The Dodgers hired Pedro Guerrero as their hitting coach on November 10, 2026, turning to a 37-year-old who spent the past two seasons guiding the Marlins’ hitters. He will replace Aaron Bates and work alongside Robert Van Scoyoc in Los Angeles.
The move matters now because it closes a vacancy that opened only after Bates unexpectedly chose to leave even though the Dodgers offered him a multi-year deal to stay. That kind of departure does not usually happen when a club wants continuity, and it leaves Guerrero stepping into a job the Dodgers clearly wanted to keep in-house.
Guerrero arrives with a long connection to the organization. He spent his entire minor league playing career in the Dodgers system, played 411 minor league games from 2006 to 2013, reached Triple-A and posted a.236/.287/.351 line. He later returned as a bench coach in the low levels of the Dodgers’ system in 2016 and 2017 before moving into coaching roles elsewhere.
His work in Miami gives the Dodgers a coach with recent major league experience, and the numbers there offer a mixed picture. Marlins hitters batted.249/.326/.400 as a team in 2026, finished in the bottom-third of the league with 168 home runs, and still ranked top-10 in batting average and on-base percentage. Liam Hicks, Otto Lopez and Javier Sanoja broke through, while Owen Caissie and Connor Norby struggled badly. Peter Bendix called Guerrero a “wonderful human being” who “did a tremendous job for us,” but also said the Marlins felt it was time for a new voice to guide their young hitters.
That is the tension around every coaching hire: performance can improve, regress or hold steady for reasons that rarely belong to one person alone. The Dodgers are betting that Guerrero can add to what Van Scoyoc already brings, while the rest of Dave Roberts’ staff is expected to remain intact. It is a familiar kind of change on paper and a meaningful one in practice, because the only real test now is whether Guerrero can turn a new pairing into a different result.
