Former Mariners cult hero scores the perfect post-playing gig with Brewers

The Seattle Mariners are five years into a run as contenders in the AL West, which makes it easy to forget the constant weirdness and semi-permanent sadness of the before times. But like Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris, Mariners fans will always have Daniel Vogelbach.

Speaking of, Vogelbach has a new gig with the Milwaukee Brewers as one of two hitting coaches alongside Guillermo Martinez. The team announced it on Monday:

The 33-year-old's playing career was already over, as he retired last year and took on a new challenge with the Pittsburgh Pirates as a special assistant to the hitting department. His new gig is a promotion, as it's a more important job and a move up from worst to first in the NL Central.

Mariners cult hero Daniel Vogelbach scores the perfect post-playing gig

Vogelbach didn't have much to work with in Pittsburgh last year. After ranking 24th in scoring in 2024, the Pirates changed nothing and plummeted to last in scoring for the 2025 season. One can't definitively say that bad coaching wasn't an issue, but when Spencer Horwitz is your best hitter… well, that's a talent problem, bub.

The Brewers are different. They had the best record in baseball last year in large part because their offense didn't have exploitable holes. Notably, they led the National League in batting average and on-base percentage.

Power-wise, however, they weren't even middling. They hit only one more home run than the lowly Chicago White Sox, and their slugging percentage was a tick below the league average. This isn't the reason they lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, but they did get out-homered by six to one.

As Mariners fans know, this is where Vogelbach might help.

His one and only season as an All-Star was as a Mariner in 2019, and it was because of his power and nothing else that he got that kind of recognition. He hit 30 of his 81 career homers in that 2019 season, including 21 in the first half alone.

Granted, Vogelbach can't teach Brewers batsmen how to be 6-foot-0, 270-pounders with ample oomph to put into each swing. Yet there was more to his power output than brute force. In 2019, he had the 12th-lowest rate of ground balls among qualified hitters, flanked on either side of that leaderboard by José Ramírez and Anthony Rendon — let the record show that this was Rendon was still good.

As the Brewers had the fourth-highest rate of ground balls in 2025, they needed someone in the dugout who can preach lifting the ball. Maybe this isn't specifically what got Vogelbach the job, but one can imagine this being how he leaves his mark.

In any case, you're not going to find a Mariners fan who doesn't like hearing about good news for Vogelbach. Particularly early on in that 2019 season, he was a cult hero in Seattle before he went on to play in Milwaukee, Toronto and New York. And given how wonky things were for the Mariners in the late 2010s, he remains a fond memory.

Good luck in Milwaukee, Vogey. May you find nothing but success in Milwaukee… unless the Mariners and Brewers meet in the World Series.