee/Vitello type, operating round like an overcaffeinated Labrador, often raging at umpires, flipping again his hair at each flip. Vitello joked that he may need to resort to a shock collar to handle Gilbert this time round, and that he was employed to be “Drew Gilbert’s babysitter.”
“There’s a certain standard that he expects you to play to, and practice to,” Gilbert says, “and if you don’t bring it every time he’ll get someone else who will.”
Vitello’s new-school strategy rapidly turned a subject in the Giants’ clubhouse; if a drill scheduled for 20 minutes was accomplished mistake-free in 5, it was over. “Up-tempo, fast-paced, get it done right and you’re done,” Gage says. Vitello held video research classes that broke down particular person performs into their smallest increments, inspecting them like sacred texts. To the bare eye, a runner scoring from second base on a single is a fairly simple proposition. On Vitello’s display screen, although, the particulars come alive. He breaks down the runner’s major and secondary leads, then highlights the learn he will get off the bat. Without any a kind of components, the runner may need been thrown out at the plate or held up at third.
“I can’t think of any other time in my career when we did that,” says Ray, in his thirteenth season and fifth group. “It’s probably something he did at Tennessee, but I like it because it’s positive reinforcement. Usually coaching revolves around what someone did wrong, but here it’s, ‘Hey, this happened because we did this small thing right.’ It creates a whole different energy.”
Posey says, “I thought Tony was going to eat, sleep and breathe this, and he is. I knew hiring Tony was going to be a headline, or headlines, but I thought it was going to be fun, too. Ultimately, the reason I have a job is that we’re in the entertainment business. Did we hire Tony strictly for entertainment value? Of course not, but there’s some value in that as well.”
Back in the windowless workplace, Vitello downloads the audiobook of “The Anxious Generation” after a dialogue about the rise of social media habit amongst younger individuals since the introduction of the smartphone. It’s the era he handled day by day in Tennessee, and that era of youngsters who had been youngsters in the 2010s now occupy practically each stool in the Giants’ clubhouse. The societal implications of know-how have been a supply of limitless curiosity to Vitello; as an alternative of surrendering, he sees the competitors for consideration like he sees every little thing else: a recreation to win.
“I don’t know whether it was COVID or not, but there’s definitely been a change in the way people communicate,” Vitello says. The e-book investigates, in half, how mother and father, out of an exaggerated concern of risks similar to childhood abduction, have ignored the very actual dangers of a screen-based childhood. “An easy example might be you let a kid go out in the yard and play stickball,” Vitello says, “and they might get hit in the head or the arm with the ball, but that’s not going to be as bad as getting hurt inside your brain or your soul.”
Giants gamers use the phrase “feel” to describe Vitello’s capability to perceive and relate to every participant on a private degree. It’s a decidedly new-agey — and dare we are saying collegiate — high quality for an enormous league manager, and it was exemplified late in spring coaching when a reporter innocently used the phrase “bodies” to describe the crew’s roster predicament when it got here to the determination on whether or not to maintain prized prospect Bryce Eldridge on the Opening Day roster. Vitello rapidly interrupted. “It’s a body,” he mentioned, “but it’s also a person.”
A human-centric philosophy is a dramatic departure from the notion of the Giants beneath Farhan Zaidi, the president of baseball operations earlier than Posey. Although the crew received a franchise-record 107 video games in 2021, the theme of Zaidi’s tenure turned machines over individuals. The reliance on analytics typically meant a unique lineup day by day, crafted in giant half by the entrance workplace, a tricky promote to a fan base that grew snug with the day-to-day simplicity of seeing the very same core of gamers take the discipline for the higher a part of a decade — and three World Series titles. The autonomy of the discipline manager is considered one of the enduring subplots of each franchise, and Posey is banking on Vitello’s familiarity with superior metrics — Tennessee was amongst the first adoptees in school baseball — and his capability to join with gamers to create an angle of repose.
“I’m a big believer, since I got to live this life as a player, that the structure between the front office and the coaching staff is one of teamwork,” Posey says. “I hope we disagree on things; we’re going to need to disagree at times. If I see something that I really think is backwards, I’ll say something.”
