Rangers Complete Skip Schumaker's Staff: Tommy Joseph Is the New Hitting Coach in Arlington

ARLINGTON — The Rangers' coaching staff is whole. The Texas Rangers announced Wednesday night that former major-league first baseman Tommy Joseph has been hired as a hitting coach, completing second-year manager Skip Schumaker's staff for 2027, Field Level Media reported.

Joseph, 35, has spent the past two years as an assistant hitting coach with the Seattle Mariners (2024) and Baltimore Orioles (2025). In Arlington he replaces Alex Cintron, who has moved to a different offensive role within the organization, and he will work under lead hitting coach Justin Viele — the structure the front office has been building around since Schumaker's first season.

The new coach's playing career gives him a particular kind of credibility in a batting cage. Originally a second-round pick by the San Francisco Giants, Joseph played 249 career games with the Philadelphia Phillies from 2016 to 2017, then played in South Korea's KBO League in 2019 and one season in the independent Constellation Energy League in 2020 before retiring. He began coaching in 2021 as the lead hitting instructor for the New York Mets' Single-A team, was promoted to Double-A in 2022, and spent the 2023 season as a High-A hitting coach in the Giants' organization before joining the Mariners.

President of baseball operations Chris Young framed the staff's task in the announcement, praising Viele — 'Players love JV. He's got such a care factor... He's very well-respected, highly regarded' — while naming the gap Joseph is hired to help close: 'It didn't perfectly translate to the run production we needed last year, but there were improvements offensively... Now we've got to translate that to our ability to score runs as a collective group. My hope is that it'll lead to good results next year.'