The San Francisco Giants are preparing to announce that University of Tennessee coach Tony Vitello has been hired as the 40th manager in franchise history, sources tell The Athletic.
He is unlike all 39 of his predecessors.
Vitello, 47, is making the nearly unprecedented jump from a college campus to a major-league dugout. He has no professional experience as a player, having transitioned directly into coaching after playing at the University of Missouri. He will have to adjust to the brand-new challenges of navigating a 162-game MLB schedule, soothing the egos of multimillionaire players and managing a roster that is not of his own orchestration.
But his magnetism and high motor resonated with Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey, who isn’t too far removed from his own experience as a college baseball standout at Florida State — and whose legendary self-assurance continues to be on full display barely one year into his executive tenure. Posey did not hesitate to pivot to Vitello, his least conventional candidate, when Nick Hundley, the early frontrunner for the job, withdrew his name from consideration due to family reasons. The financial component to land Vitello was no sure thing, given his $3 million annual salary at Tennessee — along with a $3 million buyout — and his rock-star status in Knoxville while leading a program that has advanced to the College World Series in three of the past five seasons.
When Posey identifies the person he wants, though, he tends to draw a direct line between A and B.
Vitello will face a steep learning curve, but he also brings a wealth of knowledge about player development, particularly on the pitching side, while graduating 10 first-round picks over his eight seasons in Knoxville, including Boston Red Sox left-hander, Cy Young Award candidate Garrett Crochet and flamethrowing Los Angeles Angels reliever Ben Joyce. Among the Vols’ four first-round picks in the 2025 draft was infielder Gavin Kilen, whom the Giants took with the 13th pick. The Giants also have former Vols shortstop Maui Ahuna representing them in the Arizona Fall League; they acquired two more former Tennessee standouts, outfielder Drew Gilbert and right-hander Blade Tidwell, in the late-July trade that sent reliever Tyler Rogers to the New York Mets.
Gilbert was one of Vitello’s all-time favorite players at Tennessee, who has been credited with changing the culture of the program into a team that plays with swagger and style. Gilbert made a similar impact on the Giants this past season after he made his major league debut in August, enlivening their clubhouse and dugout with his offbeat energy. It will be interesting to learn how much Gilbert’s impact on the Giants clubhouse piqued Posey’s curiosity to pursue Vitello as a candidate.
In September, it was notable that Posey made an unscheduled trip to join the Giants for a series at Coors Field while Vitello happened to be there visiting four of his former players. Vitello, speaking on a podcast with Youth.inc released on Tuesday, confirmed that he spoke with “a GM” during that visit and that, within their conversation, they lamented the current state of the game.
“I think everyone is suffering the consequences all the way up to the big leagues where guys are super skilled, but there’s less development, less coaching, less accountability and therefore less understanding of how to actually play the game to win,” Vitello told Youth.inc. “And it starts all the way, trickle-down effect.”
Posey has made many similar remarks since taking over as the Giants’ top baseball official 12 months ago, extolling the value of players who develop the ability to compete along with physical skills like bat speed and spin rate.
Vitello has recruited and helped develop more than a dozen major-league players from his time as an assistant at Missouri, Texas Christian and Arkansas, in addition to his eight seasons turning around what had been a dejected program at Tennessee. None of his former pupils is more accomplished than Max Scherzer, the three-time Cy Young Award winner and future Hall of Famer who helped pitch the Toronto Blue Jays to the World Series this past week.
Scherzer, when asked last week by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal about the prospect of Vitello as a major-league managerial candidate, expressed confidence that the concept wasn’t crazy.
“It’s the competitiveness. It’s the fire. It’s the intensity,” Scherzer said. “And it’s the communication skills. He makes it so relatable. He’s such a players’ guy. He makes you want to run through a brick wall for him. He was perfect for me when I was in college. He helped even to foster my mentality and add to it, really helped bring it out of me. Mizzou was my ground zero where I really took off and his fingerprints are all over that. So I absolutely believe in him. He’s to this day one of my closest friends and I absolutely believe he’s gonna get it done at the big league level.
“He’s going to get players to buy in. I know there’s going to be this narrative that he doesn’t have any pro ball experience. But his ability to relate to players and his fire and passion for the game is going to resonate with everybody within that clubhouse. So I just don’t see that as an issue.”
Vitello led the Vols in an intrasquad scrimmage at Lindsey Nelson Stadium on Tuesday that was open to the public. Fans chanted his name and hung a banner imploring him to stay. Vitello threw autographed baseballs into the stands. At one point prior to the scrimmage, after emerging from what appeared to be a team meeting, Vitello was seen repeatedly wiping his eyes with his sleeve.
