It was only yesterday that Buster Posey indicated Tony Vitello’s new coaching staff was “still very much a work in progress,” and yet here we are about 24 hours later and one of the key roles has been
seemingly cemented. The Athletic’s Blue Jays beat writer Mitch Bannon has reported Toronto’s assistant hitting coach Hunter Mense will be joining the Giants for the 2026 season.
NBC Sports Bay Area has drafted off this report to speculate he’ll be replacing Pat Burrell as the team’s lead hitting coach, a decent assumption. Alex Pavlovic notes in this post:
During the regular season, [the Blue Jays] led the big leagues with a .265 average (the Giants hit .235) and ranked second-to-last with 1,099 strikeouts (the Giants have been over 1,300 in five consecutive seasons). The Blue Jays also ranked third in OPS and fourth in runs scored.
Mense — pronounced “MENTZ,” like how Hunter Pence pronounces his surname — is good friends with Tony Vitello, so those who’ve been on the Vitello MLB Connections beat are being rewarded right now. Pavlovic mentions, “Both are Missouri natives and Mense played at Missouri while Vitello was an assistant coach.” This is the same setup for those Max Scherzer to the Giants rumors, by the way, and Scherzer is currently the only active major leaguer from Vitello’s time in Missouri.
He never made it to the majors, peaking at Kansas City’s Double-A team in 2012, where at age 27 he hit .291/.338/.457 in 51 games. My familiarity with him goes beyond his time in Toronto. I’m sure many of us who’ve played Out of the Park Baseball over the years has hired the digital version of him as their team’s hitting coach. In my head, I always pronounced it “MEN-see,” kinda like how actor Tobias Menzies pronounces his. Anyway!
For the Marco Luciano, Wade Meckler, Grant McCray and Bryce Eldrigeheads out there, Hunter Mense has a development background, having been Toronto’s minor league hitting coordinator from 2019-2021 before his promotion to assistant hitting coach on the major league roster. Since 2022, Toronto has sported the fourth-best offense in baseball (109 wRC+) and led the sport in batting average (.257). So, on the surface, this seems like a real get.
I’ll agree with that while also noting that before being the organization’s minor league hitting coordinator, he was their Double-A team’s (New Hampshire Fisher Cats) hitting coach in 2018 and that year they won their league championship. That lineup featured Lourdes Gurriel, Cavan Biggio, Bo Bichette, and Vlad Guerrero Jr.. So, you know, was the coaching in service of all-service talent or did coaching take the lead? I suspect we know the answer.
Still, this is a breath of fresh air for the coaching staff after Bob Melvin’s tenure saw him surrounding himself with a host of retreads who had pretty famously burned out in their last stops.
The coaching staff would still be in a state of flux even with this hire. As Maria Guardado noted on BlueSky:
They’re getting a hot commodity of a hitting coach to, hopefully, reshape a Giants lineup sorely in need of a makeover.
