San Francisco Giants manager Tony Vitello doesn’t speak in clichés. He’s also not entirely sure why.
Asked recently by Chris Rose why he speaks so openly with reporters rather than defaulting to the kind of clichés that define most dugout press conferences, Vitello traced it back to his days as a college recruiting coordinator — and to his mother.
“When you’re a recruiting guy in college, you’re the liaison between scouts and the players, and the one thing we always try to do is talk to our players and say, hey, these scouts are just guys that have a job to do,” Vitello said. “Umpires, media, scouts, agents, those people, as far as their job — they all have a different job than I do that can probably only interfere with trying to win games — but they are people. My dad was intense as it gets, but my mom was pretty damn strict about the manners, so I think it’s just about respect for people’s time, and you’ve got to have something to write, and I’d rather just have a conversation.”
The philosophy has been on full display since Vitello arrived in San Francisco last October after eight seasons as Tennessee’s head baseball coach, though not always in the way he might have intended. His first notable press conference as Giants manager involved him re-litigating the media reports around his own hiring, telling reporters the leak “might have changed the course of history” before walking it back the following day.
Two games into the regular season, he blamed himself publicly for the Giants’ scoreless start, saying he got “all fire and brimstone” and left the locker room “a little emotional.” During a Fox broadcast, he told Ken Rosenthal that the biggest adjustment from college to the majors was “I can’t talk down to guys anymore, they’re my age.”
He’s also aware, at least in theory, that the openness has limits.
“Then what you do with it, I don’t really care because it’s not going to affect my world unless it gets so loud to where it’s, hey, the lefty came in, and now you’re the third media person to bring it up,” Vitello said. “Now, at least I know about it, but again, for me to let that into my world, my world’s already pretty chaotic.”
As Awful Announcing’s Sean Keeley noted back in February, the question was always whether Vitello would talk himself into trouble once the criticism arrived. Nearly 50 games into the job, he’s provided a pretty clear answer to that.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.