Some Tennessee fans were so desperate to keep him over the past few days that they created fake Giants fan accounts and flooded social media with negative comments about the potential hire. According to a source, athletic director Danny White is expected to hold a news conference later this afternoon to address Vitello’s departure and next steps for the Volunteers.
“You see how much he loves Tennessee, you almost think he’s going to be there for the rest of his career,” Joyce said in a phone interview. “I would have been less shocked if I saw that he signed a lifetime contract to Tennessee, just because of the way that they love him in Knoxville. He took Tennessee from bottom of the SEC to one of the best programs in the country in two or three years, so that’s a pretty record-setting pace to do something like that. I know how hard he works, so I was not surprised to hear that he was in talks with being a big league manager at all.”
Although Vitello wouldn’t be the first major-league manager to leap from a college head coaching position, his hiring has no true precedent. When the New York Yankees hired Florida State coach Dick Howser to manage in 1980, Howser had been on campus for one season, and prior to that, he’d spent eight seasons as a major-league player, plus 10 more on the Yankees coaching staff. Before the California Angels hired Arizona State coach Bobby Winkles to manage in 1973, Winkles had spent a season on their coaching staff.
There’s been more movement in both directions between Division I programs and the major leagues in recent years, a change that likely has something to do with the truncation of the minor leagues and the cutting-edge advancement of player development at the college level. The Detroit Tigers hired pitching coach Chris Fetter straight out of the University of Michigan in 2020; former Minnesota Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson came from the University of Arkansas, and then went back to Division I when LSU offered him more money than he was making in the big leagues.
Former major leaguer and University of Arizona coach Chip Hale, who managed the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2020-21, said he was surprised to see Vitello emerge as a major-league candidate but is bullish on his ability to make a successful transition.
“When I think of the best managers, it’s about relationships and how you handle people,” Hale said. “I’ve seen it with Tony on the recruiting trail: unbelievable with people, unbelievable with families, so good at the relationship part of it. For every front office or owner picking a manager, they’ve got to be a great leader of men. That’s where Pat Murphy has done a great job. He’s got those guys playing at a high level.”
Murphy, the only MLB manager this past season who had been a Division I head coach, is likely to win his second consecutive National League Manager of the Year Award after leading the Milwaukee Brewers to the NL’s best record. Murphy has invigorated the Brewers with his folksy charm and unmistakably collegiate intensity; he also spent more than a decade in pro baseball, including eight seasons as the Brewers’ bench coach, following his career at Notre Dame and Arizona State. If teams around the league are searching to emulate the Brewers’ fundamentally sound style, then hiring a manager in Murphy’s mold would seem to be part of the attraction.
Although Vitello doesn’t have Murphy’s professional baseball experience, by tapping him to manage the Giants, Posey is betting on the personality while seeking a leader who can continue player development at the major-league level — all while managing an ambitious franchise with big-money players like Rafael Devers, Matt Chapman and Willy Adames, who are being paid to win now.
“I know the work ethic he has will translate really anywhere,” Joyce said. “He’s the kind of guy if he has his mind on something, he’s going to do it. If he went to the big-league level, I think he’d be great. From a mentally positive and hard-working standpoint, I think it would translate to really whatever level he’s at.”
Murphy, speaking on the New York Post Sports Podcast with Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman, said on Tuesday that he didn’t feel ready when he was elevated to the interim manager role with the San Diego Padres in 2015. But Murphy also said he has too much respect for Posey to doubt that Vitello can be successful.
“He knows it’s a tremendous transition from college to the major leagues for a guy that’s never been in a major league dugout,” Murphy said of Posey. “They’re not stupid. They know what they’re getting into. And they see things in this guy that help lead a club – an unabashed way of saying, ‘This is how we’re going to do it’ or a personality that can handle the media, a personality that can handle different types of players.
“Everyone’s (going to) say, ‘How can this work? You can’t go from harness racing to thoroughbred racing.’ Oh yes you can, if you know what you’re getting into and that horse can run. I think it’s a great thing for the game. … The Giants are not stupid. They’re not throwing a dart at the board. They’ve done their research and they believe the guy can do it. So I’m gonna say he can do it.”
The Athletic was the first to mention Vitello as a potential candidate on Sept. 28, one day before the team fired Bob Melvin, and was also was first to report that the Giants had offered him the position.
— The Athletic’s Sam Blum contributed to this report.
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