Just six days ago we had an article about going unconventional and hiring a college head coach as the next manager of the Washington Nationals. Specifically named in the article were Jay Johnson of LSU and Tony Vitello of Tennessee.
News was breaking last night that the San Francisco Giants were going in that exact direction with their PoBO, Buster Posey, hiring Vitello as their next manager.
Anyone who watches the MLB Draft has certainly seen Vitello on the panel of analysts on MLB Network. He is also buddies with Jayson Werth and Shawn Kelley and recently appeared on their podcast.
Look, this hiring of Vitello will either look genius or genie-ass. They usually go one way or the other. Posey made that trade earlier this season for Rafael Devers, and the team finished at 81-81 and missed the playoffs. They just fired Bob Melvin as their manager, and the Giants haven’t made the playoffs since 2021 when Gabe Kapler led them to a 107-55 record with Posey as their catcher. Then they got rid of Kapler and Farhan Zaidi (President, Baseball Operations) and GM Scott Harris. They replaced Harris with Pete Putila and got rid of him and hired Zack Minasian. It has been a revolving door for years there.
Posey, 38, is Giants’ royalty with three World Series rings as a player. As a PoBO, he has already shown that he will take chances. Whether or not it will work is yet to be seen. That Devers trade with the Boston Red Sox, while Paul Toboni was assistant general manager there, shows that these 30-somethings taking PoBO positions is a new trend. So far, you see a fresh approach to a business that generally doesn’t color outside the lines much.
Will Toboni consider following suit and grabbing perhaps the top college coach in Johnson from LSU? We will see if that is a possibility. In our poll with that article on TalkNats, less than 20 percent of respondents chose Johnson or a college head coach as the way the Nats should go. The top choice was another unconventional route of hiring MLB Network analyst Mark DeRosa whose managerial experience is his son’s travel team and USA Baseball in the WBC.
We will see where all of this goes. So far Toboni has done a good job keeping his interviews on stealth mode. Ramón Vázquez, the Red Sox bench coach, is the only name we’ve heard, but we don’t know if Boston granted permission to interview him. Nats interim-manager, Miguel Cairo, was getting a courtesy interview. Is Johnson on the list? We will see.
This news on the next Nats manager should happen soon.
