The Yankees announced Monday that Brad Wilkerson will join their MLB coaching staff in 2023 as an assistant hitting coach. Wilkerson replaces Hensley Meulens, who moved on to become the lead hitting coach with the Rockies in November.
Wilkerson played parts of eight major league seasons with the Expos/Nationals, Rangers, Mariners and Blue Jays between 2001-2008, tallying 788 hits, 122 home runs and an overall .247/.350/.440 career batting line. He was selected 33rd overall by Montreal in the 1998 MLB Draft and finished second for NL Rookie of the Year in 2002. His playing career officially came to an end in the spring of 2010, when the Phillies cut him loose from a minor league pact with a camp invite.
This will be the first MLB-affiliated coaching position for Wilkerson. He managed a middle school baseball team in 2014 and spent some time as a high school coach before joining Jacksonville University in 2020 as a baseball assistant.
The 45-year-old will work alongside lead hitting coach Dillon Lawson in New York and try to help the Bronx Bombers replicate the kind of cumulative success they achieved at the plate last season. With a combined team OPS of .751 (4th in MLB) and the second-most runs scored of all 30 major league teams, the Yankees rolled to 99 regular-season wins and the AL East title.
The Expos live.
Gary From Evanston is smiling from above!
Report the Greinke signing to Royals.
You do it
Way to go Wilky!!!
This is quite the job oppurtunity. Zero pro experience and now a direct assistant. Good for Brad Wilkerson!
Everytime I see his name I think of Soriano and the Mariners minor league legend himself TERRMEL SLEDGE!!
this is a perfect fit, since the Yankees looked like a Middle School baseball team against the Astros last season.
They actually didn’t look that good against Astros pitching last year.
Another urban legend arises.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, all but one of those games were close contests in which the Astros won one game by two runs and two games by one run. The Astros didn’t crush Yankee pitching either, except in that one 5-0 game. And that was the one in which the “ace,” Gerrit Cole, crapped the bed — again.
baseball-reference.com/postseason/2022_ALCS.shtml
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t the Yankees swept without the Astros even breaking a sweat?
You’ve got the record in front of you, if you bother to click on the link.
Go Gators!
Another hitting coach that didn’t set the mlb on fire, I cannot understand how subpar former mlb hitters can teach current MLB players how to hit?
hey just need someone to talk with, and their wives wouldn’t understand.
Many (probably most) of the best coaches never set the world on fire as a player, and many of the best players in the game were never any good on the coaching side.
Ted Williams – so, when you see the seams rotating down and to the left, you know that he is trying to throw you that back foot slider…
Player – wait….you can see the seams doing that?
Nelson Cruz owes his entire career to the coaching he got from Scott Coolbaugh in the minors. Cruz was dead in the water and the Rangers had all but given up on him when Coolbaugh opened up his stance, and the rest is history.
The Ted Williams story I remember was him telling players, “Just hit the ball.”
Bob Gibson was a terrible pitching coach.
I remember when Rod Carew was the Brewer’s hitting coach and they were among the worst offensive teams in the league. MLB success has no bearing on coaching success.
Then you have guys like Tony Perez and Don Baylor who were great hitters and good hitting coaches.
Not everyone can teach though. Some don’t have the patience or communication skills.
I always wondered the same.
You don’t need physical talent in order to understand strategy and mechanics and then teach it.
The best players are so gifted that they often struggle to teach other “normal” talents to produce. On the other hand, someone who gutted out a ten year journeyman career has seen every teaching technique under the sun.
A former middle school hitting coach?
Unimpressive. Cost-saving measure?
and major league ball player. That probably counts for something.
Hopefully Wilkerson can bring more to the hitting coach position than Dillon “Swing and miss at strikes hard no matter what the count is” Lawson, the latest no-experience wiz brought in by Cashman the Clueless.
I’m sure Boonie considers him a “peer” given that their careers intersected each other. I’m quite certain they must know each other and Boonie must have a lot of confidence in his coaching future to get him this job with lack of pro coaching resume.
The only thing I remember about him is that my Rangers made a horrible trade to get him.