Former Tennessee Vols baseball coach Tony Vitello, who is in his first season as the manager of the San Francisco Giants, obviously has a great eye for talent.

Vitello’s eye is so good, in fact, that he identified a future MLB star as a high school freshman — even though the player wasn’t completely focused on baseball at the time.

Tony Vitello told Colson Montgomery’s coach that he shouldn’t play basketball anymore

Chicago White Sox shortstop Colson Montgomery is one of the top young stars in MLB right now.

Montgomery, who is in his second big league season with the White Sox, has hit 41 home runs through his first 145 career games. He’s currently fifth among shortstops in AL All-Star Game fan voting.

The former first-round draft pick didn’t always dream of playing in MLB. Instead, he was planning to play college basketball (he was recruited by programs like Purdue and Louisville).

Vitello, however, noticed immediately that Montgomery was a special talent as a high school freshman in 2018 while seeing him play on a trip where he was actually checking out a couple of Montgomery’s teammates.

Montgomery, who is from Holland, IN, told the story during a recent appearance on the Enjoy The Show Podcast

“That (getting recruited) kind of started when my freshman year of baseball came around,” said Montgomery. “Because they knew about me, but they didn’t really know that much about me — just because I didn’t play much travel ball.

“There were guys on my team — Camden Gasser and Chase Taylor, and some of these other guys — who were getting recruited by D1 teams. So they came and they watched those two, and then they saw me play one game at shortstop, and they came up to my coach, and they’re like, ‘Who’s the shortstop?’ And my coach was like, ‘He’s a basketball player.’ It was Tony Vitello. He was like, ‘Who’s the shortstop?’ And my coach was like, ‘Sorry, he plays basketball.’ And [Vitello] was like, ‘Well, he shouldn’t [play basketball anymore], you can tell him’. So he told me that, and then that was when all the SEC schools — Mississippi State, Vandy, and all these teams — started showing interest.”

Montgomery admitted that he wasn’t that interested in going to college to play baseball, though he did commit to Indiana (for baseball and as a preferred walk-on for basketball). He ended up getting selected with the No. 22 overall pick in the 2021 MLB Draft and receiving a $3 million signing bonus, so it’s easy to see why he was focused on the draft.

Vitello, by the way, was in his first season as the head coach at Tennessee. The Vols weren’t the juggernaut program that they are now, and Vitello wasn’t the star that he is now, so it’s unlikely that Montgomery would’ve had UT near the top of his list had he been serious about playing in college.

Still, it’s a fun story that shows just how elite Vitello is at identifying talent.