Mets add two new coaches to Carlos Mendoza's staff
Jeff Albert, left, and Kai Correa. Credit: AP
The Mets made significant headway in reconstructing their gutted coaching staff Tuesday, hiring a new bench coach and promoting from within to fill the role of hitting coach, sources said.
Kai Correa, most recently the Guardians’ field coordinator and coach of defense, baserunning and game strategy, will be manager Carlos Mendoza’s second in command. He assumes the bench coach role vacated by John Gibbons, who resigned as part of the Mets’ massive coaching reconstruction earlier this month.
Jeff Albert, who’s served as the organization’s director of hitting development for the last two years, will lead the major-league club’s hitting program; it’s likely the Mets will also hire an additional hitting coach. Albert, who has a background in physiology and biomechanics, will partially take over the role filled by ousted hitting coaches Jeremy Barnes and Eric Chavez.
Correa, 37, played college baseball at Puget Sound University and has quickly risen through the ranks: He started as a Division III assistant coach with Puget Sound, moved on to Division I, and began serving as a minor-league coach in the Cleveland organization in 2018.
He became then-Giants manager Gabe Kapler’s bench coach in 2020, and interim manager for three games in 2023 when Kapler was fired. He returned to the Guardians the next season.
Albert, meanwhile, has a bachelor’s degree in finance, along with a master’s in exercise science from Louisiana Tech, and began his coaching career in Dominican Winter ball in 2015. He worked with the Astros in various capacities for five years, before becoming the Cardinals’ primary hitting coach from 2018 to 2022.
He also owns HittingResearch.com, which, according to his LinkedIn page, is home to Hit 585 — a “batting cage facility where (they) customize player development programs and share information on application of objective information to the hitting development process.”
The duo fill two of the many holes left by the front office’s coaching purge. The Mets still need at least a pitching, catching, and third-base coach.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
