Evaluating critiques of the San Francisco Giants' new manager, Tony Vitello

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And that’s been the 2026 Giants so far. Hold on, let me start over. It’s been a frustrating team so far, but it hasn’t exactly been a confusing one. The bullpen was supposed to be shaky, and it has been. The Giants haven’t scored a lot of runs because they haven’t been hitting the ball as well as they’re capable of. The rotation has had more ups than downs, with every game feeling like it might go sideways. It’s the team we were told to expect, just with a nasty slump that infected almost the entire lineup. They may have already snapped out of it. If the team returns to its normal, .500-ish ways, perhaps new manager Tony Vitello isn’t as closely scrutinized, and he becomes just another manager. That is not the case at the moment, with the Giants still underwater, you will notice the atypical decisions and comments. So I’ve rounded up a few of the complaints that I’ve seen more than once, and I’ll chime in on if the criticisms are justified or unjustified. It won’t be a complete list, but that’s what the comments are for. Start with the easiest one to evaluate: A lot of the below quirks are fixable with experience or time, if they’re things that need to be fixed at all. They are something to notice more than they’re something to revolt against, at least for now. If you had complaints, they would have been secondary if Vitello’s response to the early-season weirdness were to start pulling at different threads, benching veterans and everyday players, searching for the hot hand. It would have made him look like a novice blackjack player with $20 left, sweaty and splitting cards he shouldn’t be splitting. It would have been one of the biggest red flags possible. The first time a manager sits a veteran in a game the veteran expects to start, it had better be for a better reason than “a rookie’s first five plate appearances.” Bailey might be one of the more frustrating valuable players in the game. If you go stat-shopping, you can claim that his defense makes him one of the more valuable players in baseball, even if he hits like a backup catcher. The problem is that he hits like a backup catcher, and he’s been even worse to start the 2026 season. But if the Giants are going to have a successful 2026 season, Bailey is much, much more likely to be involved than Susac. The highest batting average on the 2000 Giants didn’t belong to Barry Bonds, Jeff Kent or Ellis Burks. It didn’t even belong to Terrell Lowery, who went 15-for-34 (.441/.548/.646). No, the highest average on that team was Damon Minor, who hit .444 (4-for-9) with two walks and three homers. His slugging percentage (1.444) was higher than anyone else’s OPS that year, including the players who finished 1-2 in the National League MVP race. Those nine at-bats came toward the end of the season, though, when there weren’t so many open-ended questions. So nobody was thinking that there should be a way for Minor to be the starting first baseman in the postseason. It was just a nice li’l stretch where he looked like the actual Stretch. Susac might be the Giants’ future at the catcher’s position. Or he might never get a starting job and become one of their hitting coaches in a couple decades. Either way, it’s still the first page of his story. At least finish the first chapter before making a consequential decision like this. The lack of platoon-based pinch-hitting doesn’t bother me much, if at all. The Giants offered you years of strict platoon fanaticism, and it wasn’t very fun to watch. The correct move will eventually be Jared Oliva pinch-hitting for Jung Hoo Lee in the ninth inning, most likely, if we haven’t gotten there already. But take the first month and let the platoon candidates prove that they’re not platoon material. Fine by me. This complaint is legitimate, though, because the idea of a “bench” also includes defensive replacements and spot starts, and it’s absolutely absurd that Christian Koss didn’t get an at-bat until Wednesday night, the 13th game of season. The Giants have been blown out in games already this season, the point where Koss had to pitch before he hit, which suggests that giving Willy Adames or Luis Arraez or anybody else a little extra rest wouldn’t have been a problem. There should have been at least a couple of garbage-time at-bats for Koss already. The Giants’ bench is filled with major leaguers who think they can start on one of the 30 MLB teams, not college kids who aren’t an everyday player on one of the 300+ Division I college teams. What actually happened was an example of why it’s brutal to keep a major-league hitter out of action for that long. Koss came up in his first at-bat and scorched a 100-mph line drive into an out. Then he swung on the first pitch of his second at-bat and hit it to a second baseman playing directly behind the bag. It’s hard to deal with the innate unfairness of hitting a baseball when getting everyday at-bats. Now imagine being the phantom at the end of the bench, never knowing when your next chance will be. If it was a deliberate decision from Vitello to keep his everyday players in the lineup to show faith in his starters and prove that he’s not going to panic, that’s understandable. But there was a way to finesse Koss (and Oliva) into more playing time without tweaking noses. Hopefully, it’s smoother going forward. This is true, but with an asterisk. Experienced managers like Bob Melvin were given pretty detailed scenarios about when they should bring in this Pitcher A to face Batter A, B or C, and while there was perhaps a little wiggle room, these are not the old days. For the most part, those decisions were only partially made by Melvin. Now imagine how it is for a manager who has never played professional baseball, much less managed a major-league bullpen. What the Giants are doing right now is throwing spaghetti at the wall with their relievers and seeing whose spaghetti has the best spin rate. Or something to that effect. And if you listen to Vitello after the game … “Then you’ve got this — well, you can’t see it, maybe I shouldn’t show it — you got all these boxes and data and I can show you guys what it says, and we’re definitely using it, but we’re not leaning on it,” Vitello said. “It’s not the only