Vitello’s teaching workers, in addition to entrance workplace assistants Dusty Baker and Bochy, would possibly spin Vitello ahead earlier than the want for a confrontation. He will probably be flanked, figuratively no less than, by two former managers, bench coach and former Missouri teammate Jayce Tingler, and infield coach Ron Washington. Former Kansas State head coach Frank Anderson, Vitello’s pitching coach at Tennessee and director of main league pitching with the Giants, says, “One of the best things Tony did was embrace it. If you were insecure, you danged sure wouldn’t want all those guys around.”
Tingler and Vitello are longtime associates, and Vitello says, “I guess if I could get vulnerable for a second: You need co-workers, and you’ve got to lean on people, but you also need a friend. I think having somebody who’s lived out just about every scenario in this game is valuable on the work side, but also on the personal side.”
Vitello received greater than 72% of his video games in Knoxville. No crew in Major League Baseball received 60% final season. His competitiveness, by necessity, will probably be examined. He is not married or in any other case connected, and he deflects questions on his private life by saying he is “married to baseball.” But there will probably be strain, eight stable months of it, and the look he gave his father after the Team USA recreation carried a little bit of a warning in its personal proper.
“I do worry that he goes home to an empty house every night,” Greg says. “And I do think there are things he’s missing, but that’s coming from my perspective: married 57 years and raised four kids. To me, that’s the ideal. He comes home to nobody, so who does he talk to? Who does he vent with? Those are the things he’s had to learn to deal with by himself.”
Before Posey determined to rent Vitello, to drop the rock in the water and stand again to watch the ripples, Vitello made a confession:
“I don’t know how I’m going to handle losing 60 games a year.”
Posey, along with his attribute placidity, seemed throughout at Vitello and mentioned, “Trust me: If we lose 60 games, we’ll all be doing backflips.”
VITELLO’S ANSWERS ARE typically cryptic, withholding simply sufficient to maintain himself away from grand proclamations. He could be folksy when he needs to deflect, and goofy — invoking Lil Wayne at some point, explaining the problem of conducting a information convention with System of a Down banging by means of the ballpark audio system the subsequent. “I’m always going to be a little guarded,” he says. “I don’t like being phony, but I’m not going to go off the rails and say what I really want to say. At the same time, I don’t want to be boring.” There are occasions when a childlike marvel at his circumstances bubbles forth, like when, on the first day of dwell batting apply, Ray confronted Rafael Devers and Vitello mentioned, “If someone came up to me outside the ballpark and said those two were about to go at it, I don’t know how much I’d pay to come in, but I’d probably go up to 50 bucks.”
Still, there are few public examples of the brash, swaggering man who typically raged at umpires and celebrated the 2024 College World Series title like a one-man Mardi Gras. He has been deferential to those that got here earlier than him, even making some extent to reward ex-Cubs manager Joe Maddon regardless of Maddon’s description of Vitello’s hiring as “insulting.”
“We had a loud group at Tennessee,” Vitello says, “but I think I was labeled by a lot of opposing fans as being cocky, which is an attribute that I wish I had. Believing in yourself is important; I struggled with that as a player. I think I’m better at it as a coach, but at the very least I don’t think I’m cocky. But let’s be honest: Guys are running around wearing costumes, trying to have some fun and do their best, and when you’ve got a lot going on, you’re going to see some crazy stuff.” Reminded that he, as an enormous league manager, runs a crew in the solely sport the place the on-field chief additionally clothes in costume, Vitello laughs and says, “Yep, and you see some crazy stuff.”
“I didn’t know Tony before the interview process,” Posey says. “I just watched him and his teams and the way they played. It wasn’t my style as a player. I was more of an internal psychopath than outwardly a psychopath. But I loved the energy.”
