The Red Sox announced that Dillon Lawson has been promoted to the role of assistant hitting coach. Lawson had been with the Sox for the last year as the club’s minor league hitting coordinator, and he’ll now take over the role left open by Luis Ortiz, who was one of six coaches Boston announced wouldn’t be returning for the 2025 season. Last week, MassLive.com’s Sean McAdam suggested that Lawson was seen as a logical candidate for the assistant hitting coach job.
This will be Lawson’s second stint on a big league coaching staff, after his previous job as the Yankees’ hitting coach for the 2022 season and the first half of the 2023 season. Somewhat infamously, Lawson became the first coach longtime Yankees GM Brian Cashman ever fired partway through a season, as Cashman installed former MLB veteran Sean Casey as New York’s new hitting coach as the team resumed play after the All-Star break. The change didn’t work, as the Yankees actually had a lower wRC+ (92) under Casey than under Lawson (96).
The 39-year-old Lawson had a long coaching career in college ball, including a year as the University of Missouri’s hitting coach in 2017 that was sandwiched between his first two jobs with a Major League team. Lawson worked as a hitting coach for two separate Astros Single-A affiliates in 2016 and 2018, and then moved on to join the Yankees as a minor league hitting coordinator for the 2019-21 seasons.
Peter Fatse is Boston’s lead hitting coach, with Ben Rosenthal and now Lawson acting as assistants. The Red Sox ranked in the top ten in most offensive categories in 2024, though a team-wide slump over the last six weeks of the season curtailed Boston’s late bid for a wild card spot.