The 2020 San Francisco Giants coaching staff looks very different than years past: a lot of new faces with unique backgrounds. Get to know our new staff members in this three part series, stating with our bench coach and hitting coaches.

Kai Correa — Bench Coach

Everywhere Jimmy Correa went in Hilo, Hawaii — grocery store, post office, coffee shop — everyone called him Coach. Even people who didn’t know baseball. He was a legend. He coached the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of his earliest players, from park and rec teams to high school and travel ball. He was still coaching almost until his death at age 96.

Jimmy Correa had eight children, including four boys. Two became baseball coaches.

One son, Tom, a science teacher, coached the high school team. He had two sons. The younger one didn’t take to baseball. He went off to Harvard and is earning his doctorate at UC Berkeley in rhetoric. The older one, Kainoa, was also a serious student, but his homework arrived on the teacher’s desk smudged with dirt from the dugout. He loved baseball. When he had to write an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up, the answer was obvious: baseball coach.

He became an all-conference infielder in high school then played ball and studied history at the University of Puget Sound, a Division III school not known for churning out draft picks (just eight in the last 42 years). An unusually practical young man, Correa came to understand that a guy who was never going to play an inning of pro ball, much less Major League ball, had no chance to be a full-time college or pro coach. He had calculated there were approximately 2,500 of such jobs in the country and declared the odds impossible.

The practical move, he decided, was to be a history professor who coached baseball on the side.

While practicality is helpful when planning a career, it’s useless when answering a calling. A calling, like Correa’s for coaching, will find its way.

After graduation, Correa wasn’t ready to dive into graduate school so he signed on as an assistant coach at Puget Sound. He stayed four years, falling deeper in love every day not only with teaching skills but with mentoring, motivating, explaining, organizing. He left in 2015 for Division I University of Northern Colorado, rising from a volunteer assistant to head assistant in less than three years. Along the way he worked for USA Baseball as an infield instructor.

Soon, he was conducting clinics and giving talks around the country about his coaching techniques and philosophy. A few Major League teams began to take notice. The Cleveland Indians hired him away from Northern Colorado in 2017 to work with their minor league infielders, which quickly turned into a job as minor league defensive coordinator.

Gabe Kapler, then the Dodgers’ player development director, began following Correa’s career. When Kapler took over as Giants Manager in November 2019, the 31-year-old Correa became his first hire after veteran Giants coach Ron Wotus.

Correa says both his grandfathers, not just Jimmy Correa, gave him everything he needs for the job he has now. His grandfather on his mother’s side, the son of Japanese immigrants, fought in World War II, earned an MBA from New York University and spent his career running the largest accounting firm in Hawaii.

“It’s personnel management, it’s teaching in the classroom and on the field, it’s demonstrating skills, it’s mentoring, it’s pubic speaking, it’s marketing, it’s organizational skills, it’s graphic design in creating visual displays to make advanced statistics easy to understand,’’ he says, “So many layers to unpack.’’

Despite his near-impossible rise to the Major Leagues, he is as hyper-practical as ever.

When he slips behind the wheel of his Toyota Tundra, he never turns on music. He listens to something useful, like a lecture on motor skills, or an audio version of the 2020 MLB rules changes (he uses an app to translate printed documents to audio). Or he’ll knock out the phone calls he needs to return. “I just try to max out my time,’’ he says. He won’t go into gas stations or grocery stores on the left side of the road because the ones on the right side are quicker.

In the shower, he sets up his phone outside the glass wall and watches video. The other morning he reviewed Maurcio Dubon’s plays from last season. He has no hobbies and takes no vacations. He is meticulous about saving for their daughter’s college. She is four months old.

Even his honeymoon was practical. He and his wife, Brittany, flew to Curacao at the invitation from former Giants coach Hensley Meulens, who paid for the flights in exchange for Correa teaching at his baseball training camp. So mornings were spent at the beach, afternoons at the baseball camp, and evenings at a nice restaurant.

“It was a great honeymoon!’’ he says.

So what does he do for fun?

“This!’’ he says, opening his arms outside the coaches’ meeting room at Scottsdale Stadium during spring training. “How many Division III infielders have become Major League bench coaches? I never put my head down on my pillow and not like my job.’’

Follow Kai on Twitter and Instagram.

Donnie Ecker — Hitting Coach

Donnie Ecker’s path to coaching began with a question: Why couldn’t he hit?

