Home run king Barry Bonds hired as Marlins hitting coach

Mark McGwire, who admitted to using PEDs during the season in which he set the Major League Baseball record for home runs (since broken by Bonds), was hired in 2010 as hitting coach with the St. Louis Cardinals and is now with the San Diego Padres.

San Francisco Giants’ Barry Bonds, left, talks with New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez during batting practice before their baseball game in San Francisco, Friday, June 22, 2007. It will be Bonds’s first major league coaching stint, although he has helped out in past years as a guest instructor for the San Francisco Giants during spring training.

Bonds, baseball’s all-time leader with 762 home runs, will have a superstar student in Giancarlo Stanton, who has 181 homers and is only 26.

Bonds is joining the staff of new Marlins manager Don Mattingly as hitting coach. Bonds will push incumbent hitting coach Frank Menechino into assistant hitting coach duties.

Miami also announced the hiring of Tim Wallach as bench coach and Juan Nieves as pitching coach. A player must garner at least 75 percent of the vote to be elected.

Bonds is, unquestionably, on the short list of the greatest players in history.

The voting, Bonds said, is out of his hands. Nieves was the Red Sox pitching coach when they won the World Series in 2013 and was sacked in May. A former catcher, he played in the majors for 13 seasons.

But after the trial in 2011, he was convicted only of obstruction for giving an evasive answer to a question and even that conviction was overturned by a larger panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last April.

Bonds said he’s not upset the Giants didn’t offer him a full-time position and excited to join the Marlins.

Also returning from the 2015 staff is first base/infield coach Perry Hill, third base coach Lenny Harris and bullpen coach Reid Cornelius.