The unique relationship between these 2 Twins

This story was excerpted from Do-Hyoung Park’s Twins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Imagine the pride of being a collegiate pitching coach for a Division II program and seeing one of your former pupils become the first player in program history to make it all the way to the Major Leagues.

Now, imagine that you get to go into work every day and watch his big league career unfold.

There might not be a more unique situation in baseball than that of Marcus McKenzie and Louie Varland. In 2017, they were coach and pupil at Concordia University St. Paul. A mere five years later, they’re reunited at Target Field -- and while Varland has seen his pitching career through to the game’s highest level, McKenzie now works every day as the visiting clubhouse manager at Target Field, just down the hall from where Varland prepares for big league starts.

“I'm his coworker now!” Varland said, beaming. “I work with him. I work for the Twins.”

“It's super fun to see him over there and just be able to joke and laugh and kind of just reminisce, but then realize like, ‘Hey, we're both kind of here right? We're both at the highest level you can be at in our professions that we're doing,’” McKenzie said. “It's just fun to see him smile and be over there and be around other guys, the players that I've known and know that he's in a good place and they're going to take him under his wing and just, what an opportunity.”

While Varland made huge strides with his mechanics and the quality of his stuff to go from Division II and relatively unknown to big league starter, McKenzie’s career path in baseball has taken him away from coaching. Because his father, Mark “Lunch” McKenzie, has worked in the Vikings’ visiting clubhouse since the late '60s, Marcus followed in his footsteps in the early 2000s, starting as a ballboy before joining his father in the clubhouse.

In the meantime, the elder McKenzie also ran the baseball program at Concordia, and after Marcus graduated, he started helping his dad with some coaching in '08, eventually moving all the way up to full-time pitching coach in '17. But he also cultivated his career in clubhouse management alongside that, starting with the Twins in '11 in a part-time capacity before he was promoted to the Twins’ full-time visiting clubhouse manager in '18.

McKenzie tried to do both roles for a while, but eventually, he committed to the Twins, with '19 serving as his last formal season with Concordia. He stayed long enough to coach the start of Varland’s collegiate career -- and look at them now.

“It's kind of funny. It's like, every time I see him, it's almost like you're back to when you coached him, because you’re like, it's the same relationship,” McKenzie said. “I don't coach him now. I don't really give him any pointers. I just keep telling him to be himself and I’m proud of him.”

But wait, there’s more to the story: When McKenzie held both his positions with Concordia and the Twins, he would often bring some players over to Target Field late some nights, after visiting teams arrived for road trips, so that they could help with unloading luggage and setting up lockers. It was a cool opportunity for many of them to see a big league clubhouse for the first time -- including Varland.

“I unpacked the A's, and I believe Sonny Gray was on the team then, and I unpacked his stuff, and now, I'm his teammate with the Twins,” Varland said.

Has he told Gray about that?

"Not yet,” Varland said, looking at Gray’s locker, directly across the clubhouse from his own. “I haven't told him yet. I should, though.”

"It's been a crazy ride,” Varland added. “I never thought I'd actually make it up here until things kind of worked out that way. A pitcher going to [a] D-II [school], the odds are stacked against you. And things just kind of unraveled, and here we are. It's really cool to look back at it. All those years ago, I was unpacking these guys. Now, I'm one of the guys."