Who is Jason Kanzler? New name emerges in Mariners coaching search
· Yahoo Sports
There’s a new name being bandied about for the Mariners manager position; The Athletic reports that, in addition to known quantities Joe Espada and Rocco Baldelli, the Mariners are also interviewing 36-year-old Jason Kanzler, currently director of player development for the Cubs.
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Kanzler has a background as a player: he was drafted by the Twins in 2013 out of SUNY Buffalo and spent three years as an outfielder in Minnesota’s system, topping out at the High-A level. After being released in 2015, he taught public school for a few years while building his own performance training business, coaching Cape Cod League baseball in the summers, before transitioning to coaching full-time. Eventually he landed in the Astros system, where he worked his way up from a minor-league hitting coordinator in 2019 to the World Series champion big-league club in 2022 (putting him solidly past the most scandal-soaked years of the Astros, although it was a near miss with the Brandon Taubman debacle). The Cubs hired Kanzler as director of player development prior to the 2024 season, a role that is currently overseen by Justin Toole in the Mariners organization but most Mariners fans might associate with Andy McKay, who held the position for seven years before the Mariners promoted him to assistant GM in 2022; McKay moved to the Guardians prior to the 2026 season to take an on-field role.
It’s more relevant to talk about Toole and McKay as analogues for Kanzler than it is to talk about Baldelli or Espada, both of whom have years of experience managing at the big-league level. Kanzler’s background is more on the minor-league and independent side, with some of the hallmarks you find in people who are more invested on the player development side. Kanzler has a Twitter account (@KanzlerThinks) that hasn’t been updated since 2020, shortly after he began his big-league coaching career in earnest, which hits many of the same beats you’ll find in skimming Twitter feeds from other young coaches – he rails about the youth sports industrial complex (yes!), says the best training equipment is A Hill (eyeroll), and rewrites the lyrics to “The Sound of Silence” to be about hitting development (?) on a post dated on Christmas Day 2019 (???). A peek at Kanzler’s LinkedIn touts his “proficiency” in Spanish, which is certainly preferable to not proficient, and a “broad coding background” (his Twitter bio identifies him as a “hobbyist programmer”), suggesting he’s at least not adverse to integrating technology.
Kanzler was hired to oversee Cubs player development at a time when the Cubs had the most MLB Pipeline Top 100 prospects in baseball (7) – interestingly, he told MLB.com shortly after his hiring that he actually felt the strength of the farm was a challenge, noting that the big-league club – which had just added Pete Crow-Armstrong – was set up to be competitive for several years, meaning the farm would be depleted by trades, and emphasizing the importance of making sure the farm was deep and robust in order to weather those trades. That’s a similar situation to what Kanzler, should he become the Mariners manager, would be walking into in Seattle. The Mariners started the season with seven top-100 prospects, but have already promoted four of them – Colt Emerson, Kade Anderson, Lazaro Montes, and Michael Arroyo – to the big leagues, triggering a new contention cycle but also resetting the next wave of prospects on the farm. Kanzler, over his time with the Cubs, would be familiar with both managing the farm and seeing how that wave of young players integrate with the existing big-league clubhouse, making him uniquely positioned to understand where the Mariners are headed into 2027.
The question, of course, is if Kanzler has enough experience on the big-league side of things to translate those learnings into success for the Mariners. Kanzler was 34 when he joined the Cubs, two years younger than Justin Toole was when he took up the same position with the Mariners; at 36, he’s almost ten years younger than Baldelli, 15 years younger than Espada, and over 20 years younger than the Mariners’ last skipper, Dan Wilson.
But age doesn’t determine personality; yesterday I wrote about how the new Mariners manager must be able to empower a clubhouse culture of leadership and accountability. Espada, for all his years of experience, inherited a clubhouse that Astros beat writer Chandler Rome, on 710 Seattle Sports’s Bump and Stacy show, described as “self-policing.” Whoever is given the Mariners managerial position will have significantly more work to do in building clubhouse culture, and Kanzler’s youthful energy – even if some of it comes off as sparkle-motion-level cringe-y – could be a spark in invigorating a clubhouse that often felt stagnant and directionless. Plus, we already know his potential clubhouse leader Cal Raleigh is no stranger to a parody song himself.