According to a report in The Athletic, Rachel Balkovec will manage the Low-A team for the New York Yankees this season, making her the first female captain in allied professional baseball.
According to The Athletic, Balkovec, who joined the Yankees as minor league hitting coach in November 2019, will lead the minor league Tampa Tarpons.
A 34-year-old from Omaha, Nebraska, Balkovec got his first place in pro ball in 2012 with the St. Louis Cardinals as a minor league strength and conditioning coach.
Balkovec, a former softball catcher in Creighton and New Mexico, moved from the Cardinals to the Houston Astros in 2016. He was hired as a Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator, a position for which he learned Spanish, and later became strength and conditioning. Coach at Double-A Corpus Christi.
She left baseball briefly in 2018 to pursue a second master's degree at the University of Vrije in the Netherlands, where she also worked with the country's national baseball and softball teams. He then worked for Driveline Baseball, a data-driven baseball center that trained several major leaguers before being hired by New York.
“I see my path as an advantage,” Balkovec told the Associated Press in 2019, “I probably had to do a lot more than a male counterpart, but I like it because I am so much more up to those challenges. I am ready to do what I can. Encounter."