thing we use. Sometimes it can be a tiebreaker. Sometimes it’s such a loud number that you do invest in the analytical side. And the rest is just who you think the best guy is down there.” He’s describing a pitcher-go-brrrrrrr box, where it’s telling you which pitchers are going brrrrrrrr and can strike out Shohei Ohtani nine times out of 10 if they’re throwing this well and executing. That box suggested that Caleb Kilian was likelier to turn Trea Turner, Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper into three outs than anyone else available, even a left-hander. Baggs called it a galaxy-brain move, which is more than appropriate, but it’s one with shared responsibility. A manager can get only so wacky with his bullpen in the modern game. It takes a village to get completely wacky, and the Giants will continue working on it until they find a solid eight relievers. Keaton Winn is the only reliever in the Giants’ bullpen to throw in back-to-back outings so far this year. It was, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, his worst outing of the year. But if that’s the most egregious example of misuse, the Giants might have the most delicately used bullpen in baseball. Here’s a handy site that keeps track of reliever usage. Scroll through it and marvel at all the back-to-backs for some of these teams. The Nationals’ Cole Henry threw 16 pitches and took the loss on Tuesday, then came back and threw 43 pitches on Wednesday. If you’re suspecting that the Giants are overworking their bullpen, it’s because you’re only watching two teams: the Giants and whomever they’re playing. The other teams leave after a couple days, so you can’t tell how hard they’re worked. This is, like the above, not entirely the purview of the manager. This is a group decision. So far, it’s been limiting the pitches and workload of an inexperienced bullpen. Good. You can tell that Vitello hasn’t played Major League Baseball. This is not a critique. This is a fact. It would be the same thing if a current major-league manager had to coach a college team, where the goals and aims and rules and vibes and pace and everything are slightly different. You’ll notice the inexperience. It might take months to fade away. It might never happen. The best analogy I have is a position change for a major leaguer. One of the most important things I learned from Russell Carleton, who recently semi-retired from writing, was that even the most brilliant defenders in baseball struggle with a position change. There’s so much that’s different, from the angles, to the speed of the ball off the bat, to the footwork, et cetera. Ozzie Smith’s defensive numbers would have taken a hit if he shifted to second base, at least initially. Rafael Devers’ defensive numbers would also take a hit if he shifts to second base, so let’s be realistic. Somewhere in that Devers-to-Ozzie spectrum is Vitello’s managerial ceiling, so to speak. He could still be the Ozzie Smith of deft managerial moves. He could be completely unqualified for the position, like Devers at second base. All I know is that there will be quirks like what we’ve seen until the experience accumulates. The Giants didn’t hire a new manager to communicate pinch-hitting duties perfectly. They hired one to make the whole danged thing run smoothly. There will be hiccups before the smoothening, and you will notice them. Vitello’s entire deal is connecting with people. It’s why he’s made it this far. He’s trying to be honest, entertaining and engaging with reporters, but it’s not the right format. He gets a few questions and a few minutes to explain, well, everything, and then he gets a few minutes after the game to answer questions about that specific game. In those minutes, he’ll reference Lil Wayne or Teddy Roosevelt and go on tangents, occasionally making you scratch your head. He’ll eventually decide if it’s worth it. If he’s sincere about ignoring people like me — and he should be, as should you — he’ll stick with the personality. If he’s tired of hearing about it, or if it somehow starts to affect play on the field, he’ll keep his head down and give 110 percent and come back tomorrow to give the same quotes as a generic store-brand manager. Right now, everything he’s saying is getting magnified, and there’s rarely context around it. Take the latest kerfuffle, where Vitello mentioned that there had been “two other clubhouse incidents” that reporters didn’t get wind of. It appeared to be unnecessarily volunteered information, except consider the context. The first clubhouse incident he’s referring to was Matt Chapman telling Casey Schmitt to catch the f’ing ball. That wasn’t much of an incident. I have worked under (and done a podcast with) an editor who would 100 percent look me in the eyes and say “Catch the f’ing ball,” except he would make it about writing, and he wouldn’t leave out the offending letters. Then he would say them again. And I would take that message in the spirit it was given because I respect this editor and his methods of communication, which range from love-love to tough love. If it came from a different editor, the message might not land. You have to know the dynamics, and the people involved definitely do. So in that spirit, where the “incident” in question was something relatively banal and ephemeral in a workplace setting, and it shouldn’t be that be weird to mention them offhand like Vitello did. If he gets tired of the scrutiny and parsing of every quote, he’ll stop giving them. If he’s truly not reading the chatter and focused on baseball, baseball, baseball, he’ll keep being himself, and the idea is that eventually it will seem charming. He’ll start to get better in the format with experience. That’s the working theory, at least. But I’m just a writer who gives 110 percent and absolutely loves it when a manager says something I haven’t heard before. If it becomes a problem, it’ll probably stop. Here’s hoping it doesn’t become a problem. It’s too much fun as is. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Grant Brisbee is a senior writer for The Athletic, covering the San Francisco Giants. Grant has written about the Giants since 2003 and covered Major League Baseball for SB Nation from 2011 to 2019. He is a two-time recipient of the SABR Analytics Research Award. Follow Grant on Twitter @GrantBrisbee