Three weeks into the 2025 regular season, a showdown between the Salt Lake Bees and Oklahoma City Comets typically wouldn’t carry much fanfare.
But when the Los Angeles Angels’ Triple-A affiliate bested the Los Angeles Dodgers’ minor league squad 9-4 on Friday, the Bees got to celebrate their skipper in a big way.
Keith Johnson, currently in his third stint as manager in Salt Lake, reached 900 career wins with the one-sided victory. He has been a minor league manager for 17 years, so the accomplishment was a long time in the making.
Johnson started out with the Angels’ High-A affiliate, the Cedar Rapids Kernels, in 2008. After one season in Iowa, he spent two with the Single-A Rancho Cucamonga Quakes. Johnson led the Quakes to a championship in 2010, getting bumped up to Triple-A as a result.
Four seasons into his tenure with the Bees, Johnson took a year off to serve as a minor league scout for the Angels. He returned to Salt Lake for three more seasons, until he reached the majors as Los Angeles’ infield coach in 2018.
Johnson finally left the Angels organization in 2019, taking over as the New Orleans Baby Cakes’ manager at the Triple-A level of the Miami Marlins’ farm system. The Marlins made Johnson their big league first-base coach for the 2021 and 2022 campaigns, before he returned to Salt Lake in 2023.
