SAN FRANCISCO — The stories spilled out of Bob Melvin as easily as if he were at an intimate dinner party with lifelong friends.
Growing up in Menlo Park. Matching his childhood obsession to whatever Bay Area team happened to be in season: Giants, 49ers, Cal and Stanford football, Warriors, the A’s. Riding bikes and milling about with his buddies on the road that led to Willie Mays’ house in Atherton as they waited for that unmissable pink Cadillac to roll past, hoping to see one of those strong, calloused hands waving out the driver’s side window. Cheering from the stands at Candlestick Park when an aging Mays collected his 3,000th hit.
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Realizing a dream not only when he reached the big leagues, but also when the Detroit Tigers traded him to his hometown Giants in 1986. Feeling his emotions turn from awestruck to overwhelmed when he walked into the home clubhouse and it dawned upon him that the Giants organized their lockers in alphabetical order, which meant he would dress next to the honorary spaces for Mays and Willie McCovey. Squatting behind the plate at Candlestick and receiving signals from the Humm Baby himself, Roger Craig, who taught him how to see the game’s folds and undulations from the scenic overlook that only a manager is perched high enough to view.
At one point Wednesday morning during Melvin’s news conference, the one that introduced him as the Giants’ newest dugout surveyor through 2026, a veteran reporter in the back of the room asked him: Baseball aside, what made growing up and living in the Bay Area so special?
“You know,” Melvin replied.
It was not a verbal tic. It was not a rhetorical pause. It was a two-word interpersonal connection. You know. The reporter was Chris Haft, the decorous and decorated baseball beat writer who covered the Cincinnati Reds for many years before returning home to serve on the Giants beat for the San Jose Mercury News and MLB.com. Haft grew up in the southern reaches of San Mateo County, another sports-obsessed kid, in the same era that Melvin did. Before Haft began to work on sharpening his copy, he was a teenager working on sharpening his jump shot. Sometimes with Melvin’s hand in his face.
“You know,” Melvin said in response to Haft’s question. “We were playing pickup basketball in the gym in Menlo. In basketball season, basketball is my favorite sport. In football season, football’s my favorite sport. And baseball. So you get very well rounded here in sports in the Bay Area, probably as much as anywhere in the world.”
It is one thing to hire a manager with a local connection. It is another thing to hire a manager so interwoven into the Bay Area sports community that he can answer a question at his introductory press conference from someone he knows from playing shirts vs. skins as a teenager.
How was that Chris Haft jump shot, by the way?
“Hate to say it in this forum,” said Melvin, smiling. “But it was pretty good.”
Major League Baseball teams introduce managers all the time. The unspoken truth is that these events are almost always the wedding banquet before the divorce. The job essentially arrives with a deckle-edged invitation and a perforated pink slip. But in the club-level space at Oracle Park Wednesday morning, there was a palpable lightness beyond the usual sunshine of these events. Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi nervously unbuttoned a No. 6 Giants jersey and Melvin, after putting it on, nervously mismatched a buttonhole or two. A sizable contingent of front-office employees gathered behind the seated reporters and the bank of cameras and applauded at intervals as if watching a State of the Union address.
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It’s been a while since the Giants, who dramatically scrapped last December’s pomp and revelry for Carlos Correa, had one of these celebratory introductions. It’s been so long, in fact, that in the minutes before the news conference began, two club employees with portable steam irons scrambled to smooth wrinkles out of the black cloth that draped the front of the dais.
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The Giants arranged this news conference to introduce a new manager. But judging from the connections made, the warm smiles exchanged and the general giddiness of the gallery, it felt more like the Giants were reintroducing a more familiar version of themselves.
What better way to reestablish a franchise as fan-friendly than by hiring a highly respected three-time Manager of the Year who also happens to identify as a lifelong and unabashed Bay Area sports fan?
“Every series (in San Francisco) I would look in that dugout over on the other side and say, ‘Maybe someday, hopefully,’” said Melvin, who spent most of his 20-year managerial career with the NL West-rival Arizona Diamondbacks and Bay Area-rival Oakland A’s. “I can admit that now. I was hoping at some point in time, I’d come back.”