He had washed out from the Texas Rangers minor leagues after just two years, and at age 23 found himself in Crestwood, Illinois, as a backup third-baseman for the Frontier League’s Windy City Thunderbolts. He had always been a strong, strapping, all-around athlete, racking up 27 touchdown passes as quarterback for Los Altos High School.

So how, Ecker wondered, did he manage just 4 extra-base hits in 115 at-bats in the minors? He began studying baseball swings.

Thus began an obsession that grips him still.

He recorded the swings of major league players by pointing a VHS camera at the television. These videos turned into a computerized hitting library. He studied what the best hitters had in common, creating a library of video profiles of individual hitters. He called up college coaches to strip-mine everything they knew about hitting.

“In a world where everyone is trying to be right,’’ Ecker says, “I’ve always been way more interested in questioning where I’m wrong.’’

He discovered that pro golf was decades ahead of baseball in studying the bio-mechanics of swings, so he’d go to Southern California Performance Institute and Stanford University Performance Lab, both of which were at the forefront of golf swings and human movement. At this point, he was still trying to fix himself. Then something shifted.

“You’re holding on tight to all you’ve ever known,’’ Ecker says, “but you know you’re meant to do something else in your life.’’

He stopped playing and at age 24 began coaching at alma mater Los Altos High. In the off-seasons, he traveled to Perth, Australia — twice — to study the science of learning, more specifically how athletes acquire new skills. Offering to work for free, he sent to every general manager in baseball a box of edited batting videos along with analyses of every hitter. No response.

But he began to gain a reputation in the baseball world as a budding hitting guru. He finished his college degree with a double major in communications and business leadership. He earned certification as a specialist in the biomechanics of sports and exercise. He began traveling every year to Chicago to study in the off-season with a biomechanics professor there, focusing on a different aspect of the body or a swing.

He rose quickly through the coaching ranks, from Los Altos High to the college level in Bakersfield to the St. Louis Cardinals farm system. In 2019, he became an assistant hitting coach for the major league Cincinnati Reds. At the age of 33, he is now a hitting coach for the Giants.

The obsession with hitting shows no signs of abating.

Ecker began to keep a daily journal in 2017, voicing thoughts, ideas, to-do tasks and experiences into his phone throughout the day. Every night, he transcribed the audio notes into a black notebook.

He is on his 57th black notebook and counting. He fills 15 to 20 each season.

“Every year I reread them,’’ he says, “and I laugh at myself.’’

He finds that he was wrong a good portion of the time. That’s how it should be, he says. What he thinks and how he teaches have to always evolve. Because if he’s not changing, he’s not growing.

“Do I have a life outside of this? I really don’t,’’ he admits. “I have a really deep obsession for my craft. I want to be the best in the world at it.’’

He wants to impact as many people as possible. He wants to win a World Series, too. But there’s more to it.

“The joy is not when you arrive or win the prize,’’ Ecker says, “but the moments that went into the process to get there.”

Follow Donnie on Twitter and Instagram.

Justin Viele — Hitting Coach

It was the second-to-last day of spring training, 2015. Orioles camp. Sarasota, Florida.

Justin Viele looked at the board in the hall outside the clubhouse, hoping he wouldn’t see his name. There it was, along with a time slot to see the farm director. Viele, like every guy in camp, knew what that meant.

“Sorry, Viele, we don’t have a spot for you,’’ the farm director told him. “But how would you like to coach first base in High A?”

Coach? Was he kidding? Viele was only 24 years old. He had played just two years in the minors. He was just getting started. He’d hook on somewhere else. Maybe apply for citizenship in Italy and play there.

“Take a day to think about it,’’ the farm director said.

Viele thought about it. He knew the chances of reaching the big leagues were slim. Drafted in the 37th round, he hit .211 with a .333 OBP in 126 minor-league games, none above Low-A. He had to be honest with himself. What, realistically, was his future as a player? Coaching at least could keep him in the game. He said yes.

Then he pulled out his phone. The moment Viele heard his father’s voice, he choked up. When he had won the MVP award in high school, when he had become team captain at Santa Clara University as a sophomore, when he had played 161 consecutive games — Viele’s father had been there for him. He was his son’s biggest fan. And he still was.

“Go for it,” his dad said.

