At the GM Meetings, Buster Posey said that the San Francisco Giants were close to hiring a hitting coach.
He wasn’t kidding.
The Giants are in talks with former New York Yankees hitting coach James Rowson for a position on the staff, with one possibility being Major League Offensive coordinator, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.
Giants hiring ex-Yankees hitting coach James Rowson
Yankees general manager Brian Cashman was noncommittal about Rowson’s status at the GM Meetings on Tuesday, describing the team's former hitting coach as a “free agent.” The Yankees, meanwhile, are engaged with other hitting coach candidates — both internally and externally, Cashman said. But time would appear to be of the essence with the lockout looming on Dec. 1. Teams are still allowed to hire coaches during a lockout, but those coaches would not be allowed to have any work-related contact with their new players, which would obviously make the transition difficult ahead of what could be an abbreviated regular season.
In San Francisco, Rowson helps replace Hunter Mense, the team’s hitting coach from last season, who departed this winter for the Kansas City Royals. Rowson had been the Yankees’ hitting coach since Nov. 2023 and was previously with the Detroit Tigers, Minnesota Twins and Miami Marlins, serving as bench coach in Miami from 2020-2022.
New York ranked first in baseball in team wRC+ in each of Rowson's first two seasons at the helm in 2024 and 2025, but they dropped all the way to 14th in 2026 and were one of the worst offenses in the league after Aaron Judge went down with a rib injury at the end of May. The Giants, meanwhile, ranked 23rd in team wRC+ in Mense's lone season as the team's hitting coach, the fourth year in a row they've finished in the bottom third of the league in that metric.
Elsewhere on the Giants’ staff, they hired Taira Uematsu as the new first base coach while retaining Ron Washington and Gary Pettis.
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