The Dodgers announced Tuesday that they’ve hired Pedro Guerrero as a hitting coach. He’ll replace Aaron Bates, who surprisingly opted to leave the organization despite being offered a multi-year deal to stay. Guerrero has spent the past two seasons as the Marlins’ hitting coach. The 37-year-old had previously worked as an assistant hitting coach with both the Giants and Phillies organizations.
Though this is, of course, not the same Pedro Guerrero who made five All-Star teams with the Dodgers in the 1980s, the incoming Guerrero is no stranger to the Dodgers organization. He spent his entire minor league playing career there and served as a bench coach in the low levels of their system back in 2016-17 — his first professional coaching gigs. From 2006-13, Guerrero played 411 minor league games and tallied 1524 plate appearances. He topped out at the Triple-A level and logged a career .236/.287/.351 batting line. Of course, as we’ve seen throughout the years in MLB, a poor track record as a player doesn’t preclude a successful coaching career.
Marlins hitters batted .249/.326/.400 as a team in 2026. Miami ranked in the bottom-third of the league with 168 home runs but posted a middle-of-the-pack run-scoring total and ranked top-10 in both batting average and on-base percentage. Hitters like Liam Hicks (traded to Tampa Bay at the deadline), Otto Lopez and Javier Sanoja had breakouts in South Florida. Of course, fellow youngsters like Owen Caissie and Connor Norby struggled badly.
A team’s overall performance — and even the performance of individual players — can rarely be attributed to one singular coach. That’s long been the case but is truer than ever in an era where teams deploy much larger coaching staffs than in the past, to say nothing of input from analytics departments, advance scouting teams and personal/private offseason coaches.
Following the season, Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix praised Guerrero as a “wonderful human being” who “did a tremendous job for us” but said the organization felt it was time for a new voice to guide its young hitters. Guerrero’s free agency lasted only a matter of weeks. He’ll now step into the vacancy created by Bates’ departure to team with fellow hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc in Los Angeles. The rest of the Dodgers’ coaching staff under manager Dave Roberts is expected to remain intact.
