Pedro Guerrero is wasting no time getting to the heart of what the Dodgers need.
After replacing Aaron Bates as the club’s hitting coach on Monday, Guerrero said his focus won’t be on trying to reinvent swings. Instead, he wants to sharpen the way the Dodgers compete in the biggest offensive moments.
“I like to think of it as building the player, not the swing,” Guerrero said. “The swings are kind of built at this point, so it’s going back to … are we having team at-bats?
How do we execute [with runners in scoring position]? How are we gonna make it really tough for the starter?”
That approach lines up with one of the Dodgers’ biggest issues late in the season: situational hitting. Manager Dave Roberts brought up that phrase multiple times during the year as Los Angeles came up short in key spots, and the numbers backed up the concern. The Dodgers left 1,165 runners on base last season, the fourth-most in MLB.
Even with those struggles, the offense was still productive overall. Los Angeles scored the fourth-most runs in the league over the course of the season, but Guerrero’s job now is to help push that production higher when the pressure rises. The hope is that cleaner execution in leverage situations can make a difference for them in 2027.
Guerrero brings a long and winding baseball path to the role. The 37-year-old spent eight years in the Dodgers’ organization from 2006-13 during his playing career, though he never reached the majors. He got as high as Triple-A, but only appeared in three games above High-A.
His first coaching job came in 2016 with the Dodgers’ organization, when he worked as bench coach for the Ogden Raptors, then a rookie-ball affiliate. After two seasons there, he moved on to the Phillies as an assistant hitting coach at the major league level.
Guerrero then took the same position with the Giants in 2022 and stayed there through 2024 before landing the Marlins’ hitting coach job in 2025. He spent two years in Miami before the Dodgers came calling.
The Marlins saw noticeable offensive improvement during his time there, and president of baseball operations Peter Bendix praised him on the way out.
“He did a tremendous job for us,” Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix said. “He’s a wonderful human being.
We’re going to miss having him around, and really appreciate everything that Pedro gave to us. Just time for a new voice in the hitting space.”
Now the Dodgers are banking on that new voice to help steady an offense that finished strong enough in the big picture, but not sharp enough when the game tightened.
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