Dillon Lawson Confident Casey Dykes Will Keep Producing With Yankees
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The Yankees still need to hire an assistant hitting coach, but Dillon Lawson is excited about the one already on staff.
Lawson, New York’s lead hitting coach, will receive help from Casey Dykes. Another assistant is expected to join the group after Eric Chávez quickly left for a promotion with the Mets. Major league staffs have expanded across the sport, and the Yankees expressed a desire to follow that industry trend prior to announcing a Chávez-inclusive staff in mid-December.
Dykes, meanwhile, comes with Lawson’s full endorsement after spending the 2021 season as Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre’s hitting coach. His RailRiders finished second in the East in on-base percentage (.352) and fifth in average (.255) and OPS (.775).
“You hear great things about his personality and you’re just following the work that he’s put forth and executed on, and it’s just a no-brainer, we gotta get this guy in,” Lawson recently said of Dykes, who was going to be the Yankees’ Single-A hitting coach in 2020 before the pandemic canceled the minor league season. “We were really excited about the person we were getting, and he blew our expectations out of the water.”
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Lawson has been impressed with Dykes at all of the latter’s coaching stops, which include his alma mater, Western Kentucky, and Indiana University, where Dykes won the 2019 Big Ten regular-season championship while the Hoosiers led all of Division I in homers.
The jobs that stood out most to Lawson, however, were the ones Dykes held at Virginia Military Institute from 2015-2018. There, Dykes held the titles of hitting coach and recruiting coordinator.
“That’s a really difficult place to recruit, to convince people to come and be a part of that institution,” Lawson said. “And yet he had top-25 recruiting classes. Just the simple fact of that alone, you think about his ability to sell or persuade. Now we have performance science and we have all this information. We’re just selling a different product.”
Lawson noted that all of Dykes’ teams have enjoyed an uptick in power. He also praised the assistant’s ability to connect with different players and individualize his approach to coaching. That will be an important skill for both staffers as they try to relay varying levels of information to different hitters.
READ: Yankees' Hitting Coach Dillon Lawson Eager to Start Working With 'Outstanding' Roster
More than anything, Lawson is confident that he can rely on Dykes. As the two prepare for their first season in the majors—in any capacity—that could prove crucial for a hitting staff that needs to get more out of the Yankees offense in 2022.
“I can trust him. If I say, ‘I need you to go do this,’ there are no questions,” Dykes said. “I know exactly how it’s going to work out. I know exactly how he’s going to say it or how he’s going to do it or how it’s gonna look and what the end result is going to look like. That’s very comforting for me.”
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- Yankees’ Dillon Lawson: MLB Playing Experience Not a Must for Eric Chávez Replacement
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