The 54-year-old Mabry has more than a decade of MLB coaching experience on top of a 14-year playing career.
The Orioles are going to try out something new for the major league coaching staff: Having a guy with a lot of experience be around in the mix. On Friday afternoon, the team announced the hire of 14-year MLB veteran John Mabry as a senior advisor, major league coaching staff. This was rumored to be in the works earlier in the week by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.
The team’s press release on Mabry’s hire is vague on what he will actually do. The full description provided is this: “In this new role, he will be advising Interim Manager Tony Mansolino and the rest of the major league coaching staff.” There is an opening on the coaching staff, since the team relieved field coordinator/catching instructor Tim Cossins of duties at the same time Brandon Hyde was fired. It does not appear that Mabry is directly joining the uniformed staff that will be in the dugout nightly, however.
One thing that Mabry has that the current Orioles coaching staff broadly does not is a substantial amount of major league experience as both a player and a coach. His 14-year MLB career brought him across eight organizations, and he’s served as a coach nearly every year since 2012 for three different teams. Most recently, he was the assistant hitting coach for the Marlins in 2023 and their hitting coach last year.
It’s a bit of an unusual arrangement, in the sense that if the Orioles wanted Mabry to be a hitting coach, they could just get rid of one of their hitting coaches and replace him with Mabry. That press release would call him a hitting coach and say what uniform number he’d be wearing.
Instead, Mabry gets the senior advisor title with a feeling that his arrival will bring a perspective of experience that is lacking. Is he going to interact with players directly? Or will he just be talking to the coaches about how to best get their message across? Whether any of this will be productive towards changing the team’s fortunes, specifically the fortunes of certain hitters who’ve been struggling this season, is something that only time will tell.