Tuesday is Opening Day in the Pioneer League, a West Coast independent baseball league. For one of its new teams, the person helping run the show is someone San Francisco Giants fans will recognize.
Amy Gutierrez spent more than 20 years around the Giants, the majority of them as the television sideline reporter covering the team. But after a baseball career best known for her work behind the microphone, Gutierrez has moved into the action as a co-general manager for the RedPocket Mobiles, a new team named after a budget cellphone service provider.
The Pioneer League is the same league where former Giant J.T. Snow will manage a team in Modesto and where the Oakland Ballers play. But unlike those teams, the Mobiles will play exclusively on the road for the entire 2026 summer, about as close as you get to baseball’s old barnstorming days in the modern era. (It also makes their cellphone-inspired name quite fitting.)
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“I think, hands down, this is the most unique situation in baseball I’ve ever encountered,” Gutierrez told SFGATE in a phone interview last week. “Like, I kind of can’t believe these guys are willing to do this. Ninety-six games on the road from California to Montana, and they are going to be together, and they’re going to be on a bus, and I think it’s going to have all kinds of fun story lines and some drama.”
FILE: San Francisco Giants center fielder Angel Pagan, right, talks with Giants broadcast reporter Amy Gutierrez during batting practice before a baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers in San Francisco.
Jeff Chiu/AP
Gutierrez has been working as co-GM alongside Pioneer League director of baseball operations Al Maulding since she was hired in late February. She’s gotten a true crash course in everything that comes with the GM role — from scouting trips to spring training in Arizona to the highs and lows of roster moves.
But unlike a GM for a big league team, a minor league general manager has far more off-field tasks to manage. When she spoke to SFGATE last week, Gutierrez was driving up to Marysville, about 20 miles east of Sutter Buttes, for an exhibition game but said she needed to stop at a Save Mart to pick up the food for the team to eat. She’s had to learn all of the paperwork the league requires for hiring people, making trades, coordinating travel. Her phone has been constantly buzzing in recent weeks leading up to Opening Day.
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“I could jump from this to being like a firefighter and putting out fires,” Gutierrez quipped. “That’s, I mean, I’m literally gaining training for multiple gigs outside of baseball, because the skill set that you get, being a general manager, is really just straight up problem-solving.”
One thing that hasn’t been a problem, though, is finding interested players. Gutierrez gave most of the credit to the ex-big leaguers on the coaching staff: manager Dmitri Young, who spent 13 years in the major leagues, and pitching coach Ray King (whom Giants fans might remember from giving up an absolute bomb to Barry Bonds in a 2003 marquee matchup during King’s 10-year career).
“The demand to play for Dmitri and Ray is huge,” Gutierrez said. “… They’re just that revered and have that much experience — in the game but also in life. They just kind of get it.”
RedPocket Mobiles co-general manager Amy Gutierrez, center, the former sideline reporter who covered the San Francisco Giants, poses for a photo alongside the team’s ex-MLB player coaches, manager Dmitri Young, left, and pitching coach Ray King.
Courtesy of the RedPocket Mobiles
That demand also brings its own challenges. Over the weekend, Gutierrez got to experience the thrill of telling a player he had made the team — a moment that she said gave her “the chills in the best way possible” — at the same time as she had to tell others they were cut. It’s in those tough conversations that the former UC Davis volleyball player can relate to the grind, especially after her own professional career in baseball.
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Gutierrez got her start in television at KFTY-TV, a tiny station up in Santa Rosa (where Giants broadcaster Jon Miller also started his career back in the 1970s). She initially got to NBC Sports Bay Area as a producer in the mid-2000s and then was put in front of the camera as an in-game reporter in 2008, joining legendary broadcast duo Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper on the nightly telecast.
“I said yes and had no idea what I was getting into when I started reporting on the Giants in 2008,” Gutierrez said. “… It was so hard to find my way alongside Kruk and Kuip — who were amazing, but it was kind of like, ‘What do I have to offer next to these two rock stars?’”
As Gutierrez remembers it, the fanbase “did not like me at all” at the start. She credits her “ability to outlast” as helping her power through the negativity.
