Mike Fransoso Back In Somerset As A Yankees Coach

Bridgewater, New Jersey – Somerset hitting coach Mike Fransoso is a newcomer to skipper Raul Dominguez’s coaching staff this season after spending the previous five years coaching in the Seattle Mariners minor league system. While 2025 is the inaugural campaign in the Yankees organization for Fransoso, his time standing on the top step of the first base dugout at TD Bank Ballpark marks a homecoming for him after spending two seasons with the Patriots from 2018-2019 during the club’s run as an independent team.

🎥 @SOMPatriots || Part of wanting to come back this year was getting to work with @M_Fransoso again…enjoyed covering him as a player and got into that a bit with his experience here then and how different things look now after the Yankees affiliation accelerated some upgrades. pic.twitter.com/eKDg0HpcO6

— Mike Ashmore (@mashmore98) April 2, 2025

“I guess that it hasn’t hit me totally,” admitted Fransoso. “It feels like home here obviously having spent two years here, but for it to now be an affiliate of the Yankees is really cool. You always thought about it back when they were in the Atlantic League; it was obvious this place needed to have an affiliation. The way that it is run is so professional and to see it now come to fruition is really cool and to come back and be a part of it is even cooler for me, especially being on the coaching side of it. It’s really special here and the people are incredible; it just feels like home.”

Fransoso added, “This is obviously an incredible opportunity to be with the Yankees, but it is also just an incredible opportunity to be close to home, which is really difficult to do in professional baseball. Not a lot of people get that opportunity, usually you are pretty far from home, and you are spending months away from your family. The fact that I am close enough that I can see my family is great and to be back here is the icing on top.”

The now 34-year-old Fransoso, who had a three-season run in the Pirates organization after being a 27^th round draft selection in 2013, exploded onto the scene in Bridgewater in 2018. The gritty outfielder drove home 46 runs and swiped 24 bags while earning a nod in the league’s All-Star Game that summer.

As Somerset headed into the All-Star break this week sitting in a first-place tie with Binghamton, Fransoso reflected back to that mid-summer classic in 2018, a contest in which he went 2-for-4 with an RBI double. “It was really cool,” said Fransoso. “It was a cool experience, I think there was five, or six of us [Patriots] in that game, I was just honored to represent the Patriots.”

After returning to the Patriots in 2019, the popular Fransoso was suddenly battling severe hip pain while hitting an uncharacteristic .195 after 51 games when he sat down with then manager Brett Jodie to assess where he was both physically and mentally.

That meeting of the minds turned out to be the final stanza of one chapter and the penning of a fresh one for the Somerset hitting coach. Fransoso and the staff found it mutually beneficial to begin a transition into a player-coach role for the remainder of that 2019 campaign when it became apparent that the daily excruciating pain that his right hip was causing would not make playing viable any longer. A few months later after that season wrapped, Fransoso landed a coaching role in the Mariners organization in 2020, but it was here at TD Bank Ballpark during those dog days of 2019 where his roots as a coach were planted after his playing days came to an emotional close.

“It was very difficult [to flip the switch],” explained Fransoso. “I was in the lineup the day before, and then you show up the next day and it just kind of started as a check-in kind of meeting. Kind of just came in and had a chat to see where I was at because they knew things were bothering me. In that moment I just said that I couldn’t do it anymore – it was really emotional in making that transition. Just the day-to-day of being a player and what goes through your mind mentally getting prepared to play every night and to kind of shut that off and not have to worry about it was somewhat of a relief from the pain side of it but also not preparing to play in a game sucked for a while.”

Fransoso added, “I am thankful for Brett [Jodie] and obviously the ownership group for just giving me the opportunity to stay around even though I couldn’t perform on the field anymore. They kept me around when they could have gone out and got another player, but they didn’t, so I am obviously very thankful for that. There was nothing else that I saw myself doing. I always knew that I was going to stay in the game, it was just whether I was going to go down the college route, but in 2019 when I transitioned to a player-coach, I saw the pro side of things and I enjoyed it. I always knew that it was baseball or nothing.”

Fans of the game tend to gravitate or root for particular players based on unique flare, style, and successes. The thing that makes baseball so diverse is that there isn’t a cookie cutter style or approach to reach victory – every single player varies in size and skill level but are all working to reach the same outcomes while taking different avenues to get there.

