The calendar says November 6, but it’s Christmas here at Lookout Landing HQ.
Swanson, who was born in Cle Elum and attended high school in Cle Elum-Roslyn (and still lives in Roslyn), played college baseball in the Northwest, leaving local community colleges (Green River and Everett) before transferring to Central Washington. After graduation, he coached high school baseball at Sultan and his various alma maters (almae mater?) as well as at the University of Washington, where he focused on his true love of coaching catchers, founding his own catching development company, D1 Catching. He parlayed that into his first job in professional 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 a quality control coordinator and big league catching coordinator, where he remained until the Mariners came calling with the bench coaching opportunity.
This rental is very exciting for many reasons. Under Swanson’s leadership of the Yankees catching corps, they went from mid-tier to one of the consistently better teams in catcher framing runs. Swanson oversaw Jose Trevino during his first Gold Glove-winning season in 2022, when he led the league in that metric. Swanson was also credited for his work with Yankees catcher Austin Wells, who many scouts expected would move away from the catcher position after college. Wells has ranked in the top five in receiver framing carries for each of the last three seasons.
More broadly, Swanson was an early adopter of the knee-on-the-ground catching philosophy, considered a controversial but now standard practice at the time. Swanson perfected the technique in 2017 during his first year with the Twins, while working with minor league catcher Ben Rodriguez, whose larger size caused him problems when trying to block balls. He is a respected voice in the industry who has spoken at conferences, appeared on podcasts, and generally acted as a thought leader in his field over the past two decades.
Swanson’s father was Jim Swanson, a left-handed minor league catcher for the Portland Mavericks – made famous in the documentary The Beaten Bastards of Baseball – and is worth a read if you don’t know his story (left-handed catchers, I’ll always 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.
Developing catches is Swanson’s calling card – and makes him a good fit for a team where one of the club’s leaders is catcher – but ironically, he never played catcher in his career, instead playing as an infielder during his college career. But Swanson’s interests are inexplicable; he studies all aspects of the game, often retweeting ideas he finds interesting about hitting or coaching in general (he has a solid Twitter following – @TannerSwanson. I’ve followed him for years and have learned a lot). He is also passionate about sport in general – particularly women’s sport, as the father of four daughters – and remains deeply connected to developmental sports in the North West.
As for experience, Swanson has direct experience as a bench coach – he was Great Britain’s bench coach in the WBC last year. (He also served as manager for one game in 2026 when Aaron Boone and Brad Ausmus were ejected in a game against the Rays.)
Gn sports
