Yankees hire Balkovec as MiLB's 1st female full-time hitting coach

Rachel Balkovec will assume her new role as a minor-league hitting coach with the New York Yankees in February and is believed to be the first female to do so on a full-time basis, according to Lindsay Berra of the New York Times.

"It's an easy answer to why we chose Rachel for this role," Yankees hitting coordinator Dillon Lawson told Berra. "She's a good hitting coach and a good coach, period."

Balkovec had been working with Driveline Baseball, a data-driven player development program based out of Washington state. Balkovec has two master's degrees in the science of human movement and possesses experience with several minor-league clubs.

"During the interview process, I was blown away by the Yankees' hitting staff," Balkovec told Berra. "They are making aggressive operational changes to compete in the rapidly changing landscape of player development."

Major League Baseball teams have hired females to their staffs before. Rachel Folden serves as the Chicago Cubs' lead hitting lab technician and as an additional coach for their Rookie-ball team in the Arizona Fall League. Justine Siegal - who became the first female coach of a pro team when she joined the Brockton Rox in 2009 - was hired as a special guest instructor by the Oakland Athletics in 2015. The A's also hired Veronica Alvarez last spring as a guest catching coach. Until the end of the 2019 season, Nikki Huffman served as the head athletic trainer for the Toronto Blue Jays.

In order to get callbacks when first applying for strength and conditioning jobs, Balkovec told Berra that she changed the first name on her resume from Rachel to Rae. Some teams never called back a second time after hearing her voice, and one club told her it would never hire a woman.