Meet the new Red Sox hitting coordinator leaning on previous MLB experience to help shape Boston's offensive future
The Red Sox 2024 offseason was filled with quite a few hires that revolved around the pitching side of things.
First and foremost, Craig Breslow was hired as the Chief Baseball Officer. Andrew Bailey was then added as the major league pitching coach. Both Breslow and Bailey have obvious pitching backgrounds after pitching in the major leagues. The club also brought in Justin Willard as their Director of Pitching, after being a Pitching Coordinator in the Twins organization for the past six years.
Along with those three, the organization brought in numerous pitching minds from Driveline and other pitching labs.
What about on the hitting side of things?
Dillon Lawson was hired by the Red Sox this offseason after serving as New York Yankees major league hitting coach on Aaron Boone’s staff. Lawson splits his time between Portland and Worcester serving as a hitting coordinator for the organization.
“My job is exciting from the fact that I get to work with these guys that will surely impact the major leagues in the near future,” Lawson said of his first year in the Red Sox organization. “Going from Worcester to Portland, the crop of players that I get to spend time with play an exciting brand of baseball. The Red Sox should be excited about what is coming in the near future. On top of that, we have so many good people on staff. I had another guy or two from the Yankees come over here before me and they had a lot of great things to say about the Red Sox. It made me feel more comfortable coming over here, but it has been above and beyond what I thought it might be.”
The Kentucky native got his coaching career started at Lindenwood University. He then had stops at Morehead State, Southeast Missouri State, Mizzou, and eventually made his way to the Houston Astros as a hitting coach. That path led his way to the Yankees organization where he was a minor league hitting coordinator for three years before being promoted to Director of Hitting and MLB Hitting coach in 2021.
With half a season under his belt in the Red Sox organization, what has Lawson seen from things he has implemented since coming aboard?
“We were talking here recently with mid-season reviews now here that looking at the results as justification for a lot of the process we put in place,” Lawson said. “We do harp on the process and trust in it, but at the end of the day, the process does have to yield some results or else we need to be making some adjustments. If you look at Triple-A and the FCL, they are both leading their levels in controlling the strike zone and lowest chase rates. High-A is making some noise in regard to hard hit balls. Low-A has some exciting pieces with some guys who might be a little bit more raw but the underlying data like bat speed has them towards the top of their level. Then you have Double-A which is leading the league in offensive production between actual or expected numbers. They are doing a really good job there. It isn’t just Roman, Marcelo, and Kyle, it is everyone there. Nobody really had Matthew Lugo on the radar, and you look at what he has done with controlling the strike zone and getting the ball in the air with authority.”
Lawson is truly in a role at a time when there is such a big emphasis on the minor league system in Boston. While he gets to work with the top three prospects in the system throughout the season, he also gets to work with guys like Matthew Lugo and Mickey Gasper who have exceeded all expectations in 2024, especially Gasper after coming over in the Minor League Rule 5 Draft.
“There is always satisfaction in that” Lawson said of seeing the off the radar guys succeed. “It is very gratifying with Mickey being in the Yankees organization and seeing what he was capable of there to having chances and opportunities here with the Red Sox. We want to be the best hitting coaches in the world not just the best swing coaches or some smaller fraction of what it takes to be a hitter. We wanted to be able to serve the players in every component in whatever they needed over a six month period or in the moment because of the at-bats over the last week or two. The acquisition process here has been one I don’t fully understand yet, but we just don’t have talent, we have workhorses who are willing to put in the work.”
I think most of the casual fans can agree that the pitching side of things is a little easier to grasp than the hitting side of things. Fans can easily look up velocity, strikeouts per 9, walks per 9, and just about most of the stats that teams have available to them. Hitting is not like that, and Lawson thinks we are just in the beginning of the hitting analytic revolution.
“We really wouldn’t be taking advantage of all of our resources if we weren’t having conversations with the opposite side, Lawson said of working with the pitching coordinators. “It is easier for the public to understand pitching development because it is a lot more straight forward. Hitting is a bit more messy because there are still plenty of things we are still learning. Bat speed stuff and bat tracking have just recently become public metrics. Think about pitch velocity and everything we already look at for pitching. That technology has been around for decades at this point. We are still in the front of the hitting revolution. For the pitching side to get the praise makes sense because it is easier to make sense of it. But just because hitting is messy, doesn’t mean we should discount the progress being made here.”
Lawson has a unique background after being a major league hitting coach for the New York Yankees on Aaron Boone’s staff. He knows how valuable that experience was for him and has taken things into his role now that he learned on that job.
“We all lean on the experiences, and I have had the unique experience of coaching superstars like Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Josh Donaldson who are all established big leaguers,” Lawson noted. “I still think about the time with Matt Carpenter when we were struggling as a team. He spoke up on how to manage that situation and pressure on how to step up and attack things. You find yourself referring back to those conversations in my role now with players at every level when they struggle or wonder if they are going in the right direction. They bring me ideas and I can relate to another player using something that helped them out.”
