What’s the Boss? MLB Skippers Spill On How Their Job Has Changed

The sound of the wood bat still turns Tony Vitello’s head. The new manager of the Giants is trying to figure out where the bathrooms are and what the rules are and who the players are, but he is also trying to get used to the most visceral change of all: crack instead of ping.

After 24 years coaching at the collegiate level, Vitello admits he will miss the metal bats a bit. “But this is so natural,” he says. “It’s a tradition-based sport. That’s part of the tradition.”

In some ways, Vitello is, too. Sure, he’s an unconventional choice, the first person to go straight from the college ranks to major league manager. But these days, a brief résumé is more common than a lifetime of riding the buses and filling out lineup cards in the minors. Of the eight managers hired since the end of the 2025 regular season, only three had done the job before; only two of the remaining five had ever led a team in pro ball. Neither Craig Stammen (Padres) nor Kurt Suzuki (Angels) had ever even so much as coached before.

All these men will try to tackle a job whose description seems to grow longer every day. The modern manager must navigate a clubhouse and the stars and scrubs therein; keep track not just of whose arm hurts but also of who is arguing with his wife; absorb and process information from quants and scouts alike; disseminate that information to people who want varying degrees of it; solicit opinions and then massage the egos of those whose advice he did not take; address the media at least twice per day; take public responsibility for decisions he did not make; and represent a multibillion dollar corporation on the global stage while dressed in baseball pants.

Oh, and he has to decide whether to pull the starter in the third inning.

“Seven to 10 [p.m.],” says Atlanta general manager Alex Anthopoulos, “feels like the smallest part of the job.”

The manager might be the most important job in the organization. And we’re still not entirely sure what makes someone good at it.

Illustration of inside an MLB manager’s head segmented with different roles he has to play. — Andrew DeGraff/Sports Illustrated

Every so often, Tigers manager A.J. Hinch hears from an old Astros coworker who wants to reminisce about a play he called in the second inning of Game 7 of the 2017 World Series, with one out and one of the slowest runners in the sport, catcher Brian McCann, on third base. Houston pitcher Lance McCullers Jr., who bats left-handed, grounded to second. McCann, who was going on contact, scored to extend a lead the team would not relinquish. It was the most valuable such groundout in baseball history, and it was Hinch, then the Astros’ skipper, who told McCann to go. It’s one thing for a manager to call the contact play in July with a guy who runs like an umpire. It’s another thing entirely to do it in Game 7 of the World Series.

“What I learned about moves that are made in the World Series is that you have to make those moves long in advance,” says Hinch. “Meaning you have to be in front of that decision by how you prepare your players and how you set the foundation of how you’re going to play and the why behind it. You’re always preparing for future decisions by the decisions you make today.”

Rangers GM Chris Young estimates in-game decision making constitutes “10 to 15%” of a manager’s job. That figure might be on the decline as new rules—the universal designated hitter, the ghost runner on second base in extra innings, the limit on mound disengagements—reduce the number of choices at any moment. “In a lot of ways, it’s more checkers than it is chess,” says White Sox assistant GM Josh Barfield. “It’s taken out some of the strategy.”

So much of that strategizing takes place long before the game begins. “I don’t know how many managers just make their own decisions,” says Royals skipper Matt Quatraro. He’s not even just referring to the front office. There are so many more people involved these days: the research department, the trainers, the mental skills staffers, the bench coach, the pitching coach, the hitting coach. And sometimes he takes all that information and still chooses not to field the best team possible, because sometimes he wants to give perennial MVP candidate shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. a day off.

“A lot of the philosophies are good until you have to actually apply them,” Quatraro says. And you have to force yourself to focus on process over result. “I think when you’re a younger manager, you have a hard time accepting that you could make the right decision and have the wrong outcome,” says the 51-year-old Hinch.

Illustration of Giants manager Tony Vitello listening to a bat like a doctor with a stethoscope — Andrew DeGraff/Sports Illustrated

The tactical moves are the only part of the manager’s job that the fan sees. (Managers often joke, “If I don’t matter, why do you keep yelling at me?”) But before they can pinch-hit in the ninth inning, they have to have received scouting reports from the advance guy on the pitcher they’ll face as well as tendency and pitch-shape and swing-plane data from the quants. They have to have laid the groundwork with both the pinch hitter and the guy he’s replacing. Both need to prepare for their roles, and both need time to tend to their feelings about the situation. In some ways, that’s just the same as it ever was.

