A fun former Pittsburgh Pirate is back in baseball, as the Tampa Bay Rays have hired former outfielder Corey Dickerson to serve as the team’s first base coach.

Tampa Bay Rays Coaching Staff Update:

The Tampa Bay Rays have hired Corey Dickerson as First Base Coach.

— Rays Communications (@RaysPR) December 22, 2025

Dickerson joins the coaching staff of manager Kevin Cash, who was Dickerson’s manager when he played for the Rays. This will be his introduction to coaching at the professional level. After his playing career concluded, he coached high school baseball near his home in Mississippi.

After a solid first five years in MLB with the Rockies and Rays, which included hitting 27 home runs and making the AL All-Star team in 2017, Dickerson was traded to the Pirates in Feb. 2018, a month after the team traded Andrew McCutchen away to San Francisco. The main return the Pirates sent the Rays was reliever Daniel Hudson, who, as Pirates fans surely remember, is the third-most recent player to sign a multi-year free agent deal in Pittsburgh (thank you, Ryan O’Hearn).

There was certainly a ton of pressure that came with being the direct replacement of a franchise icon like McCutchen, but Dickerson did his part. In 2018, he hit .300/.330/.474 in 135 games and, after splitting his time between left field and DH in Tampa, came out of nowhere to post 16 defensive runs saved and win an NL Gold Glove while patrolling the massive left field at PNC Park.

Dickerson came to Pittsburgh with two seasons of control and was a significant factor in the team posting a winning record in 2018. Once the Pirates collapsed in 2019, Dickerson was among those traded at the deadline. He would bounce around with five teams over the next handful of years, retiring after the 2023 season.

Former Pirate Corey Dickerson will be returning to a major league dugout in 2026.

Dickerson was a key to the Pirates’ plans of returning to relevance post-McCutchen. He now faces a similar venture, joining the coaching staff of a Tampa Bay Rays team that also just traded its longest-tenured star. It feels like it wasn’t that long ago when Dickerson was still playing. Now he’s back in uniform, hoping to contribute in a new capacity for a Rays team that faces an uphill battle towards contending in the AL East.