MAYBE THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE WILL GET THE BATS GOING

The New York Yankees are making major changes to their coaching staff this year.  With Larry Rothschild moving on from the Yankees this year to make way for more "increasing incorporation of analytics and biomechanics," the Yankees make another bold move to include a double-masters degree hitting coach that packs a powerful punch.  Oh, and did I mention, she is a woman?

Source: NY Times

32-year-old Rachel Balkovec will take hitting to a whole new level as the "first woman hired as a full-time hitting coach by a big-league team."  She signed with the club earlier this month, and will report to spring training on February 1st in Tampa.  She will work across the Yankee organization and could be in the Bronx in 2020.

According to the New York Times, "Club officials said they had hired Balkovec based on qualifications — including two master’s degrees in the science of human movement and experience at several minor league clubs — that were a natural fit with the coaching crew being assembled for next season."  

Balkovec broke into the baseball business back in 2014, when she was hired by the St. Louis Cardinals as the full-time minor league strength and conditioning coordinator and the first female strength and conditioning position in major league-affiliated baseball. But the road to career baseball was not easy for her, despite her years of experience playing catcher at Creighton University and New Mexico softball teams and her educational background.

"Being a woman has always been the biggest obstacle to her success, she said. After her messages were not answered when she initially applied for strength and conditioning jobs in baseball, she changed her first name on her résumé and applications to “Rae” from “Rachel.” Then the phone started ringing.

Once the door was ajar, Balkovec helped St. Louis and later the Houston Astros improve their hitting across the minor leagues.  The opportunity to come the Yankees stemmed from her work with Yankee hitting coordinator Dillon Lawson when they both were with the Astros organization in 2016.

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

Balkovec brings a much needed modern spin to the Yankees after working at Driveline Baseball, a data-driven performance training center in Washington State, since August.  Her research on eye tracking for hitters and hip movement for pitchers will add tremendous value and currency to a team that desperately needs to elevate itself from a legacy team with 27 championships to a modern day dynasty.  I'm so elated for Rachel and as a female educator, director and journalist, I am excited to see how she will lift the Yankees hitters to new heights in 2020.

--Suzie Pinstripe
BYB Managing Editor
Twitter: @suzieprof

A JACKIE ROBINSON STORY FEATURING MIKE O'HARA!

A quick note on this Memorial day weekend.  Not sure if you all know this, I guess some of you do, but our BYB guy Mike O'Hara was in a show on FOX Nation.com called "42 Faith".  I watched it yesterday and was blown away.

First of all, the story about Jackie Robinson is amazing. I'm really not sure how someone could be as strong as he was to deal with all he dealt with. But the story of Branch Rickey is equally fascinating.  And Mike O'Hara is right there, with other folks like icon Ken Burns and Yogi Berra's granddaughter, Lindsay Berra. Even Carl Erskine, who is very, very old now had a few wonderful stories about Jackie.

Ed Henry was the host of this. I thought he was great. I love when things are not political these days.  You can tell he's a huge sports fan. But Mike O'Hara man. The dude got in there and rubbed elbows with the best of them and did a terrific job helping to tell the story.  I was super impressed.

Here is a promo that I found online about the Robinson documentary. Check it out:

Anyway, huge kudos to Mike.  Just another example that Mike can do anything. He's an terrific story teller, holds a ton of knowledge and also just a great guy and writer for BYB. We are lucky to know him.

Well done Mike!

I leave you all with this on a Sunday morning of Memorial Day weekend...


My favorite bit by O'Hara! LOL. Still one of the best.

A YANKEE PROSPECT TO REMEMBER

Last year on Memorial Day, I was haunted by a piece MLB.com's Lindsay Berra wrote about the long history of baseball players who have died in military service.

Berra opened the piece with a quick nod to the proud tradition of ballplayers serving their country, ticking off a few of the more well-known Hall of Famers who had done so, including her grandfather Lawrence Peter Berra; who had attacked enemy positions with rockets on D-Day wearing the uniform of a sailor before he ever attacked a baseball with a bat in the Bronx wearing the uniform of a Yankee.

Then, citing  the scholarly work of Gary Bedingfield -- a British member of the Society for American Baseball Research and former player himself who runs the website http://baseballinwartime.com and authored two books on the subject -- Lindsay went on to note that since the Civil War (when baseball players first began to get paid to play) some 535 men who had played ball at various levels of the sport had lost their lives while on active duty,  and that 12 of them had played in the major leagues.

One of those 12, I've thought about at least once every time I watch a Yankee game.

Before I go on, I must say if you're ever taken by the urge to learn more about the connection between American baseball and service to country -- for a few minutes or a few hours, right around Memorial Day or any other day of the year -- Bedingfield's website is a powerful  place to start. His devotion to the topic is voracious to say the least, and his never-ending quest to find and document every ballplayer who ever served is relentless and meticulous.

For instance, during WWII alone he's confirmed more than 4,500 professional ballplayers left the sport to serve in the military and that at least 130 minor league players lost their lives while serving their country.

With more than 500 extensive individual bios and enough old pictures, personal documents and first-hand accounts  to fill a bricks-and-mortar library, it's a place anyone with an interest in either the national pastime or the history of the military can easily be drawn into and get lost in thoughtful contemplation.

So anyway, there I was a year ago, reading Lindsay Berra's thumbnails of each of those 12 MLB players' stories; each no more than a paragraph or so; each including where they played their baseball, what branch of the military they served in, where they served and  how they lost their lives.