“We’re still chasing matchups,” says Hinch. “We’ve always chased matchups. We’re just willing to do that a little more aggressively today than we were.” He adds, “All the things that may drive the traditional fan crazy, it’s actually just emphasizing the strengths of the players.”

But in other ways, the decision-making process would be completely unrecognizable to a manager from 30 years ago. Reds skipper Terry Francona says that when he started with the Phillies before the 1997 season “there was the general manager and the assistant general manager and that was about it.” These days, teams often employ 50 analysts. “It can be a little overwhelming,” Francona says. Still, he adds, “In today’s world of analytics and numbers, I feel an obligation to the organization and to the team not to guess. Does that mean I’m going to make every right [decision]? No, but I’m going to have a reason. When you forget you’re dealing with people, I think you’re making a big mistake.”

Once in a while, someone wanting to talk to Guardians manager Stephen Vogt has to wait a minute outside his office. Vogt is busy crying in the bathroom.

It’s important, he says, to understand “that what might be a minor transaction in your eyes is a huge moment for that player, and being able to have empathy with the most no-brainer option, or the most no-brainer DFA, or whatever it might be—that’s the worst day of that person’s life.” So he tries to sit down with every player who is getting bad news, and sometimes he becomes so upset on the young man’s behalf that, even after the kid has left and tossed his glove into a duffel bag, the manager is still recovering from the conversation.

“I think you create a good atmosphere and a good environment, a learning environment, a commitment, a team atmosphere that leads to success,” says second-year Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer. “That is my main job, because I spend most of the day doing it. Running the game, that’s three hours. I spend 12 hours on culture.”

Illustration of Guardians manager Stephen Vogt crying on the bathroom floor — Andrew DeGraff/Sports Illustrated

Perhaps Vitello’s time surrounded by teenagers will help him relate to younger major leaguers. The former Tennessee coach, who led the Volunteers to a College World Series title in 2024, is used to the Gen Z attention span—“They’ve been on TikTok,” says the 47-year-old. “They’ve got about 20 seconds.”—and he is ready with strategies to keep his players engaged. “Show some videos,” he says. “Sometimes cracking jokes works.”

Such answers can sometimes veer into cliché, but this cohort does require different methods of connection. Young people today communicate through their phones more often than face-to-face, so a manager has to be adept at both channels. And he has to account for the anxiety that a digital childhood can foster. “Today’s player has to understand why,” says Guardians GM Mike Chernoff, 44. “And you have to provide evidence. The traditional because I said so doesn’t fly.” Today’s player is also at least as familiar with most data as his coaches, and his coach better be as fluent in that language as he is. “This is how they’ve grown up in the game,” says Rockies president of baseball operations Paul DePodesta. “This is an expectation.”

Most people shy away from the idea that managing is increasingly a young man’s job, perhaps because they hope one day to be old men in that job. (“What I think is happening is general managers are becoming younger,” says Francona, “And they’re looking for people they’re comfortable with.”) But the 41-year-old Vogt, who spent 10 seasons in the majors as a catcher, acknowledges that he was caught off-guard by the physical toll. It’s a long season even if you’re not playing in it. So he does an Orange Theory fitness class every morning. “I want to make sure my heart’s healthy,” he says. “I want to make sure I don’t get too sloppy.”

Young managers do have an advantage when it comes to relatability. “The players look at you differently when there’s a wider age gap or different experience, or when you’ve accomplished something in the game, or as you become more notable,” Hinch says. His solution is “to allow yourself to be vulnerable,” he says. “I really want them to understand that I make mistakes too, and I know how hard the game is.”

The job gets harder as you become more notable, too. “I have to fight harder to stay connected to the thing that matters most, which is the relationship with the players,” says Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “The irony is the thing I got into this because I love, which is coaching, is the thing that you do the least of as you climb the ladder.”

That’s especially true for the Dodgers, who with their three Japanese stars have to answer as much to fans in Tokyo as in Los Angeles. But each team, and each market, brings its own difficulties.