The same can be said for coaches; they adopt their own style of teaching as they develop in the respective roles and while a player may eventually marry a specific set of mechanics or an approach, coaching style most certainly differs from year-to-year and even player-to-player.

“I think you figure out what your style is as you go through the years,” said Fransoso. “It’s a trial-and-error type of thing, but it is also a personality thing. Everybody plays with their personality; you do it as a player and it is remarkably similar on the coaching side. I think guys have different coaching styles because of who they are as people first and then you just adapt to that and sometimes you have to adapt to the player, too.

“You have multiple hats and sometimes change them for each individual guy,” added Fransoso. “The beauty of coaching is figuring out how to do that. You can’t have a one-style fits all because it doesn’t work for everybody. If you are trying to touch multiple players, you are going to have to figure out multiple ways to do that.”

Thanks for the memories, Spencer 💙 pic.twitter.com/rbSnZVOqgB

— Somerset Patriots (@SOMPatriots) June 27, 2025

The player that has garnered the most outside attention over the first three months of the season had been second-ranked prospect Spencer Jones. The 2022 first-round draft selection had an admittedly inconsistent 2024 season for his standards and he worked rigorously over the offseason months to find sustained consistency. Before being promoted to Triple-A on June 27, Jones led the Eastern League in homers with 16 and slugging with a .594 mark – all while doing so with a noticeably altered batting stance that directly correlated to reduced chase and groundball rates and an increased flyball percentage.

“It has been awesome to watch him [Spencer], Fransoso admitted. “I think everybody has known what he is capable of, and he has really found what makes it work for him. I am just happy to see him get the opportunity to get promoted and he gets up there and nothing has changed. He does what he has been doing the whole year and continues that; he put in a ton of work this year for a guy in his third stint coming back to Somerset, for some guys that could get you down, but for him it didn’t. He knew what he had to work on, and he did it and he is very confident about what he is doing in the box right now and it is showing.”

With the departure of Jones, the prospect now most highly touted on Fransoso’s watch is the Yankees crown jewel, George Lombard Jr. The organizations 2023 first-round draft selection, who starred in the MLB All-Star Futures Game last weekend, has posted a .382 on-base percentage this season. Despite hitting just .203 since his promotion to Somerset on May 6, Lombard was the youngest player at Double-A upon his bump up and Fransoso has been enamored by his mindset and approach while facing upper-level competition for the first time.

“Really impressive just what he can do at the plate in terms of plate discipline,” Fransoso explained. “He’s elite, to be quite frank, with how good his eye is and his ability to get on base and to do it at 20-year-old in Double-A is even more impressive. Obviously, he is working on some things here and going through some growing pains going level to level. Just his pitch log in terms of the number of pitches that he has seen is not as high as a lot of the rest of these guys and so I am not worried about him at all. He comes in everyday ready to work and gets right after it and he knows what he needs to do and work on and so he shows up and he is an absolute gamer.”

As a team, Somerset leads the Eastern League in homers (94) while ranking second in runs scored (407) and third in both stolen bases (110) and OPS (.709). Fransoso’s offensive unit has produced four players that have reached double-digit homers in recently promoted Spencer Jones (16), Rafael Flores (15), Tyler Hardman (13) and Dylan Jasso (12).

The Patriots’ offense is tied for second in the EL in runs scored (58) in July and after outscoring New Hampshire 28-12 last week during the teams 5-1 series victory, Somerset now heads into the all-star break tied for first place while firing on all cylinders in the box.

“I’m very happy with the work that all of these guys have put in,” said Fransoso. “That is just a testament to them and putting in the work every single day; they show up and guys want to get better, and they come out and compete. Just the dugout chemistry and the chemistry of the guys right now is really high. They are all rooting for each other and all pulling for each other all while challenging each other in their work. We just come out here and have fun and they show up every night to compete and win a baseball game and right now that’s what we’re doing.”

Matt Kardos | SomersetPatriots.com Senior Writer

Matt Kardos has covered the Yankees minor league system for over a decade and will spend his 13th season on the beat covering the Patriots for SomersetPatriots.com. Throughout his career, Matt has contributed to MLB.com, YES Network and Pinstriped Prospects. When he’s not at the ballpark, Matt enjoys traveling with his wife Kimberly, watching Jets football and collecting sports cards.