Yankees hire female hitting coach

The Yankees hired a full-time female minor league hitting coach, who is believed to be the first woman in the position for a big-league team, The New York Times reported Friday.

Rachel Balkovec, 32, signed a contract with the Yankees on Nov. 8 to become a roving instructor, MLB.com reported. She will attend the team’s spring training in Tampa on Feb. 1.

Club officials told the Times they chose Balkovec because of her two master’s degrees in the science of human movement and her other experience at minor league clubs.

“It’s an easy answer to why we chose Rachel for this role,” Yankees hitting coordinator Dillon Lawson told the Times. “She’s a good hitting coach, and a good coach, period.”

Balkovec served as a part-time strength and conditioning coach for the St. Louis Cardinals before being chosen as the minor league strength and conditioning coordinator for the team for the 2014-2015 season. She was the first woman to have a full-time strength and conditioning position in major league-affiliated baseball, according to the Times.

She also worked as the Astros’ Latin American strength and conditioning coach in 2016. In 2018, she became the strength and conditioning coach for the Double-A Corpus Christi Hooks, according to the newspaper.

In August, she started working at Driveline Baseball, a data-driven performance training center in Washington, where she conducted research on eye tracking for hitters and hip movement for pitchers. 

The Hill reached out to the MLB and the Yankees for comment.