SURPRISE, Ariz. -- Connor Dawson can rattle off names of Royals players from almost every decade, and one of his dogs is named Chief. His Kansas City Chiefs season tickets are on the 30-yard line, but way up top, because he loves the bird's-eye view of a play developing. He’ll go way out of his way to eat at Wyandot Barbeque, his favorite spot in Kansas City.
Dawson, in his own words, “grew up on Chiefs football, Royals baseball, barbeque and Boulevard Wheat.”
Now he’s the Royals’ assistant hitting coach, and it’s fair to say that getting to work for his hometown team is a dream come true.
“This is where I grew up,” Dawson said.
The Royals hired Dawson and Marcus Thames this offseason as assistant hitting coaches under senior director of hitting performance Alec Zumwalt. Thames, 48, brings experience as a former player and veteran coach. Dawson, 32, brings a newer-school approach to hitting with an eye on metrics and game planning.
“It’s been great,” Zumwalt said. “Two different backgrounds, two different personalities, two different upbringings in the game. … It’s been a really good dynamic.”
A 2012 graduate of Olathe North High School in Kansas, Dawson grew up about 25 miles southwest of Kauffman Stadium. He played collegiately at Neosho County Community College in Chanute, Kansas, but he set his sights on coaching early. He coached the Kansas City Bullets college prep baseball program -- a team that included Royals catcher Carter Jensen -- and was the hitting coach and strength coach at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Overland Park, Kansas.
“Coaching is just such a different side of things,” Dawson said. “The one thing I knew I wanted was for players to feel confident at all times. I wanted them to know that I thought they could take on the world. ... As a player, I probably didn’t necessarily think like that. There’s a ton of value in having fun and knowing that you can win, and that’s kind of what I want to instill in players.”
In 2019, Dawson was the hitting coach and pitching coach at Marshalltown Community College in Iowa before joining the Mariners organization. He was the Mariners’ hitting strategist in 2020 and Minor League hitting coordinator in ’21 before the Brewers hired him to their Major League staff. Dawson spent the last four seasons coaching one of the best offenses in the league.
Dawson and his wife had just moved into their new house in Olathe when the Royals called about an interview this fall. He was in the middle of painting his basement Urban Bronze by Sherwin-Williams. The paint job took a backseat as memories of his Royals fandom flooded his mind.
When Dawson thinks of the Royals, he thinks of all the eras. George Brett, of course, and all of the winners in the 1970s and ’80s. Mike Sweeney was the icon of Dawson’s childhood.
But even then, Dawson says, he was “sort of a Royals nerd.” He knows all the names.
“Mark Quinn, Dee Brown,” Dawson said. “Andy Sisco – big giant lefty on the mound. Those are the guys I think about when I think about the Royals. It’s not necessarily the stars … Kila Ka’aihue, Calvin Pickering. It was who I grew up watching.”
Those teams, though, weren’t really winners. It wasn’t until Dawson became a coach in 2015 that the Royals won a championship. But the current era of Royals baseball includes Bobby Witt Jr., Salvador Perez, and the expectation to win.
Dawson’s challenge now is to help them do that.
“We have power, we have speed, we have really smart players,” Dawson said. “It’s a very baseball-y team, which is really interesting to me. There are teams that are built on three true outcomes, and this team is not one of them. This team can create pressure in a lot of different ways and can attack you in a lot of different ways.”
Dawson comes to Kansas City with an analytically minded reputation and a good understanding of game approaches. Players have enjoyed talking to him about pitch sequencing as they work off the Trajekt machine. Working his way through different levels of baseball forced him to get creative and “win on the margins,” he said, especially in community college. He called pitches from the dugout there, which likely helped shape his understanding of approaches now.
Dawson’s hitting philosophy revolves around getting a good pitch to hit and hitting it on the line. But he recognizes there’s much more to it than that.
“In reality, we’re running an offense here,” Dawson said. “You have different levels of pressure you want to put on teams. I’ve always found that question interesting because there’s so much more to hitting than just swinging a baseball bat. Other parts of the game affect what happens in the box, and what happens in the box affects other parts of the game.”
Making it all work together is now part of Dawson’s job. He’s already sat in so many different seats around Kauffman Stadium. The home dugout might be his new favorite.