Melvin, the visiting manager, would run the stadium stairs on the first day of every series. When the Diamondbacks or A’s or San Diego Padres would arrive on the shores of McCovey Cove, there were moments in the early afternoon, confronted by 42,000 empty seats and his own thoughts, when Melvin would meditate on his connection to this franchise. Then he would head out to the Coke bottle in left field for another cathartic experience.
“I used to slide down the slide for luck,” said Melvin, to laughter. “Then they started locking it. They didn’t want me to slide down anymore headfirst.”
That’s how this news conference went: locally sourced anecdotes, an embarrassment of accolades, soft smiles even from those who strain to hew to objectivity. It was a striking change from the news conference in November 2019 that introduced Melvin’s predecessor. Gabe Kapler put on a jersey for the cameras that day. He stiffly looked into the cameras. He sat for a tense inquisition.
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Perhaps Kapler failed to create authenticity in his four seasons with the Giants, but at least he was earnest in his efforts. And many of them were laudable. He won over his share of skeptics. He worked hard at his interpersonal relationships. But the result was a manager who always seemed to make everything harder than it needed to be. If Melvin is the antithesis of Kapler in any aspect, it’s this: it does not feel like work to be in Melvin’s presence. He effortlessly puts others at ease.
Perhaps Zaidi made a correct assessment four years ago when he hand-picked Kapler to be his manager. Perhaps Kapler was the person best equipped at the time, given the materials at hand, to help the Giants win the most baseball games. They did win a franchise-record 107 games in 2021, after all. But it didn’t take four seasons into his tenure — one that, the record shows, included an NL Manager of the Year title that hadn’t been bestowed on a Giants skipper since Dusty Baker — to comprehend that an organization steeped in nostalgia lost something else in the process.
Its connective tissue.
In their wildest dreams, the Giants couldn’t have designed a candidate who blended Melvin’s career dossier, local connection and interpersonal skills. That’s why they waited informally for several weeks, and formally for several days, even though the soon-to-be 62-year-old (his birthday is on Saturday) was under contract to manage the turbulent San Diego Padres next season. Once the Padres completed their offseason evaluations and approved the Giants’ request to speak with Melvin late Saturday night, the process moved at warp speed. Melvin held Zoom meetings with Giants front-office officials on Sunday, he met in person with chairman Greg Johnson and executive board member Buster Posey on Monday, and by Tuesday morning, the Giants began informing other interviewees that Melvin would be their choice.
He would represent their brand. He would represent their fans.
“San Francisco is the Giants and the Giants are San Francisco,” Melvin said. “I don’t think anybody understands that more than I do.”
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No matter what job you have, however glamorous it might be, all creature comforts and fringe benefits aside, it will begin to feel like work once you’ve been at it for two decades. That’s how long Melvin has managed in the big leagues. Tack on his playing career and his time as a bench coach, including the 2001 season in which he won a World Series ring with Arizona, and it’s closer to four decades.
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Appreciation dulls. Wonder recedes. Endorphins trickle instead of rush.
And yet …
“When I got up this morning, it just seemed like it was too crazy to even comprehend,” said Melvin, later adding that he’s had a few pinch-me conversations with some of his best and longest friends — including some, like base coach and former Giants great Matt Williams, who are likely to be added to his coaching staff.
“There were conversations about, ‘Could you imagine?’ So now …
“Now I’m getting to imagine.”
As Melvin slipped into his Giants jersey, it was hard not to notice the corporate logo on his sleeve for Cruise, the troubled driverless taxi company that had its operating license revoked by the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday. The symbolism landed with all the subtlety of a fender crashing into a cement mixer.
There might come a time when big-league teams no longer require an independent mind to steer them through a season. There might come a time when AI effortlessly solves every problem and game management can be turned over to algorithms and predictive modeling. But that time isn’t now. The Giants needed someone new and trustworthy to drive them, their players, and their fans to a new destination.
They went with someone who already knew the backroads.
(Top photo: Eric Risberg / Associated Press)
