How rookie manager Tony Vitello is getting the Giants to buy in - ESPN

THE FATHER HAD seen this look many times before: the jaw set, the dark eyes narrowing, the posture tense. This is the transformation the son undergoes every time he loses: the optimism, usually about three feet thick, is replaced with a brittle sulk, as if the moment he is less than completely consumed by losing is the moment he will become forever defined by it.

Greg Vitello watched his son, Tony, manage the San Francisco Giants against Team USA on a perfectly fine March Tuesday afternoon at Scottsdale Stadium in Arizona. All spring training games are exhibitions, but this game, an exhibition within the exhibition season, contained multiple layers of insignificance. There was a group of big league superstars in the third-base dugout. On the first-base side, a Giants roster depleted by seven of its own World Baseball Classic players. But as the score got worse and worse, as 5-1 become 7-1 became 13-1 on its way to 15-1, Greg kept looking down at the dugout, watching his son's bearing tighten as if cranked by an invisible wrench. He noticed Giants players inching their way to the far end of the dugout, a tide ebbing from the pull of his son's intensity.

«They don't know what he's all about yet,» Greg says. «It's going to take them a while, probably until they start playing real games, but that showed me they're starting to figure it out.»

The father laughs a little as he finishes saying this. He knows his son, the first person to jump directly from college head coach to major league manager, has never been content to be a character in someone else's script. Tennessee had not been to a College World Series in 12 years when Vitello was hired as the head coach in 2017; the Volunteers made it three times in his eight seasons