Taking the media to task

Are we 100% sure why or what the media did wrong in this case? Look, that's not the point.

I would like to make one thing very clear to Tony Vitello: The It Would Be Nice If The Giants Weren’t Bad newsletter did not break the news about you coming to San Francisco four days before the official announcement. Clearly, whoever did that is not on your side because they are not being honest about who in either the Giants organization or at the University of Tennessee is your mortal enemy, but you can trust IWBNITGWB. We would never do that kind of thing, because we do not have sources.

For those of you who are not Tony Vitello, this is the necessary context that I possibly should have led with. Whoops!

For Tony Vitello one more time: look at how honest I am that I won’t even do a cursory rewrite here. You can trust me to leak things. Think about it!

For those of you who don’t want to watch the video, here’s a brief summary: New Giants manager Tony Vitello was starting out his press availability session yesterday, and thought he needed to address something: That the reports from October 18 that he’d already decided to take the deal to manage the Giants were premature — nothing was official until October 22 — and that it took him a few more days to decide to come to San Francisco, and he doesn’t want to name any names, but that’s not how that should have happened.

Can’t stress this enough: I wrote about Vitello for the first time on October 23. Just nailing this New Best Friends idea.

The more pressing issue is this, though: the report that Vitello objected to came out in mid-October. It is now mid-February. It has been four months, and Vitello has either spent the whole time stewing about this lie or he pushed down his distaste for it until something brought it back this week.

Either way, it’s weird. It’s a weird thing to confront the media about before you’ve played even one Spring Training game. It’s especially weird because their source ended up being right. Vitello did leave the University of Tennessee to come manage the Giants. That’s what got leaked, and that’s what happened.

And just going back to that original article, here’s what it said:

Industry sources confirmed that the Giants are closing in on hiring Tony Vitello, a 47-year-old Division I head coach who transformed the University of Tennessee from an SEC bottom-feeder into one of the most talent-rich programs in the country.

The Giants did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Vitello, reached via text message, said, “There is nothing to confirm.”

That was the scoop. They reached out to Vitello for comment, he gave a non-answer, and the audience had the full picture: Sources say Vitello to Giants, Vitello says nothing.

The next paragraph was this:

Should they cross the finish line, Vitello’s hiring for a major-league managerial position would be an extraordinary and nearly unprecedented leap for someone with no professional coaching experience.

No certainty about what was happening. No “This is a done deal” type assertions. Reasonable, responsible journalism based on Sources. Yes, it was inconvenient for Tony Vitello personally that the report got out and that players and coaches on the University of Tennessee baseball team then brought it up to him, but that is the cost that comes with deciding to leave one team for another. There are only 30 major league managers. Joining that club is big news.

Did Vitello expect deference? That is not a journalist’s job. Did he expect that social media would reserve judgment until the Giants made an official announcement? That is definitely not social media’s job. Did he expect that once he started this process, he would be able to control every aspect of it to avoid giving out any information until he was personally ready to give it out? That’s pretty naive.

There was never going to be a way to leave Tennessee without hurting some of the people there. Some might understand and be happy for Vitello, but some were always going to feel betrayed. Some were always going to feel that he made a promise to build that program, and instead of doing that, he left.

It seems like Vitello is externalizing the blame for that decision. Yes, it would have been nice for him to have a team meeting before the news broke to let the Volunteers know, but the media did not do anything wrong by reporting the news before he could do that.

It is worrying, though, that Vitello was sufficiently offended by this that he had to bring it up publicly four months later. It is not a great sign that his first experience in professional baseball’s media environment was so distasteful that he had to castigate them several months later, especially because there is nothing there worth castigating.

If Tony Vitello is going to be an effective major league manager — and let’s hope! — then he’s just going to have to get over that shit. There will be leaks. He will be annoyed when stuff gets reported that he doesn’t want reported. He will say that Erik Miller was held out of a game because he felt a tweak in his hamstring, and then there will immediately be a report that Miller really needed a mental day off. Is he going to yell at the media for that? Is he going to berate them for informing the public?

The entire scene yesterday was strange. Maybe there’s some other explanation. Maybe there really was a Chronicle report or a Baggs tweet that made some bigger assumptions than what was in that Athletic article. But I don’t think that was the case, and even if it was, man, you gotta just get over it.

Even a relatively friendly press in San Francisco is going to find stories the manager doesn’t want them to find. One of the big tests of a manager is what he does then. In his first test, Tony Vitello was not very impressive. Part of his appeal as a manager is that he’s fiery and heartfelt. But in the major leagues, he also needs to be professional. There will be a crisis in Vitello’s time with the Giants. Probably many. Hopefully the next time will look a little different.