The St. Louis Cardinals recently made a change to their coaching staff. Late in October, they announced that hitting coach Brant Brown would not be returning for the 2027 season. Brown was the team's hitting coach for the last two years, and St. Louis immediately began searching for a new replacement.

According to Robert Murray of FanSided, the Cardinals have found their guy. Joel McKeithan, who was the assistant hitting coach for the Chicago White Sox this past season, has been hired as the team's new full-time hitting coach. The 2027 coaching staff is nearly set, and the Cardinals have just a few more tweaks to potentially make.

Everything Cardinals fans need to know

The Cardinals have cycled through hitting coaches a lot lately. After the 2022 season, they replaced Jeff Albert with Turner Ward and two years later hired Brown to replaced Ward, so this is the fourth hitting coach the Cardinals have had in the last five years.

However, Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offered a little perspective on McKeithan and his background as a coach.

For context, Driveline is a hitting lab in Arizona that has helped several players find their stroke again after difficult seasons. It's important to note that Jordan Walker spent time there last offseason before finally breaking out in 2026 and becoming an All-Star for the first time.

The focus now for the Cardinals will be to improve their offense. A change in direction with hitting coaches can certainly help matters, so a fresh perspective could allow Cardinals hitters to reset a little bit and potentially put up some better numbers in 2027.

Adding players to the roster in free agency is also something they can look to do. Goold previously noted that the Cardinals are willing to consider a short-term solution at third base while they wait for some of their prospects to develop.

The offseason is still young, but it will be interesting to see what else the Cardinals do with not only their roster, but also their coaching staff. The coaching staff appears close to being set for next season, and there are a lot of different directions the Cardinals can go as they try to take steps towards improving in 2027.

The McKeithan hire should help them out though, so it's a good first step to trying to get the offense back on track and scoring more runs.