And one of them jumps out at me and hits me in the gut.

"Alexander Thomson 'Tom' Burr, Nov. 1, 1893 - Oct. 12, 1918

Burr was a shortstop and pitcher at the Choate School in Connecticut and attended Williams College in Massachusetts. He signed with the New York Yankees in January 1914. Burr made just one appearance as a Yankee, on April 21 against the Senators. In 1917, Burr served with the 31st Aero Squadron, U.S. Air Service. He was killed on Oct. 12, 1918, during drills at the gunnery school in Cazaux, France, when his plane collided with another at 4,500 feet and crashed into Cazaux Lake."

He had been a Yankee at 20. He'd appeared in only one game. Three years later he was dead in France.  I had to learn more. I dug a little and found a bio written by a SABR colleague of Bedingfield's named Rory Costello.

A Chicago native and right-handed pitcher, Burr was six feet two inches tall, and weighing 190 pounds, as a senior at the prestigious Choate School in Connecticut, Burr allowed no earned runs and only 32 hits in 11 games, with 185 strikeouts and just 18 walks.

He enrolled at Williams College, but before he got to play a single collegiate game several major league teams were already bidding for his services.  Coming from a wealthy family with prospects of his own after college, Burr turned down several teams,  but jumped at the chance to play for Yankees player/manager Frank Chance, a former Cub. the young came knocking, he put off college to give pro ball a try.

Major league scouts said he had a plus fastball and a wicked curve thanks to a congenital condition that left his pitching arm with a pronounced bend.

The Providence Evening News wrote, "He turned down offers from at least three major league clubs, to play under Chance's direction." That report added, "Arthur Irwin [another Yankees scout] says that Burr is one of the best natural pitchers he has ever seen, and predicts a brilliant future for him."

Burr kept a detailed daily diary of his time with the Yankees.

After a successful spring, he made  the big club but the team's rotation that year was healthy and deep, and the daily grind of travel on trains and boredom sitting on the bench during games didn't suit him. He stuck it out until he finally got the call to go into the show -- as an outfielder.

The Yankees had scored two runs in the bottom of the 9th to tie it up and had run out of  position players. As the last man on the bench, the young pitcher was sent out to centerfield to play the 10th inning. No balls were hit to him and the Yankees won the game in their next at-bat before his turn in the order came up.

Shortly after that, he was sent down so he could get more work and stay sharp, but his month of idleness caught up with him and in a handful of minor league games he was wild and had no command of his pitches. A quick return to the Bigs didn't look likely and he was a practical young man if nothing else, judging from his diary entries. So he quit pro ball and returned to Williams to complete his education.

However, when the U.S. entered the war in Europe he left school and returned home to Chicago to enlist, which turned out to be easier said than done. He  got bounced from officer training school when he came down with pneumonia, and then was subsequently rejected when he tried to re-enlist due to his age.

So he made his way to France on his own dime to join the Air Service, graduated flight school, became an instructor, taught other young pilots   and even got to do some pitching, striking out 21 batters of the previously undefeated St. Pierre de Corps post for the Aviation Instruction Center team.

Then he got the call to the front and flew to  the gunnery school in Cazaux for some final air-to-air target practice before heading into combat.

His plane went down there 30 days before the Armistice ending the war was signed. He was 23.

He never got to fire a shot in battle, and he never got to hit or catch a ball in his lone Yankee Stadium appearance.

And now, right around Memorial Day, as I watch young Yankees battle to win ballgames and keep their cherished roster spots and the announcers talk about their bright futures, I can't help but think of Burr.

He was only 20 when he wore the pinstripes, younger than any of the kids playing in today's Yankee game. The papers and pundits all said he had a bright future too.

Turned out they were right.

I hope when all our prospects look back on their lives and careers, they can be as proud of theirs as Burr can be of his.

Waytago rook.

 --Barry Millman
BYB Writer
Twitter: @nyyankeefanfore

YOGI BERRA'S MEDAL OF FREEDOM AWARD COMES TOO LATE

It happened.  It finally happened!  Yogi Berra is to get the President Medal of Freedom award.  According to NJ.com, it happened:

"Berra will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously, the White House announced Monday...Berra was one of 17 people to receive the award. the nation;s highest civilian honor. Another was Willie Mays, a Hall of Fame center fielder for the New York and San Francisco Giants who finished his career in the 1973 World Series for Berra's Mets. Mays once played for the Giants' farm team in Trenton."

Now obviously the honor is very special and we here at Bleeding Yankee Blue are thrilled that the Berra family can celebrate this high honor.  You know what would have made it more special? If Yogi Berra were alive to receive it.  That my friends is extremely disappointing.

(In Photo: Lindsay Berra)
When talk first began about the idea of Berra being considered for the award by his granddaughter Lindsay Berra, we immediately knew it was the right thing to do. Fans then signed a petition and things caught fire, and rightly so... Yogi was an American War Hero, an American Icon, Champion with the New York Yankees... bottom line, it's a no brainer.  But procedure and red tape sometimes takes too long, and throughout the waiting... Mr. Berra passed away.   It's personally sad for me, that's all.

That being said, I am happy it's happening... all of us Yankee fans are.  I just wish it could have happened sooner, that's all.

Congrats to the Berra family. No doubt Yogi's in heaven saying something like, "If I knew there was cake, I would have stuck around." 

That wasn't a Yogism... I made it up, to honor the great Yogi Berra.

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