After gaining valuable lessons as a player from Dusty Baker, Felipe Alou and Terry Francona, Snow steps up to manage his own team, the Modesto Roadsters
Former San Francisco Giants player J.T. Snow during a ceremony for longtime Giants clubhouse manager Mike “Murph” Murphy being inducted into the team’s Wall of Fame before a baseball game between the Giants and the Atlanta Braves in San Francisco, Sunday, Aug.
27, 2023. The six-time Gold Glove winner admired Baker’s gut instincts. He watched Alou take a more calculated approach. His brief stint with Francona was his favorite. “He just was really honest and upfront and treated the guys like men, with respect,” the longtime Giants first baseman said of playing for Francona with the Boston Red Sox in 2006. “I played for some great managers in the big leagues.” Now 57, two decades since his last Major League at-bat, Snow wants to follow in their footsteps. The urge is so strong that, with the full support of his wife, Gina, Snow has decided to uproot his life on the San Francisco Peninsula to live out of a hotel in Modesto. SAN DIEGO – JULY 1: First baseman J.T. Snow #6 of the San Francisco Giants tries to catch a line drive hit by Xavier Nady #22 of the San Diego Padres in the first inning on July 1, 2005 at PETCO Park in San Diego, California. Snow was introduced in November as the first manager of the Modesto Roadsters. Along with the Long Beach Coast, led by former Angels Troy Percival and Troy Glaus, the teams are the 10th and 11th entrants to the. They are independent from Major League Baseball, but due to the recent contraction of affiliated minor league teams, their rosters are filled with players who have fallen through the resulting cracks. Snow, who spent 10 of his 16 seasons in the majors with the Giants, was the first choice of Roadsters owner Dave Heller, who made the club the fifth in his portfolio of Minor League teams. Snow declined his first offer, so he came back with a better one. “I wanted that combination of presence and history, with somebody who is a great teacher and really understands the game backward and forward,” Heller said. Snow suggested his name recognition with the contingent of Giants fans in the Central Valley may have played a role. One of the most enduring images in franchise history is Snow, during Game 5 of the 2002 World Series, grabbing then-3-year-old Darren Baker, Dusty’s son and the Giants’ bat boy, to avoid a potential collision at home plate. “We didn’t hire him because we thought he would be a draw for our fans,” Heller said. “We hired him because we thought he would be the best manager for the team, period.” As soon as he was hired, Snow called up Francona and former Giants executive Brian Sabean, and picked their brains for an hour apiece.. But he left his post midway through their inaugural season, in 2024, when he needed hernia surgery. He overcame a more serious scare in 2022, one that left him in the hospital for five weeks, when he had an emergency procedure to remove his colon. Snow, diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 1997, said the health issues “took a toll” but that he is “pretty much back to normal now.” That is, besides his left rotator cuff, which he tore at a golf tournament in San Francisco and was supporting in a sling at his introductory news conference. “It’s taken a few years to get back, but that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to get back into baseball,” Snow said. “To prove to myself that I could get out there and do it again.” J.T. Snow times athletes participating in springs at the Oakland Ballers open tryout, Saturday, April 6, 2024, at Laney College in Oakland, Calif. Snow has other motives, too. The players in the Pioneer League aren’t the only ones with big-league dreams. “I do hope it leads to something bigger,” Snow said. Twenty years after retiring, he said he can “feel the clock ticking” but added, “I would love to get back to the big leagues as a coach or a manager.” Snow has had his chances with the Giants, the team he spent nine seasons with and helped to the National League pennant in 2002 but described his current situation with the organization as “kind of awkward.” After serving as a roving Minor League instructor for Sabean, Snow said the ensuing regime under Farhan Zaidi and Gabe Kapler “didn’t want anybody around.” When Buster Posey assumed the reins before last season, Snow volunteered to be among a group of former players to help at spring training. He specifically wanted to work with top first base prospect Bryce Eldridge. The pair struck up a close relationship and Snow worked with Eldridge twice after he was promoted to Triple-A Sacramento in the summer, but Snow said, “I never got a thank you from anybody in the organization.” Although with the Giants, “I didn’t get a lot of people asking me my opinion on things,” Snow said, in Modesto, “it’s all on me.”Snow isn’t the Roadsters’ sole employee, but it’s a small enough operation that he’s had a hand in everything from the team’s color scheme to its uniforms . Like the Ballers in Oakland, the team faces the challenge of winning over fans disenchanted by the previous players who skipped town. The ballpark that hosted the Modesto Nuts from 1955 until the team moved to San Bernardino after 2024 has been renovated and repainted so that, according to Heller, “it is a completely night-and-day experience than what it was in its last years.” SAN FRANCISCO – JULY 08: Former San Francisco Giants athlete, J.T. Snow particpates in the Taco Bell Legends & Celebrity Softball Game at AT&T Park on July 8, 2007 in San Francisco, California. A pint of beer, which cost $14 in the Nuts’ final season, will be priced at half that, Heller said. Parking will be free of charge. A tattoo of the team’s logo gets fans admission for life.‘I’ll be plotting my revenge’: SF Giants’ Vitello gets beer shower treatment in first win as rookie managerSF Giants trade Matos to Brewers, acquire reliever Dylan Smith from TigersHeller lives in Davenport, Iowa, where he runs the Single-A Quad City River Bandits, and also owns clubs in Wilmington, North Carolina; Billings, Montana; and Lowell, Massachusetts. He had no prior connection to California. So then, why Modesto?With Snow, Heller was more intimately familiar. He was behind home plate at Game 4 of the 2003 NLDS, when Snow crashed into Marlins catcher Ivan Rodriguez and was tagged out in extra innings as the Giants went on to be eliminated in four games. 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