Giants pitching prospect Blade Tidwell, considered one of the last cuts of spring, was pitching in opposition to Georgia State his freshman yr at Tennessee. Bases loaded, two out, full rely on the hitter. Allowed to name his personal pitches, Tidwell threw a pointy slider and acquired a referred to as third strike to finish the inning. As he roared off the mound, he was met close to the foul line by an unrestrained Vitello, screaming and pumping his arms, his physique primed for bodily contact.
“He ran over and shoved me,” Tidwell says, “and then he punched me in the stomach and rubbed my head until it knocked my hat off.”
Tidwell says when he heard the rumors about Vitello as soon as once more turning into his boss, he thought, “That’ll never happen. They won’t hire someone right from college.” And once they did, Tidwell says a number of days handed earlier than he acquired a textual content from Vitello. “What — you’re not even going to text me?” Vitello wrote, and Tidwell responded, “I’m fired up. Sound the trumpets.”
Vitello is working to wring all the self-deprecatory worth out of his personal enjoying profession. After a depressing season as a freshman at Division II Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama — the place the crew began 0-12 and included Vitello’s least-favorite attribute: dissension — he determined to stroll on at Missouri, the place he was assured nothing however a chance. He vowed to take one thousand swings off a tee day by day that summer time to prepare. “He didn’t get all the way to a thousand every day,” his father says, “but I bet he came close.” A shortstop, Vitello made the crew on the energy of his perspective and his fielding, and regardless of his bat. Anderson, the main league pitching director, says, “When we played Missouri, it was always a bad day if Vitello got a hit.” Vitello distinguished himself in different methods, although: by at all times being the first man to hop out of the dugout to heat up the nook outfielders between innings; by at all times sitting shut sufficient to head coach Tim Jamieson to take in the recreation’s finer factors; by priding himself on being hit by pitches — three seasons, 16 base hits, seven hit by pitches, a stat that completes the résumé of any college-baseball try-hard. “He says he was an All-American,” Greg says. “An All-American team player.”
He did not have the present, however that did not imply he could not assist those that do. He would study each facet of the recreation, working as a pitching coach at Missouri and an infield coach at TCU and a hitting coach at Arkansas. He would demand the similar quantity of vitality and dedication from his gamers that he despatched again at them. Not having one thing you need the most can develop into an influence unto itself. Was it an excessive amount of to ask they not squander the likelihood he would have completed something to have?
“He’s probably the most competitive person you’ve ever been around in your life,” Gilbert says. “He’s a guy you want to go compete with every day. He’s the best motivator you’ll ever be around. People think it’s an act, it’s fake. No, he gets you in the mindset of taking the head off whoever you’re playing against. That’s his superpower.”
CAN IGNORANCE BE a present? Can it’s his present? Not ignorance in phrases of intelligence, after all, however in phrases of newness, and an absence of preconception, and a set of darkish, brooding eyes that see every little thing in entrance of them prefer it’s the first day of creation?
So far, so good. Nothing issues till the video games rely, however there’s been progress. Without the burdens of historical past, he has requested questions and challenged present concepts. He would not care about custom or ritual or how we have at all times completed it. If he needs to put on his glove and name himself “coach,” as he did, repeatedly and unapologetically this spring, he could be reassured by the undeniable fact that Posey employed him to train and coach and be his genuine self.
“If it works, it might cause everyone to revisit some things,” Vitello says. “Sometimes you go through the motions and walk through the thought process rather than diving into it and explaining why we’re doing it. And sometimes you go through the motions and never think to ask why. We’re trying to ask why.”
Can he persuade them to need it as a lot as he does, to deal with each recreation prefer it’s a nine-inning siege? And if he does, will it’s sufficient to sway these 4 or 5 video games to the most well-liked aspect of 81?
Vitello considers himself extra of a guinea pig than a pioneer, however there is not any denying this is an experiment, an enormous and engaging and dangerous one. It’s all new: tomorrow, his first highway journey, August. He cannot let you know about any of them. This experiment has 162 steps, beginning now, and he’ll take them as they arrive, telling his corny jokes and seething in the dugout and looking for peace in the inevitable losses. He’ll let everybody else type out what all of it means.
