LOS ANGELES — The Dodgers’ vaunted player-development ladder is full of baseball lifers, the kind of coaches who spend their days teaching a cutoff here, a better routine there, and the steady confidence that gets a 22-year-old through a bad week. Joe Thon is one of those guys, and this spring he’s heading to Oklahoma City as the bench coach for the Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate with a story that has nothing to do with launch angle and everything to do with family.
The details come from an MLB.com story by Brian McTaggart, who reported that Thon, 34, received a kidney transplant from his father, former Astros shortstop Dickie Thon, on Dec. 15, 2025 at Houston Methodist Hospital. For Dickie, the decision was instant. “It was a no-brainer,” he told MLB.com. “I made up my mind.”
For Dodgers fans, the connection is personal because Thon also spent last season inside the organization, working as the bench coach for the High-A Great Lakes Loons in Michigan. And he was doing it while his health demanded constant planning, constant management, and a kind of toughness that doesn’t show up in a box score. McTaggart wrote that when Thon’s “fatigue, headaches and nausea began to worsen in January 2025,” he was put on kidney dialysis while working with Great Lakes, close enough to his wife Erika’s parents that his family could help him through the season.
Thon put it plainly in the story: “The most important thing was trying to get through therapy to the actual dialysis. And after that, once I was stable, it was to try to get on the transplant list, and that’s when I talked to my family and they all tried to donate.” McTaggart reported that everyone stepped up, including Thon’s four sisters, and so did his dad. Dickie Thon, 67 and healthy, turned out to be the best match.
That father-son dynamic runs through the entire piece. The elder Thon didn’t even hesitate when it came to the transplant. “I didn’t even think about it,” he said. “I just feel like that I wanted to do it and I needed to do it. And he has a lot of potential, so, to me, it was very rewarding.”
Joe, understandably, had to work through the emotional weight of accepting that gift. “I didn’t want to put him in a tough spot, either,” he said in the McTaggart piece. “But the doctors assured me that everything was good. It wouldn’t really take too much of a toll physically, but you hate to put somebody in a spot like that. But it was best for me and my family, too. Dad was really adamant he wanted to do it.”
If you’re a Dodgers fan, the heart of the story is that Thon kept showing up to work while all this was happening. McTaggart also traced how long this has been part of his life. Thon was diagnosed with kidney disease during a routine physical in Spring Training in 2011, just after being drafted and signing out of high school. “I was used to being in pretty good physical shape before I signed, and then it kind of was taken away from me,” he said. He still played seven seasons in the minors, reached Double-A, and moved into coaching. The grind never left. It just took a different form.
By the time he reached the Dodgers’ system last year, the day-to-day was about making it through work and treatment in the right order. Thon described peritoneal dialysis in 2024, while managing in Double-A, as something that at least let him keep doing the job. “It was nine hours a night with the machine and the solution to be able to work the next day and take the machine on the road,” he said. “It was very convenient to have that type of dialysis because hemodialysis, which I ended up getting on before the surgery, is taxing. You have to go in-session, so [peritoneal dialysis] allowed me to at least keep working.”
Before joining the Dodgers organization, Thon was a manager in the Houston minor league system. (Photo: Angela Piazza/Caller Times)
And that brings it back to the Dodgers, because development staff jobs are about tomorrow more than they’re about you. Thon sounds like someone who has learned that lesson the hardest way. “I don’t really think about goals anymore as a coach,” he told MLB.com. “I played too much in that pretense of thinking about goals and getting to the big leagues, and I think I consumed too much of myself trying to reach for a goal rather than trying to figure out the responsibilities of today and prepare for today.” Then he said the part that will stick with anyone who reads it: “I had a couple of episodes [where] I didn’t think I was going to make it. Right now, I’m trying to focus on my family, my players, my team, my staff, and try to help them as much as possible. You focus on that because you don’t know how long things will last.”
Dodgers fans tend to think of Oklahoma City as a place where the next call-up is waiting. For Joe Thon, it’s also the next step in a life that nearly got derailed before it really started. It’s a reminder that behind the affiliate logos and the nightly box scores, there are people trying to do their jobs while the rest of life is happening at full volume.
And in this case, it’s also a reminder that sometimes the biggest assist a baseball family can record has nothing to do with the field. “I’m very glad I was able to help him,” Dickie Thon said. “I had a good life and I’m not afraid of whatever happens.”
All Credit is due to Brian McTaggart for his original reporting on this one at MLB.com. Check out the full story if you get a chance!
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