When it comes to stability and continuity in the manager’s office, few franchises can match the San Francisco Giants over the past four decades. Now the Giants are turning to a three-time Manager of the Year to get them back on track.
After a swift interview process, they are poised to announce the hiring of Bob Melvin, sources briefed on the matter told The Athletic on condition of anonymity.
The Giants moved quickly once the Padres granted permission to speak to Melvin, who had one year remaining on his contract to manage in San Diego but was known to clash with Padres GM A.J. Preller. Melvin met on Monday with several top Giants officials on the baseball operations and ownership level, including executive board member Buster Posey. Evidently, nothing emerged from those conversations to dissuade San Francisco officials that Melvin, a Bay Area native who turns 62 on Saturday, was the right choice for the current moment.
Melvin would be entering his 21st season as a major-league manager — a successful second career that began when the Seattle Mariners hired him to replace Lou Piniella prior to the 2003 season. He won a National League Manager of the Year award during his five seasons with the Arizona Diamondbacks and added two American League Manager of the Year distinctions while leading the Oakland A’s to the postseason in six of his 11 seasons there from 2011 to 2021.
With the A’s in teardown mode, Oakland officials allowed Melvin to escape the final year on his contract and accept the job in San Diego, where the free-spending Padres were ramping up to make a World Series run. The Padres limped into the postseason with an 89-73 record in 2022 and overcame the suspension of Fernando Tatis Jr. to upend the Los Angeles Dodgers and reach the NLCS. But more turmoil at all levels of the organization caught up to the Padres this past season. They had to win 14 of their final 16 games to finish with a winning record (82-80) and missed the postseason despite a $250 million payroll and a +104 run differential that was superior to every NL team except the Dodgers and Atlanta Braves.
Apparently, the Giants’ top decision-makers didn’t view the disappointment in San Diego as a reflection on Melvin. The Giants have their own instability to paper over while president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi enters the final guaranteed year on his contract. And the Giants have a clubhouse culture to reconstruct after firing Gabe Kapler in the season’s final weekend, citing the need for new leadership and more connection within a clubhouse that had gone stale.
Kapler was Zaidi’s hand-picked choice and had his accomplishments in four seasons, guiding the organization through the challenge of a pandemic-shortened 2020 season played under strict health and safety protocols, then winning NL Manager of the Year after directing the Giants to a franchise-record 107 regular-season victories and a surprising NL West title in 2021. Among the unconventional 13-person coaching staff that Kapler assembled, most of whom lacked big-league experience, several blossomed into valuable contributors and are expected to be retained under Melvin.
But something was missing as the Giants lost 22 of their final 28 road games, careened to an 8-16 record under Kapler in September and finished 79-83 in a season when their playoff odds were better than 75 percent as recently as Aug. 3. As outfielder Mike Yastrzemski described in in the season’s final weekend, “I think a kind of ‘fend for yourself’ type of atmosphere somehow fell into place. I don’t know where it came from, but it kind of took over where everybody felt like they could do their own thing and it made it feel like there wasn’t an entire group effort or a sense of unity.”
The Giants are seeking more continuity in the lineup, rotation, and dugout, where they enjoyed a crisp lineage over nearly four decades from Roger Craig to Dusty Baker to Felipe Alou to Bruce Bochy — another manager whom the Padres allowed the Giants to hire away prior to the 2007 season despite a year remaining on his contract in San Diego.
Melvin isn’t expected to last 13 seasons like Bochy did. It isn’t clear whether he’ll arrive with anything more than a one-year deal or how long he intends to keep managing. Perhaps he’ll view a stint in San Francisco, however long it lasts, as a fitting place to round out a four-decade career in uniform. Melvin grew up on the peninsula and graduated from Menlo-Atherton High before playing for Cañada College in Redwood City and Cal-Berkeley. He was 24 in 1985 when the Detroit Tigers traded him to San Francisco as part of a six-player deal and spent the next three seasons playing under Craig as the Giants’ part-time catcher.
“I think Roger Craig was the first guy I played for who really communicated,” Melvin told the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea in 2019. “He would let you know when you were going to play. He would say, ‘Look, you’re going to play two days from now against this pitcher, and here’s why.’ That resonated with me, and I feel I do that with my players the best I can.”
Required reading
(Photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)
