Guy Conti, the longtime baseball coach and scout who worked with the Pirates, Dodgers and Mets and helped shape Pedro Martínez early in his rise, died Tuesday, Oct. 13 after a lengthy illness. He was 84.
News of Conti’s death was shared by longtime Mets PR chief Jay Horwitz, who posted on X: “We lost a good one today,” long with a tribute to a man he described as the team’s former bullpen coach and special adviser. Horwitz wrote that Conti “was a friend of Sandy Koufax and beloved by Pedro Martínez.
No one had more stories than Guy. His knowledge reached people for decades.
Miss you my friend.”
Conti’s path through baseball started in western Pennsylvania. A native of Freeport, Pa., he attended Clarion State College, where he played both baseball and football. The Houston Colt .45s signed him after his freshman season, and he spent one year in the minors before a shoulder injury cut short his playing career.
He moved into coaching quickly, working in baseball and football at Albion High School in Pennsylvania before joining Edinboro State College. There, Conti coached baseball, football and basketball, and later built a strong run as Edinboro’s head basketball coach.
Over nine seasons, he went 140-98, won Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference West Division titles in 1975-76 and 1981-82, and guided the 1981-82 team to the NCAA Division II tournament. Edinboro later inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1997.
Baseball pulled him deeper into the professional ranks in the 1980s, first as a part-time coach and scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates, then with the Los Angeles Dodgers beginning in 1986. With the Dodgers, Conti filled a number of minor-league roles, including roving pitching coach and minor league pitching coordinator.
It was there that he crossed paths with Martínez, then still a young pitcher in the organization. Conti helped him sharpen the changeup that became one of the defining pitches of Martínez’s career and also pushed him to learn English. Martínez later called Conti his “white daddy,” a sign of how close the two became during those early years.
Conti joined the Mets in 1999 as a minor-league manager and later worked as a minor-league coach and field coordinator. He was the club’s bullpen coach from 2005-08 under manager Willie Randolph, and later served as the Mets’ pitching rehabilitation coordinator, helping pitchers work their way back from injury and return to competition.
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