From Chronicle Staff Writer Susan Slusser

A’s bench coach Chip Hale, 49, will be announced as the Diamondbacks new manager later today, according to numerous reports this morning. This will be the first big-league manager’s job for Hale, who will bring enormous enthusiasm and energy to the job along with detailed preparation. Hale, who was born in San Jose and attended Campolindo High School, was a star at the University of Arizona and still lives in Tucson in the offseason.

“I don’t think he could be in a better spot,” A’s manager Bob Melvin told me this morning. “He’s back home with people he knows and people with Oakland ties. It’s a great fit.”

Former A’s manager Tony La Russa is Arizona’s chief baseball officer, former A’s star starter Dave Stewart is the team’s general manager. Hale was on Melvin’s staff when Melvin was Arizona’s manager.

“He’s fundamentally sound, he’s a teacher first and foremost,” Melvin said. “He’s a good game manager, he’s prepared, motivated and competitive. It’s always tough to replace your bench coach but the flip side is that Chip is getting a wonderful opportunity and I couldn’t be happier for him.”

The top candidate to replace Hale: St. Louis Cardinals bench coach Mike Aldrete, who is friends with (and a former teammate of) Bob Melvin and who has worked with him before in both Seattle and Arizona. Aldrete, a former Giants and A’s player who attended Stanford, is from Monterey and still lives there; he has spoken in recent years of wanting to move back to the Bay Area to be closer to home. He has talked to the A’s about other positions in the past, including the hitting coach position – but he was offered a promotion to bench coach with St. Louis in order to stay there.

Recently fired Arizona manager Kirk Gibson was Melvin’s bench coach with Arizona one season, but I don’t see that happening; same thing with ex-Rangers manager Ron Washington. Managers usually take a year or two before looking for coaching jobs if they don’t find other managerial situations. And the idea of Gibson working for the A’s, a franchise he devastated in 1988….well, that’s tough to imagine. Washington, the longtime Oakland third-base coach, resigned for personal reasons in Texas, which makes an immediate return to baseball pretty unlikely.

The rest of the A’s current staff also is likely to get consideration for the bench-coach spot – particularly hitting coach Chili Davis, who has some leverage to get a promotion: the Yankees and Red Sox have interest in him as a hitting coach, and the Cubs may, too. Davis of course has Yankees ties, since he played there, and he was the Red Sox’s Triple-A hitting coach. The potential of a job offer elsewhere is one reason Aldrete went from hitting coach to bench coach, after all – it’s not a stretch to imagine it happening in this instance.