The New York Yankees made headlines this weekend. Well, lesser headlines than cutting Jacoby Ellsbury. And slightly less controversial than the Yankees plans to file a grievance so they don’t have to pay Ellsbury the complete $26 million severance package to make Ellsbury go away.
And it wasn’t about signing a boffo free agent.
So What Did The Yankees Do?
The New York Yankees are the first team in baseball to hire a full time female hitting coach. Her name is Rachel Balkovec, and she’ll be a roving hitting instructor for our minor league clubs. She got her start as a strength and conditioning coach for the St. Louis Cardinals minor league system. From St. Louis, she moved onto the Houston Astros organization, where she met one of the Yankees’ current minor league hitting coordinators, Dillon Lawson.
Shes Qualified!
Some guys may see her past titles as “strength and conditioning coach” for St. Louis and Houston and wonder “Why is she being hired to teach our players to hit?”
In a report from Yahoo! sports, she has two masters degrees in the science of human movement. We’ve all seen what these major leaguers are doing in their batting stances. All the crazy body positions, the leg kicks, where they position their bats when waiting for a pitch, it’s all movement-related. So now, all these young players in the minors are tweaking their swings to line up with all the latest hot lingo regarding hitting (launch angle, bat speed, exit velocity, basically what Ted Williams spoke about in his book, The Science of Hitting, but on steroids).
And all you have to do is just watch a full season of baseball to hear the announcers talk about what changes hitters are making at the plate to improve their swing. Eliminating a leg kick, shortening their swing, keeping their hips squared deeper in the swing, all of this is based on human movement. And it all will directly affect things like bat speed velocity, launch angle, and overall contact.
Plus, in the same Yahoo! sports article, as well as an article from USA Today, Lawson had this to say about Ms. Balkovec: “It’s easy to see why they chose Rachel for this role. She’s a good hitting coach, and a good coach, period.”
It’s reported that she will report to spring training in Tampa on February 1st.