The San Francisco Giants have a new team manager, and he’s no stranger to the Bay Area professional sports scene.

Bob Melvin, appearing in a 2017 file image, has been named the new manager of the San Francisco Giants. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr, CC BY-SA)

The Giants announced Wednesday that former Oakland A’s skipper Bob Melvin will be the team’s new manager. Melvin, who most recently served as the San Diego Padres’ manager for two Major League Baseball seasons, previously held the same position in Oakland from 2011-2021 and also managed the Seattle Mariners and Arizona Diamondbacks before that.

It will be a homecoming 35 years in the making for Melvin, who grew up in the Bay Area and played baseball at Menlo-Atherton High School and University of California, Berkeley, before his MLB career brought him to the Giants as the team’s catcher between 1986 and 1988. He played for several MLB teams between 1985 and 1994.

The Giants finished the 2023 season with a 79-83 record. After a hot start, the team limped to the finish line with a 9-18 record in September and fired manager Gabe Kapler shortly before the season ended.

Melvin led San Diego to the National League Championship Series in his first year as the Padres’ manager in 2022, but the team also struggled this season, finishing with a 82-80 record and missing the playoffs.

Dan McMenamin is the managing editor at Bay City News, directing daily news coverage of the 12-county greater Bay Area. He has worked for BCN since 2008 and has been managing editor since 2014 after previously serving as BCN’s San Francisco bureau reporter. A UC Davis graduate, he came to BCN after working for a newspaper and nonprofit in the Davis area. He handles staffing, including coaching of our interns, day-to-day coverage decisions and management of the newswire.