“I’m not sure all 30 of us have the same job,” Hinch says. This has always been the case; Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski remembers being a young administrative assistant with the 1978 White Sox, a year after they made a surprise run at the pennant with a veteran team. That winter, they let several older free agents walk and halfway through the ’78 season fired their 57-year-old manager, Bob Lemon, who immediately went to the Yankees and won the World Series. The young White Sox finished last. Dombrowski asked Chicago GM Roland Hemond if he thought he’d made a mistake.

“I remember Roland said, ‘Dave, it’s just different clubs,’ ” Dombrowski recalls. “ ‘When we had the club in ’77 over here, we got a club that you could make the lineup out, let them play. Lem was real good with that. Good with the players, good communicator, had a good feel of pitching. But in ’78 we had a young club, and he just wasn’t the right manager for this situation. Then he went to the Yankees, who were a veteran club, and he was perfect for them.’ ”

Hemond also used to say that Boston, New York and Philadelphia are different from the other major league cities. Once, when someone asked why he hadn’t gotten the managerial job in Boston, Dombrowski admitted, “I think you’d have a hard time dealing with the media here.” (The candidate eventually got a job elsewhere.)

The general manager also needs to evaluate himself, says Young. During his first years in Texas, veteran skipper Bruce Bochy was the perfect counterpart for him, because Young was still learning on the job. When Bochy retired after last season, Young decided he had enough experience to work with someone greener, and he selected Skip Schumaker, whose year as Cardinals bench coach and two as Marlins manager still make him nearly a veteran in today’s game.

It can be hard to find the right fit, says one official, because “a lot of front offices don’t know what they want.” They do a poor job of evaluating their own organization, he continues, and they choose a manager who does not fit the club. At least one team this winter declined to consider a second-time manager because execs thought his hire would not excite fans. That sort of decision making misses the point. For example, the official says, “In a rebuild, I’d hire an incredible communicator, because he’s going to be communicating to your players on the vision of the organization and the expectation of the organization. You’re probably going to have a mediocre team with young prospects coming up at some time. The second thing he’s gonna be doing is telling your fan base what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Those two skills alone are way more than the grit of, like, that 2–1 hit-and-run that you called in the seventh inning.”

After the worst year in major league history, a 2024 season in which they went 41–121, the White Sox tried to be honest with themselves about what they needed. Will Venable, who had spent three years coaching with the Cubs, two as the Red Sox’ bench coach and another season as the Rangers’ associate manager, seemed like someone who could handle multiple iterations of the same team.

“We wanted somebody that was going to be good for when he was hired, like, in a rebuild or whatever you want to call it, and for when we’re good,” Barfield says. “So there were some guys that we interviewed, and we were like, ‘Man, this guy would be awesome if we were ready to win right now.’ But you don’t want to have to [fire him in two years].”

Illustration of Dodgers manager Dave Roberts talking to the press while in the dugout. — Andrew DeGraff/Sports Illustrated

In Anthopoulos’s first year as GM, for the Blue Jays in 2010, he looked around the division and saw Francona managing the Red Sox, Buck Showalter managing the Orioles, Joe Girardi managing the Yankees and Joe Maddon managing the Rays. “There’s a ‘wow’ factor,” Anthopoulos recalls. He looked at hiring a manager like courting a free-agent player: You go after a superstar. Only as he got older did he realize: Bryce Harper was always Bryce Harper. Brian Snitker wasn’t always Brian Snitker. “Until, [after four decades in the organization], he finally got a chance to manage and won six divisions in a row and a World Series,” Anthopoulos says. “And all of a sudden he’s one of the best managers in the game.”

So how do you find Snitker before he’s Snitker? You run through in-game situations, of course. You ask for strengths and weaknesses. You check references. Some teams ask candidates about their favorite leadership books. They don’t expect an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, but they figure you can’t be very serious about the position if you haven’t consulted any of the literature. (Good answers might include The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni; Dare to Lead by Brené Brown; or The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge.) They want to try to predict how he will handle pressure—not just the pressure of high-stakes games, but also the pressure of a disappointing season. Young says one of the best pieces of advice he got when embarking on his first managerial search was to hire someone he liked being around.

