Baseball coaches face tough decisions every day. Should they send the runner or tell him to stay put? Should they ride out a pitcher’s rough inning or dial the bullpen for a fresh-armed reliever? Should they leave a perennial World Series contender to manage the Miami Marlins, a team that lost 100 games in 2024?
If you’re former Los Angeles Dodgers first base coach Clayton McCullough, the answer to that last question is yes.
“It was important to me to work with people I had a shared vision and philosophy with,” says McCullough, who lives in Jupiter with his family. “I understood there were going to be challenges here in Miami that were going to be unique and that was exciting. It wasn’t a case of there only being 30 jobs like this, so it’s hard to say no. As things started to line up, I felt like if I was going to take a shot at doing this, it was the right time and the right place to go do that.”
And the good news is that once McCullough went all-in with the Marlins, the team exceeded expectations. It only dropped 83 games in 2025 and finished third in the National League East.
It even came pretty darn close to nabbing a Wild Card spot in the playoffs, after winning seven of its last ten games. President of baseball operations Peter Bendix has said that he’s excited about the club’s trajectory now that McCullough is at the helm and building a winning culture. McCullough, meanwhile, loves what he saw from his team in his first year as coach.
“My favorite thing about this team was their resiliency,” McCullough says. “We started the 2025 season with a walk-off win, and we had some moments that weren’t great, but this team never stopped competing. They never stopped playing. We would be down in a game and come back and play to the very last out and get knocked down on the mat. But we picked ourselves back up and got back into the fight. I’m incredibly proud of that because that kind of resiliency and toughness is what it takes to get through a regular season and ultimately win in the postseason.”
Baseball has always been in McCullough’s blood. Born in Greenville, North Carolina, McCullough grew up on or near baseball diamonds. His father, Howard, was a college baseball coach who joined the Boston Red Sox as a scout in the 1980s. A traveling dad was a fact of life, and his mother did everything she could to keep the family connected. Soon, McCullough would follow in his father’s footsteps, playing baseball at Eastern Carolina University before being drafted by Cleveland prior to graduation. In college, he was a catcher who batted a respectable .272. As a pro, McCullough struggled to make contact at the plate. After a couple of years of playing in the minor leagues, he decided to pursue other career opportunities in the sport.
“I wasn’t a very good player,” he says. “I was fairly realistic after my second or third year in the minor leagues, that my chances of playing the major leagues were very slim. I could have kept playing and coming back for another year and getting limited opportunities. But I was 25 and I had some college left to finish, and I knew I wanted to stay in baseball. Going back to school would open up a potential avenue for me to coach and give back and stay in the game as a livelihood I was really interested in.”
McCullough’s manager, Luis Rivera, had already seen his potential as a manager and began including him in coaching conversations. Armed with Rivera’s wisdom, McCullough returned to Eastern Carolina as a volunteer coach while he finished his degree. Then he went to work for the Toronto Blue Jays organization for the next seven years. While coaching for the Lansing Lugnuts, an Oakland Athletics affiliate, he met his wife Jill, who was also working for the team. The couple married in 2012. Once they paid off student loans and their car note, they decided to live the itinerant baseball life, eventually choosing Jupiter, where Jill’s parents lived, as a home base.
“We’re both very family-oriented people, and we were about to have our first child,” Jill says. “We knew bringing in a new baby, especially with him in the baseball world traveling and on the go, that we wanted to be near one of our families.”
Soon after they moved to Jupiter, McCullough got a job with the Los Angeles Dodgers. As the couple’s family grew to include two more children—their brood includes 11-year-old Carson, 8-year-old Kyle, and 6-year-old Quinn—McCullough acknowledges that the periods of separation could be difficult. Like McCullough, Jill understood what it was like to have a father on the road for periods of time, as her father was a pilot. Communication, she says, has been key.
“Cell phones make a big difference,” she says. “So, we have FaceTime and phone calls, and we never go too long without knowing when we are going to see each other next. And we’re definitely on the same page with our values and the way we want to raise our family.”
McCullough says Jill used to pack up the family and bring them to California during the summer until the beginning of the school year. Though their upbringing has involved a lot of travel and change, McCullough says the kids have handled it well.
“My wife is a superhero,” he says. “She does all the heavy lifting.”
Coaching in Miami has made it easier to spend more time with his family. Jill likes that they no longer have to go as long without seeing each other now. And when the kids start missing their father, she says there’s always a friend of family member who can drive them down to the 305 for a game. Knowing your father is there for you is important when you’re young, she says.
“He’s a great dad,” Jill says. “When he comes home in the off season, he wants to be at everything. He just wants to be Dad. And he’s the biggest Disney Dad, too. Any time he can take the kids to a Disney park, he loves that, and he relishes that time we spend together there.”
As he looks ahead to the 2026 season, McCullough is eager to continue coaxing the best out of his young squad.
“When I started here, we had a blank slate,” he says. “A blank canvas can be beautiful, and we had the opportunity as a group to, you know, draw this and paint this in any way we wanted. We didn’t have to follow anyone else’s path. We didn’t have to do anything just because it’s traditionally been done that way. And I mean, that’s fun, right?”
It’s also exciting. McCullough has the Marlins believing in themselves and hungry to go out and improve every day. No one knows what year two of McCullough’s tenure will look like, or whether the postseason might be in the cards this time. Everyone knows that the only thing they can do is take things one game at a time.
“Let’s just worry about today,” he says. “We’re all in this together just trying to move this thing forward. What others say about us does not define what we’re going to end up being.”
If the Marlins—and McCullough—defy the naysayers and keep racking up victories big and small, they might just be end up being champions.
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