Cubs hitting coach Dustin Kelly isn’t one to interject if not invited. That kind of feel has served him well guiding a group of major-league players through the volatile journey of a baseball season.
So it didn’t surprise his older brother, University of Washington head coach Jason Kelly, when Dustin took an observational tact when he stopped by campus for a practice last month.
“But he coached our coaches, which was cool,” Jason said in a phone interview.
The Cubs’ and Huskies’ schedules aligned last month. The Cubs, in their first trip to Seattle since 2019, had a day off before their three-game series against the Mariners at T-Mobile Park. And UW was at home that weekend, playing UCLA, with a practice day Thursday.
“Definitely circled that one on the schedule,” Dustin told the Sun-Times leading up to the trip. “We don’t get to see each other a ton, especially during the season. So it’ll be fun to just hang out. I’ll spend my off day at a baseball field, which sounds a little crazy, but our family is so entrenched with baseball.”
Dustin went to practice and then dinner with Jason and his coaching staff.
“Everybody wants to know what makes Cody Bellinger tick, what makes Nico Hoerner tick, and all the different strategies that he has to apply to get to them mentally and help them with their routines and their plans,” Jason said. “And so it’s really cool for not only myself but my coaching staff to hear those stories and to reaffirm that we’re doing things the right way, too.”
When Dustin says the family is entrenched, he’s referencing wide-reaching baseball ties. Dustin’s and Jason’s father, Mike, was drafted by the Blue Jays in 1978 and played minor-league baseball. He passed down his knowledge and passion for the game.
Mike’s brother, Pat, also made baseball his career and is the manager of the Reds’ Triple-A affiliate. His older son, Chris, played minor-league baseball and worked in the -Padres’ scouting department. His younger son, Casey, was a Red Sox first-round pick in 2008 and is in his sixth season pitching in the Korean Baseball Organization.
“It’s a baseball family, kind of through and through,” Dustin said.
Dustin took the pro-ball route, working his way through the player-development sides of the Dodgers and Cubs organizations. This is his second season as the Cubs’ major-league hitting coach.
“For him to be in the big leagues as fast as he is, is kind of amazing,” Jason said. “He did it himself. And I think that’s really cool. He affected a lot of people, and they felt like he could be somebody that could affect big-league hitters.”
Jason has dedicated his work to college baseball, especially on the pitching side. His career has included stops at Cal Poly, Chico State, Arizona State, LSU and two separate stints at Washington.
“He’s so consistent every day,” Dustin said. “And the people that make decisions, I think they realize that and they see that in him. So that’s a really cool trait to have as a person.”
In his second season at the helm, Kelly’s Huskies finished 19-31-1 after dropping both of their games in the last Pac-12 Tournament before the conference disbands. The tournament championship is set for Saturday in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Early beginnings
Jason and Dustin’s only season playing competitive baseball together produced a game fit for family legend.
The boys were four years apart in age, so — although they logged plenty of hours of -Jason throwing tennis balls to Dustin, who was holding a whiffle-ball bat — their only crossover came in the Southside Little League in Santa Maria, California.
Dustin, then 9, was playing with the older kids. To hear both of them tell it, Jason was a force on the mound. The big lefty, whose fastball had a natural cut to it, already had broken one catcher’s thumb that season when he took out another’s with the same injury.
“I can still see it in my mind’s eye,” Jason said.
Mike Kelly, coached his sons’ team, strode out to the mound and said, “Hey, your brother’s going to have to catch you.”
“Are you serious?” Jason said.
“Yeah. There’s nobody that can do it. And he can do it. You know he can do it.”
The only problem was, Dustin wasn’t a catcher. He played right field and batted ninth. And the team didn’t have catcher’s gear or a mitt to fit a scrawny 9-year-old. Still, he ran in from right field, donned the oversized equipment and crouched behind the plate.
Jason’s next pitch knocked off Dustin’s giant glove.
“Like, blew his glove off to the backstop,” Jason said.
Dustin remembers running around along the backstop, searching for the ball as the crowd shouted directions. Jason still can picture the catcher’s mask and helmet wobbling across Dustin’s face with each step.
The ball was still sitting in the glove.
“I walk to the backstop and grab it,” Jason said, “I go, ‘Hey, it’s right here.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, oh, oh, OK.’ That was how we started.
“And I can still see him, so small, setting up low and inside, and just these big blue eyes scared to death. But my dad [said], ‘Hit your target, hit him in the glove, and he’ll be fine.’ And he caught me the whole rest of the year and did great.”
After that first game, Mike took Dustin to a sporting-goods store to get him a new catcher’s mitt.
Family business
Dustin credits Jason with “nudging” him into coaching.