Viele drove from Sarasota to Frederick, Maryland, to start his new life. It was weird. He went from playing alongside good friends and teammates like Mike Yasztremski to tossing them batting practice. Instead of fielding ground balls during warm-ups, he was hitting them. But the team’s manager Orlando Gomez, who had been coaching longer than Viele had been alive, taught him something new every day. The hitting coach, Paco Figueroa, became his mentor and close friend. Viele started keeping spray charts of opposing players and watched his positioning suggestions pay off. He kept meticulous notes about opposing pitchers’ tendencies and sequences and watched them pay off in more stolen bases, fewer pickoffs, and hitters feeling confident to pick times to sit on pitches.

“I felt like I was doing things that directly helped the team win,’’ Viele said later, “and I fell in love with coaching.’’

He spent the following season as a volunteer assistant coach at Santa Clara. The next year, in 2017, the player development director at the Dodgers was a former player named Gabe Kapler, and he hired Viele as a minor-league hitting coach.

“I became obsessed with the cage culture, the hitting tech, the online software ‘Trumedia’ and all the other resources the Dodgers provided to their staff,’’ Viele said. “I’d go down rabbit holes on Trumedia. I could go through every statistic on every player in the organization. I could look for competitive advantages against opponents. That’s when I was really learning how to be a hitting coach — learning drills, creating drills, picking the brains of the great hitting consultants the Dodgers had.’’

Three years later, during the 2019 season off-season, Viele was at a hitting conference in Fort Lauderdale when his phone rang. It was Kapler. He had just become the Giants’ Manager. He offered Viele an opportunity to fly to SF and interview for the Major League hitting coach position. Viele hit the mute button. “I thought I was going to cry, to be honest,’’ he says.

Five days later, he was in SF at dinner with Kapler after a long day of interviewing. Kap offered him his dream job.

Viele had just turned 29.

He had made it to the major leagues.

After dinner, he called his dad.

Dustin Lind — Assistant Hitting Coach

Among the Giants’ 13 coaches, Dustin Lind can claim at least two distinctions.

He hails from the smallest town: Florence, Montana, population 765.

And on a spring afternoon in 2017, at the age of 28, he strode across an auditorium stage in Montana and, with wife, parents and in-laws looking on, received a doctoral diploma. Two days later, he hung the Montana State diploma in his office at Hamilton Physical Therapy Clinic in Missoula and began a new career as Dr. Dustin Lind.

He is still a doctor of physical therapy, but the diploma hangs in his living room and people now call him coach.

Just a year after earning his doctorate, he found himself working in pro baseball. The Seattle Mariners hired him as a strength coach in 2018 then promoted him to director of hitting development in 2019. The Giants swept in and hired him as assistant hitting coach and director of hitting for 2020.

So how does a doctor of physical therapy land his dream job as a hitting coach in the major leagues?

Simple formula:

1. Spend all three years of graduate school gathering and studying thousands of videos, articles and other documents about the mechanics of hitting, then post them on a 15-gigabyte Google drive available to the public. “I thought, ‘What would I want as a resource if I was a hitter today? What was lacking when I was in high school? I wanted to create a one-stop shop,’’ Lind says. When a video of Josh Donaldson explaining his swing on MLB Network attracts more than 750,000 views, you know you’re not the only one fascinated by, and driven to understand, the most minute details of hitting.

2. As you support yourself in school by working at Walgreens, as a maintenance man at your apartment complex, as an employee at the university’s student fitness center and by creating a company called Cutthroat Bats that sells bats you make yourself at a buddy’s woodshop, you also make time to earn a strength and conditioning certification.

3. You then volunteer for your old American Legion baseball team screening their players for injury risks and writing strength and conditioning programs for those players.

4. This leads to working with the players on swing mechanics and body movement.

5. Which leads to working with private hitting coaches and their clients, which leads to working with several pro players, including a few Seattle Mariners minor leaguers.

6. Which leads to your dream job in baseball.

Nothing to it.

What Lind loves most about coaching is watching players flourish. To be an effective coach is to be an effective teacher, and teaching is part of Lind’s DNA. His father is a math teacher. His brother is a teacher and working toward a master’s degree in education administration.

“I learned from my dad that it’s all about caring about your students,’’ Lind says. “He does a lot of work above and beyond.’’ Lind took that approach in treating patients in his physical therapy practice and it’s his approach

By the way, Lind no longer sells bats. “I shut that down,’’ he says, “as soon as I made my last tuition payment.’’