Twins Hire Mark Hallberg As Bench Coach
The Twins finalized their 2026 coaching staff. Most of the moves had been previously reported, but Minnesota revealed the hiring of Mark Hallberg as bench coach. They’ve also added Mike Rabelo as an assistant bench coach and Toby Gardenhire as field coordinator.
The rest of Derek Shelton’s first staff in Minnesota was already known: pitching coach Pete Maki, hitting coach Keith Beauregard, bullpen coach LaTroy Hawkins, base coaches Grady Sizemore and Ramon Borrego, assistant pitching coach Luis Ramirez, and assistant hitting coaches Rayden Sierra and Trevor Amicone. There are five holdovers from Rocco Baldelli’s staff.
Hallberg, 39, heads to the Twin Cities after eight seasons in the Giants organization. He coached and managed in the minor league system for a couple years before joining the MLB staff in 2020. Hallberg has spent the past four seasons as a base coach in San Francisco and interviewed for their managerial vacancy over the 2023-24 offseason. (The job went to Bob Melvin.) Hallberg coincidentally steps into the job that had been filled by Jayce Tingler for the past four seasons. Tingler left the Twins to join Tony Vitello’s first staff in San Francisco.
Rabelo was part of the Pirates’ coaching staff between 2020-25. Shelton was the manager in Pittsburgh for most of that time. The 45-year-old had a three-year run in the big leagues as a part-time catcher. He has also coached in the Detroit organization and was most recently Pittsburgh’s third base coach.
Gardenhire, as one can probably infer, is the son of longtime Minnesota skipper Ron Gardenhire. Toby, 43, had a brief minor league playing career in the organization and has managed in their farm system since 2018. He has spent the past five seasons leading their Triple-A affiliate in St. Paul. He now gets the promotion across town to join an MLB staff for the first time.
Giants Add Ryan Christenson, Pat Burrell To Coaching Staff
The Giants announced some additions to their coaching staff in year one under Bob Melvin. Longtime Melvin lieutenant Ryan Christenson joins as bench coach, while former MLB outfielder Pat Burrell is taking over as hitting coach. Matt Williams is also leaving the Padres to take over as third base coach.
Incumbent hitting coach Justin Viele will retain his title, tweets Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area. He and Burrell are co-hitting coaches, while Pedro Guerrero is returning as an assistant hitting coach. According to Pavlovic, assistant hitting coach Dustin Lind will not be back in 2024.
San Francisco also announced a few holdovers from last year’s group. Mark Hallberg, Alyssa Nakken, J.P. Martinez and Taria Uematsu are all returning to the staff. Hallberg is moving across the diamond from third base to first base coach. Martinez remains an assistant pitching coach, while Nakken and Uematsu are assistant coaches.
None of the additions are surprising, as all three had been rumored to join the staff. Christenson’s strong relationship with Melvin has led him from Oakland to San Diego and back to the Bay Area. He worked as a bench coach in Oakland and San Diego and spent this year as the associate manager for the Friars.
Burrell, a former number one overall pick, was a two-time World Series winner during his 12-year MLB career. The second of those titles came in San Francisco, where he closed his playing days in 2010 and ’11. Burrell hit .253/.361/.472 with just under 300 home runs in the big leagues. The Miami product has coached in the Giants’ minor league ranks going back to 2020.
Williams, of course, had an excellent playing career in his own right. The five-time All-Star got a managerial job with the Nationals in 2014. He led Washington to a 96-win season to earn the NL Manager of the Year award in his first season. After the team went 83-79 during his second year at the helm, the Nationals dismissed him and hired Dusty Baker. Williams has subsequently spent time on the Diamondbacks, A’s and Padres staffs (overlapping with Melvin in the latter two places) and managed for two seasons in South Korea.
There’s still more to come on the coaching front in San Francisco. The team has not announced the future for pitching coach Andrew Bailey, who has reportedly considered leaving to take a position closer to his family on the East Coast.
Latest On Giants’ Managerial Search
The Giants interviewed third-base coach Mark Hallberg this week in regards to the manager’s job, Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Hallberg becomes the first candidate known to officially sit down for an interview, though several other internal candidates are also on the radar. Bench coach and interim manager Kai Correa and longtime former third base coach Ron Wotus are expected to receive interviews, Slusser writes, and catching/bullpen coach Craig Albernaz could also be considered. Albernaz has already been interviewed by the Guardians in regards to their own managerial vacancy.
Hallberg, however, “is emerging as the top in-house candidate” to replace the fired Gabe Kapler, Slusser notes. The 37-year-old Hallberg has been part of San Francisco’s coaching staff for the last four seasons, moving from an assistant coach role to taking over from Wotus as third base coach prior to the 2022 campaign. After playing five seasons in the Diamondbacks’ minor league system from 2007-11, Hallberg moved on to coaching at the high school level, and then for four seasons in the Cape Cod League. He joined the Giants organization as a coach of their former lower-A affiliate in Salem-Keizer in 2018, and then managed the club in 2019.
If the Giants did hire Hallberg, he would be the club’s first (non-interim) first-time MLB manager since Dusty Baker got the job in 1993, though Baker obviously had a larger breadth of Major League experience from his long playing career and his coaching career before moving into the manager’s chair. Considering the increasing impatience from Giants fans to see the team get back on the winning track, Hallberg would immediately face a lot of pressure, though Slusser notes that it could be a popular hire within the team since Hallberg is “well regarded by everyone in the organization.”
Correa and Wotus aren’t surprising names on the list of possibilities, and this would be the second time Wotus has interviewed for the manager’s job — the Giants spoke with Wotus during the 2019-20 offseason prior to hiring Kapler. Wotus has spent the last 35 seasons in the San Francisco organization as a minor league player, then as a manager in the minor league system, and then an extended coaching stint that lasted from 1998-2021. Nineteen of those seasons on staff were served as a bench coach, with Wotus acting as the right-hand man for managers Baker, Felipe Alou, and Bruce Bochy. The 62-year-old Wotus has worked as an advisor within the Giants organization for the last two seasons.
President of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi said he hoped to have the team’s new manager hired before the free agent period fully opens, which occurs five days after the end of the World Series. There haven’t been many public reports about external candidates who may or may not be of interest to the Giants or have spoken to the club already, but Slusser reports that Rangers bench coach Donnie Ecker “is expected to be among the potential front-runners” as San Francisco’s next manager.
Ecker is a familiar face in the Bay Area, having worked as a hitting coach with the Giants in 2020-21. Other teams with managerial vacancies (the Guardians, Mets, and Angels) might also have interest in speaking with Ecker, though the Rangers’ increasingly deep playoff run is a complication, as any interviews would have to be built into breaks in the postseason schedule.