What the SF Giants' mini-demotion of Frank Anderson tells us about the coaching staff

The SF Giants recently made a change with their pitching coaches as Frank Anderson's new title is simply assistant pitching coach while he was the Director of Major League Pitching during the 2026 season.

President of baseball operations Buster Posey spoke about this change with Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic and said that it was meant to clear up the chain-of-command and make pitching coach Justin Meccage the top voice of the coaching staff on the pitching side.

The now-former pitching director was hired out of the University of Tennessee in February 2026. Anderson spent a majority of his tenure in Knoxville with Giants manager Tony Vitello so it's clear that he was hired by the Giants since he was someone Vitello trusts.

This minor change is meant to rectify the catastrophe that was the 2026 Giants bullpen, and the pitching staff as a whole. Robbie Ray, a guy they traded in August, led the staff with 10 wins, which perfectly sums up the season.

San Francisco was near bottom of the league in just about every ranked pitching metric. They ranked 24th in WHIP, 27th in K/9 (7.59), 22nd in strikeouts to walks (2.02), and 24th in earned runs allowed (160).

To hammer home just how bad the bullpen was, it managed to have stats closer to the Colorado Rockies than the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks. Yes - those Rockies, the ones that play at 5,280-foot elevation.

So, obviously the Giants need a change, and while they may have taken a step in the right direction with their first-round draft pick, Jackson Flora, the UCSB pitcher probably won't make his MLB debut until the end of 2027 at the earliest so he is just one wooden plank over the flooding hull that is the pitching staff.

The Giants seem to be trusting current pitching coach, Justin Meccage, who formerly coached for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Milwaukee's Triple-A team, the Nashville Sounds, with turning things around rather than bringing in an external option.

Reflecting on it now, it is a bit confusing that the Giants did not bring back JP Martinez as a coach after the 2025 season, in which the San Francisco performed relatively well for a majority of the season, before being bit by the injury bug. Their pitching and hitting seemingly switched places in the offseason.

Giants may be leaning on big league experience over college experience

The Anderson mini-demotion could also be a move by the Giants to slightly limit Tony Vitello's influence on the pitching staff as many have called his coaching ability into question now as well. One can only assume the two former Tennessee would work closely with each other, however the college game is much more offensively focused while the MLB requires a high-level mix of both pitching and hitting. This could be a symptom of the Giants larger issue of limited experience in pivotal roles which is why they man be leaning on Meccage, a guy with big-league experience.

Both Buster Posey and Tony Vitello are within their first two years in new roles and our still feeling their way through what it takes to be successful as an organization. While it may not seem like it now, do not forget that both of them have been part of incredibly successful organizations and know "what" it takes to win, but are currently without the "how."

Luckily for fans the "how" could be on the way soon as the Giants just won farm system of the year at the minor league baseball awards. There are many exciting names like Bo Davidson, Jhonny Level, and Josuar Gonzalez who are on the path to being contributors at the big-league level so maybe once some of these guys start coming up things will get better, but they need to fix the pitching side of things first and the Anderson change is an attempt to do that.

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