HOUSTON — The Houston Astros are moving toward hiring San Diego Padres hitting coach Victor Rodriguez for the same position, multiple league sources told The Athletic on Wednesday.
The deal is not official, and some details are still being finalized, but the expectation is for Rodriguez, 64, to assume one of the two vacated hitting positions on Houston’s overhauled coaching staff. MLB.com first reported Rodriguez as a target late Tuesday night.
Rodriguez, who played parts of two major-league seasons as a utility infielder, has held major-league hitting coach roles for the Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Guardians and Padres across a 29-year coaching career.
Rodriguez and former Padres manager Mike Shildt had a longstanding relationship that spanned four decades. Shildt resigned last month, leaving Rodriguez and the remainder of San Diego’s coaching staff in flux.
The Astros parted ways with longtime hitting coaches Troy Snitker and Alex Cintrón after an underwhelming 2025 offensive season staggered by a slew of injuries and underperformance by highly compensated hitters. That the lineup did not improve on specific edicts from general manager Dana Brown only put Cintrón and Snitker under further scrutiny. Brown said he met with Cintrón and Snitker after the 2024 season to advocate seeing more pitches while “being a little bit more patient, and aggressive in the zone, not so much aggressive out of the zone.”
Houston’s 2025 lineup had the second-highest chase rate in the sport, saw the third-fewest pitches per plate appearance and scored fewer than three runs in 82 of its 162 games. Slugger Yordan Alvarez’s 114-game absence crippled the offense, as did a roster filled with free-swingers.
Of the seven Astros who took at least 390 plate appearances last season, six had top-50 swing rates in the sport. Four — Mauricio Dubón, Jose Altuve, Yainer Diaz and Jeremy Peña — chased outside the strike zone at least 35.3 percent of the time.
Rodriguez can’t change this personnel — though it stands to reason Brown will make changes this offseason — but perhaps the Astros are seeking a fresh perspective in a hitting department that has seen little turnover. Cintrón and Snitker had been Houston’s hitting coaches for the past seven seasons, a stretch in which the Astros led the American League in OPS.
During Rodriguez’s two-season tenure, the Padres offense posted baseball’s lowest strikeout rate and the sport’s highest contact rate. In the seven-season stretch under Snitker and Cintrón, the Astros also had baseball’s lowest strikeout rate.
“I think our philosophy is more about, ‘You have a better chance if you make contact,’” Rodriguez told The Athletic last season. “I know at times you’d rather even strike out than make contact into a double play, but I realized that that part of hitting has been going. It’s gone.”