TAMPA -- Back in January, Yankees manager Aaron Boone gathered his new coaching staff for a few days in Tampa for baseball talk and bonding. It was a new mix, as big personalities Carlos Mendoza and Sean Casey were gone, and a former big league manager, Brad Ausmus, was now bench coach.
Another member of the group carried a highly meaningful resume, if a lower-profile name. Pat Roessler, the 64-year-old assistant hitting coach, is perhaps the only man on earth to have already coached both Aaron Judge and Juan Soto.
And as director of player development for the Yankees from 2005-2014, he brings institutional knowledge of deep-seated organizational philosophies. Both of those qualities mark him as a major asset to the big league team.
Judge is the most successful Yankees prospect from Roessler’s time on the farm (new hitting coach James Rowson, a favorite of Judge’s, was minor league hitting coordinator during those years). He left the organization to join Kevin Long as the Mets’ assistant hitting coach from 2015-17, and replaced Long in the top job in 2018.
He then served as assistant hitting coach in Washington from 2020-2023, working with Soto until the Nationals traded him to San Diego in July, 2022.
“I haven't been around Judge recently,” says Roessler. “But Soto’s preparation is tremendous. He’s got a great routine. He has a very repeatable swing. He sees the ball better than 90 percent of the human race. He has great strike zone judgment, and he’s strong as hell. So he’s got a lot of good things working for him.”