The Miami Marlins have handed Dillon Lawson a promotion, naming him their new hitting coach on October 12 after he spent time in the organization as a roving hitting coach.
Lawson’s move comes after a short run in Boston, where he was among the coaches let go when the Red Sox fired Alex Cora and five other members of his staff in April 2026. Boston did recover well under Chad Tracy, but the season still ended the same way it had the year before: with a Wild Card-round exit.
According to Christina De Nicola of MLB.com, Lawson had already been working inside the Marlins’ system before landing this job. His new role is a step up from the position he held with the Red Sox, even though his previous stop before Boston was as the Yankees’ primary hitting coach from 2022 until his firing in 2023.
Lawson has long been associated with a hard-contact, data-heavy approach at the plate. His thinking lined up with the kinds of complaints Willson Contreras and other players have made about the Red Sox leaning too heavily on analytics in decision-making. Lawson’s emphasis was on exit velocity, backed by his very direct “hit strikes hard” mantra.
“When we swing at strikes, we’re likely to make more contact. When we make more contact, we’re likely to hit the ball harder.
When we make hard contact, we would like to hit it over the infield. Sometimes we would like to hit it over the outfield fence.
All of that works,” Lawson said before the 2022 season with the Yankees, via Bryan Hoch of MLB.com.
That philosophy didn’t always translate into results. Ben Ruta, a former Yankees prospect, took issue in 2023 with the organization’s analytics-driven direction in the minors and pointed directly to Lawson as part of the problem.
“There is no baseball being taught there anymore. No baserunning, moving runners, fundamentals, etc,” Ruta said of New York’s farm system under Lawson, per Austin Nivison of CBS Sports.
The numbers from Lawson’s time in New York didn’t help his case, either. In the first half of the 2023 season, before the Yankees moved on from him, they had 691 hits, the second-fewest in the league, and 400 runs, which ranked 19th in MLB. His firing made him the first in-season coach dismissed during Brian Cashman’s time running the front office.
The Marlins clearly saw enough during Lawson’s brief time with the club to give him the bump. Whether that approach plays with Miami’s young roster is the next question.
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