“He’s my best friend, he’s a mentor and he’s the one that got me my first opportunity coaching,” he said.
Jason already was down that path — as the pitching coach at Cal Poly under Larry Lee, who became a mentor to both brothers — when Dustin was coming to terms with the end of his playing career after being released and trying to figure out what to do next.
First, he helped out at a Cal Poly high school prospect camp, working with the -infielders and hitters.
The team had a volunteer coaching position open the next year. After the weeklong camp, Lee offered Dustin the position.
“I felt like I wasn’t teaching as much as I was just learning,” Dustin said. “But they both said, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at this. You kind of have a knack for teaching and engaging and connecting with players.’ And I just fell in love with it.”
Said Jason: “The kids have to believe you, and he had that ability about him, where when he spoke, people just wanted to listen, and they enjoyed talking to him. And he just had a charismatic presence about him, that if he was going to do something like this, he would be good at it.”
Now, they joke about being much better coaches than they were players.
They came by the trade honestly. Mike Kelly didn’t regale his children with stories of his playing days. What they heard came from his friends around the barbecue pit, family members on vacation, people around town who had seen him play in high school. But when Jason and Dustin were growing up, Mike was always their coach — baseball, basketball, helping out with the football team.
“Everybody in our community knew my dad as Coach,” Dustin said. “Coach Mike or Big Mike or Coach Kelly.”
And he always was talking baseball.
“Even when we didn’t want to hear about it, he was still going to talk to us about it,” Jason said. “And I don’t know that we knew that was lighting the fire in us, but it was.”
Small world
When Cubs infielders Hoerner and Nick Madrigal were standout high school baseball players in Northern California, the job of recruiting them to Washington fell to Jason.
Kelly was the Huskies’ pitching coach at the time. Madrigal’s savvy and base-running impressed him. Hoerner’s grit and determination set him apart. Hoerner said UW was recruiting him as a two-way player, and he took his first in-person visit there his sophomore year. Kelly presented him with his first scholarship offer.
“It was a great recruiting group in California that year, and both of those guys were head and shoulders above everybody else,” Jason said. “I just wanted one of them.”
He jokes that they both broke his heart. Hoerner chose Stanford, winning the conference in 2018, his last season there. Madrigal went to Oregon State and won the 2018 -College World Series.
In a twist of fate, both have worked with the younger Kelly brother for the last two seasons.
“It actually took me an embarrassingly long time to have that cross my mind,” Hoerner said, “and then it made a ton of sense.”
In addition to having the same last name, the brothers look a lot alike. As Jason put it, “I’ve just got a couple more pounds on him. He’s got a little more red in his beard; I’ve got a little more gray.” They speak with a similar calming tone and cadence.
“[Jason] seemed to have a really good feel of obviously taking the work seriously, but enjoying it at the same time and doing so from a more laid-back perspective,” Hoerner said, “which is definitely how I would describe DK’s work, in a good way.”
It’s a compliment often given to Dustin. He isn’t overbearing, he has a knack for gauging how much information to give a player and when to give it, and he has helped foster a collaborative atmosphere with the rest of the hitting staff.
Pac-12’s last hurrah
The Cubs won’t return to Seattle next year — it’s the Mariners’ turn to come to Chicago. But it’s still possible the Kelly brothers’ schedules could align again when the Huskies are in town to play Northwestern.
As the Pac-12 Tournament plays out this week, the conference’s impending dissolution is hard to ignore.
“It’s bittersweet,” Jason said. “I’m not that kind of person that’s going to really dwell on standing in the outfield going, ‘I can’t believe I’m never going to come back to some of these ballparks.’ But it is sad. We were raised on the West Coast within this conference.”
Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA are set to join the Big Ten. Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado and Utah are headed to the Big 12. Stanford and Cal are ACC-bound. Washington State baseball signed on with the Mountain West. Oregon State baseball opted for an independent schedule in 2025.
“It’s just a shame,” Madrigal said. “It was competitive in so many sports.”
The Pac-12’s 29 national baseball titles are more than double the next-closest conference’s total. And USC, with 12 College World Series titles, leads the pack by a comfortable margin. Conference realignment, driven by college football TV revenue, didn’t seem to take many other sports into consideration.
“Just from a practical, logistics standpoint, it makes no sense to me to play college sports on the other side of the country,” Hoerner said, “especially when there’s incredible competition right around you and a lot of really great history.”
As the Pac-12 season comes to a close, -Jason also is embracing the optimistic side of the bittersweet.
“It’s also a new start,” he said. “I’m excited about that. I’m excited about the Big Ten. I’m excited about new opponents and new ballparks and new road trips.”
One of those things will be a trip just outside of Chicago.
“It’ll be cool if it matches up when they’re out here one time,” Dustin said.