The calendar says November 6 but it’s Christmas around here at Lookout Landing HQ.
The New York Post reports the Mariners have reportedly finally pried Tanner Swanson away from the Yankees organization to serve as Jason Kanzler’s bench coach. The 44-year-old Swanson, who has deep roots in the Northwest, has been a long-time dream coaching candidate for many of us in the LL community, but he’s been deeply enmeshed in a high-profile role in the Yankees organization since 2019 as their primary catching
coordinator; he’s also served as their quality control coach and field coordinator. Finally, with the bench coach job open under new head coach Jason Kanzler, the Mariners were able to bring Swanson home.
Swanson, who was born in Cle Elum and attended high school at Cle Elum-Roslyn (and still makes his home in Roslyn), played his college baseball in the Northwest, moving from local community colleges (Green River and Everett) before transferring to Central Washington. After graduation, he coached high school baseball in Sultan and at his various alma maters (almae mater?) as well as at the University of Washington, where he zeroed in on his true love of coaching catchers, founding his own catching development business, D1 Catching. He parlayed that into his first job in pro baseball, joining the Twins as a minor league catching coordinator in 2017. Swanson’s first big-league job came in 2019, when the Yankees hired him as their quality control coordinator and big-league catching coordinator, where he remained until the Mariners came calling with the bench coach opportunity.
This hire is very exciting for lots of reasons. Under Swanson’s leadership of the Yankees catching corps, they’ve improved from middling to one of the consistently best teams in catcher framing runs. Swanson oversaw Jose Trevino during his first Gold Glove-winning season in 2022, when he led the league in the metric. Swanson has also been credited for his work with Yankees catcher Austin Wells, who many scouts expected to move off the catching position post-college. Wells has ranked in the top five for catcher framing runs for each of the past three seasons.
More globally, Swanson was an early adopter of the one-knee-down catching philosophy, at the time regarded as controversial but now standard practice. Swanson pioneered the technique way back in 2017during his first year with the Twins, while working with minor-league catcher Ben Rodriguez, whose bigger frame caused him issues when he was trying to block balls. He’s a respected voice in the industry who has spoken at conferences, appeared on podcasts, and generally acted as a thought-leader in his field for the past decade-plus.
Swanson’s father was Jim Swanson, a left-handed catcher with the minor-league Portland Mavericks – made famous in the documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball – and is worth reading up on if you don’t know his story (left-handed catchers, I will forever dream of you). For those of you fans of a certain age, he also ran Swannie’s sports bar in Pioneer Square in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Catching development is Swanson’s calling card – and makes him a good fit for a team where one of the clubhouse leaders is the catcher – but ironically, he never played catcher in his career, instead playing as an infielder during his college career. But Swanson’s interests are beyond catching; he’s a student of all aspects of the game, often retweeting ideas he finds interesting about hitting or coaching in general (he’s a solid Twitter follow – @TannerSwanson. I’ve been following him for years and learned a ton). He is also passionate about sports in general – especially women’s sports, as the dad of four girls – and still deeply connected to developmental sports in the Northwest.
As far as experience, Swanson has direct experience being a bench coach – he served as Great Britain’s bench coach in the WBC this past year. (He also served as manager for one game in 2026 when both Aaron Boone and Brad Ausmus were ejected in a game against the Rays.)