The Guardians’ process has become legendary throughout the game. Chernoff and president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti put Vogt through 28 hours of interviews over the course of two and a half weeks; they grew so close during that period, Vogt says, that after one call, his wife, Alyssa, turned to him and said, “You better win this.” (By then he was in good shape. Five minutes into their first Zoom call, Chernoff says, he texted Antonetti: “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Antonetti responded, “Yes.”)

The Guardians have compiled a detailed profile describing what they’re seeking. Chernoff categorizes it generally as personal factors, interpersonal factors and cognitive factors. It’s hard to find someone who checks every box, and in fact they never do. “That’s why you do crazy interviews,” he says. Because the other thing they are looking for is someone they can coach. They see a failed manager as not only a failure of hiring on their part but also a failure of development on their part. “And it’s a two-way street,” Chernoff says. “Vogter is developing us, too. We are becoming better.”

Vogt often jokes with Chernoff and Antonetti: You know so much about me after that interview process that if you don’t like my decisions, that’s on you.

Chernoff agrees. It is.

Dombrowski has long kept a file of people he thinks might be interesting managerial candidates someday, but even that extensive list sometimes misses people. Between the time when Rob Thomson joined the Yankees’ major league coaching staff in 2008 and when Dombrowski promoted him to Phillies manager in ’22—Thomson has made the playoffs four times and won a pennant—Dombrowski hired three skippers during his tenure running the Tigers and then the Red Sox. Thomson was available every time. Dombrowski never considered him. “It’s apparent we were underestimating his ability to do the job,” he says.

Indeed, many of the very traits that make Thomson such a good manager made him hard to identify as a potential manager: a quiet steadiness; an emphasis on the needs of others, often to his own detriment; a focus on doing the job, instead of making sure everyone notices that he’s done the job.

“Maybe [the industry] missed [those qualities] because we forgot those were important,” muses Hinch.

So what exactly are they looking for? In a sport that can increasingly slap a number on every player, teams still aren’t quite sure. “At the end of the day, there’s only one guy on the mound, there’s only one guy in the box, there’s only one guy standing at his position,” Anthopoulos says. “So it’s just so much easier to quantify.”

Sometimes the old-school background is important. “I’m glad I had the journey I did, because it allowed me to make some mistakes that weren’t on SportsCenter,” says Francona, who helmed teams from rookie ball and Double A to the Dominican Winter League before working his way up in the majors as a coach. He also values the time he spent with less talented players, which helps him appreciate what he sees every day now. And he needed to fail in his first shot, with the Phillies, before he could succeed.

Sometimes teams bet on the person instead of on the résumé. “I know I came into the business in a unique manner,” says Hinch, who became the Diamondbacks’ director of player development a year after retiring as a player and then got his first managerial gig straight from that role. (Arizona fired him a year later and he only found success in his second go-round, with the Astros.) “But that didn’t mean that experience didn’t matter. It just meant that I was starting behind.” He adds, “The things that veteran managers have brought to the game are still very valuable, and you can’t get them any other way than the way that Boch got it, and Snit, and [two-time manager and current Giants infield coach Ron Washington].”

And sometimes they are just making their best guess. “Of the [five] new-guy first-timers, [two or three] are probably gonna be good and [two or three] are probably gonna suck,” says an official. “Just like the old-timers.”

The Giants are betting Vitello will fall in the former category. “If we’re really being honest with ourselves, there’s going to be some things that he just can’t know until he’s here and experiences [them],” says GM Zack Minasian. “But also, we talk about being willing to zig when others are zagging. Tony will bring a very fresh perspective, and he’s got a great group around him. I give him a lot of credit for the coaching staff that he’s built [including Washington and former Padres manager Jayce Tingler]. I think hopefully they can fill in some of the gaps, and then help him just accentuate his strengths.”

At the annual Cactus League media day, the Giants’ contingent was posted alongside the Brewers’. After Vitello took close to an hour’s worth of questions, he approached Brewers manager Pat Murphy, perhaps the only person in the league whose background even remotely resembles his own. Murphy, who spent two decades at Notre Dame and Arizona State, had been in the majors for 14 years before he was named Brewers manager for 2024.

“I was certainly not ready [coming out of college],” Murphy said. “I needed to be more mature, needed to understand the game at the major league level. Yeah, it’s a whole different game.” Still, he believes Vitello is ready.

At his left, Vitello grinned. “Sir,” he said. “Can I ask you how the f--- you coach the pro game?”

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