News broke on Saturday that the San Francisco Giants were going outside the box … extremely outside the box … with their managerial search, and intended to hire University of Tennessee coach Tony Vitello.
Yet nearly as soon as The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly, the most trusted voice in Giants reporting, broke the story with a few colleagues, it was met by a tiny splash of cold water from the most trusted voice in national reporting, ESPN’s Jeff Passan, who listed Vitello as the team’s “top target” but cautioned that “the sides have yet to reach a deal.”
Passan noted that the decision was expected to come “in the next 24 to 72 hours” and, well … that was about 40 hours ago. So it stands to reason that today would likely be the day that the news breaks in earnest, and Vitello is formally hired to be the next manager of your favorite baseball team.
It’s fairly easy to read between the lines here. No one of Baggarly’s stature is going to report that the team is “closing in on” hiring a manager unless it’s a done deal in spirit. And the timeline of Passan’s report suggests less that Vitello is deciding on a future, and more on the details of that future needing time to be figured out. In other words: negotiations.
It follows that Vitello has a fair amount of leverage in those negotiations. As a star collegiate coach, his reported salary of $3 million annually is already comfortably more than many MLB managers, and that is paired with better job security than probably anyone in all of Major League Baseball, save for Shohei Ohtani. Add in the difference in cost of living between the Bay Area and Knoxville, and the tax differences between California and Tennessee (which doesn’t have income tax), and you can be sure that Vitello is holding out for one of the shiniest contracts among MLB managers.
One that, if I had to guess, we’ll learn all about later today.