It helped that her timing couldn’t have been better, in a baseball sense. Gutierrez was, literally and figuratively, along for the ride as a wave of homegrown superstars — Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, Pablo Sandoval, Brandons Belt and Crawford — led the Giants to three World Series titles in five years. Her connection with those players helped her become a Bay Area staple by the end of the 2010s.
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Then the pandemic changed everything. Gutierrez’s final season as a sideline reporter happened completely away from the sidelines, as she spent the 2020 season working from NBC Sports Bay Area’s studios or from home. The network eliminated her role after that season, but she was quickly hired by the Giants to do in-house media work. She continued to do interviews with players and even her fellow broadcasters for the team’s YouTube channel, but her contract ended in December 2025.
There was plenty to keep Gutierrez busy without baseball. She’s a lecturer in the Sonoma State University communications department, and she also was a faculty adviser for the school’s student newspaper this year alongside her husband Paul, a longtime sports journalist best known for covering the Raiders (and now working for the team as a columnist). She’s still a regular public speaker, from speeches to emceeing events and even still doing on-camera interviews, like she did at the San Francisco International Film Festival a few weeks ago. She’s authored several children’s books and is a podcast host. Oh, and she has two kids. She jokes she ought to join the circus with how many plates she’s spinning.
“At one point during all of this, during COVID, I had 18 1099s,” Gutierrez said, referring to the tax form for part-time contract work.
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Then, in February, Mike Shapiro, a longtime baseball executive who used to work as the Giants’ general counsel, offered her the chance to stay in baseball with the co-GM gig with the Mobiles. Gutierrez said she leaned on an old trick in that moment: saying yes before any imposter syndrome in her brain could say no. She’s now part of a growing wave of women coming into all aspects of baseball.
FILE: The San Francisco Giants’ Buster Posey, left, is interviewed by Amy Gutierrez during a spring training baseball game against the Oakland Athletics in Scottsdale, Ariz., Saturday, March 19, 2016.
Jeff Chiu/AP
“I never saw why women couldn’t do certain things in this sport, especially when it was just a matter of mind power,” Gutierrez said. “This isn’t physical power. I’m not playing the game. I’m analyzing the game. I’m putting the game together. I’m organizing, I’m putting out fires. That’s been very revealing to me in my quest for always searching for equality.
“There’s a very logical side of me when I dive into, ‘I’m not qualified,’ to say, ‘Get over it. Yes, you are, and you’ll figure it out.’”
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While she’s been working for months already, learning the league’s peculiar eligibility rules to help assemble the roster, Tuesday will bring the official start of her first season. She won’t be traveling with the team all season long but will be in constant communication to help with whatever the team needs — on and off the field. Outside of baseball, there’s arranging the team dinners, helping coordinate travel and media interviews, and even working with the team’s sponsor, a wireless phone company. She’ll also put her broadcast skills to use and help produce the team’s video content.
On the field, Gutierrez and Maulding are trying to build a winning roster from the jump, but they will inevitably need to scout out potential injury replacements, get new contracts signed and even make trades. Ideally, a few Mobiles will even get signed by MLB organizations. It makes Gutierrez even more grateful for all of the time she spent as a reporter covering ex-Giants GM Brian Sabean and current GM Zack Minasian.
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“There’s a great appreciation for what they do and the sacrifices they make personally, to make sure the team can get on the field,” Gutierrez said. “I don’t think people realize what it takes. I didn’t. I had no idea, and so it really just opens my mind and my perspective for how special this sport is.”
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She knows there will be days when those “overwhelming anxiety moments,” as she put it, make her question why she ever took this job. At the same time, Gutierrez feels motivated by how she’s learning something new every day, even at 52. She knows “there’s nothing mundane or dull about this job.” If anything, she’s hoping her new adventure sets a reminder of all that can be possible in baseball.
“It’s kind of sad that I didn’t see that I could do something like this, but you know who can? My daughter and all of her friends,” Gutierrez said. “That is a legacy that you leave, as a parent and hopefully as somebody who’s trying to blaze a trail, that I left my daughter with the confidence that she can see and be anything she wants to be — without hesitation or fear that she’s not qualified.”