Rachel Balkovec Adds to Growing List of Women Making Baseball History

Balkovec will be the Yankees’ Low-A manager, making her the first female manager of an affiliated professional team.

Historic news broke over the weekend when The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler reported that Rachel Balkovec will manage the Yankees’ Low-A affiliate, the Tampa Tarpons, in 2022.

Balkovec, one of the organization’s hitting coaches since 2019, will become the first female manager of an affiliated professional team. The widely praised promotion is the latest in a recent string of moves that have seen women shatter barriers throughout baseball.

The Giants made a groundbreaking hire in January 2020 when Alyssa Nakken became the first full-time female coach in MLB history. Then there was Kim Ng’s long-deserved ascension to the role of general manager, a position she accepted with the Marlins in November 2020. In doing so, she became the first woman to lead a major men’s sports team in North America, as well as the first East Asian American to lead a big league club. Red Sox minor league coach Bianca Smith, meanwhile, became the first Black woman to coach in pro ball after she was hired in January 2021.

More recently, a wave of baseball women made news around the same time as Balkovec. The Astros officially announced Sara Goodrum as their Director of Player Development on Jan. 5, and the Blue Jays just made Jaime Vieira the organization’s first female coach. Then there was Genevieve Beacom, the 17-year-old southpaw who became the first woman to pitch for a professional team in Australia when she debuted for the Melbourne Aces over the weekend.

Genevieve Beacom, Pitching for the Melbourne Aces. pic.twitter.com/Pb6ZQSGS06

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) January 8, 2022

Like all these other woman and those who pioneered before them – such as Elaine Steward, Raquel Ferreira and current Yankees assistant GM and senior vice president Jean Afterman, among others – Balkovec worked hard to earn her unprecedented position.

A collegiate softball catcher at Creighton and New Mexico, the 34-year-old began her pro baseball career as a strength and conditioning coach in the Cardinals’ system in 2012. A job as the Astros’ Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator followed; Balkovec was the first woman to hold that position, too. She then held the same role with Houston’s Double-A team, the Corpus Christi Hooks.

Already armed with a master’s degree in sports administration, Balkovec then earned a master’s in biomechanics in the Netherlands while coaching with the Dutch National Baseball and Softball teams. Balkovec interned at Driveline, the analytics-focused training center in Washington, before joining the Yankees, and she spent the 2020-21 offseason coaching with Australia’s Sydney Blue Sox. She is fluent in Spanish.

Balkovec’s resume suffers no shortage of experience or variety, but she previously told NBC that she didn’t start receiving interest from MLB organizations until she changed her name from “Rachel” to “Rae” on her job applications. Calls followed, but so did rejection once teams realized they were speaking to a woman. Now Balkovec considers the discrimination “an advantage” because it forced her to push herself. It’s an unfortunate, unfair part of her tale, but the latest chapter in that story has her making history, along with several other trailblazing baseball women.

Hopefully, their success means other won’t have to go through the same mistreatment on their way to the sport’s highest ranks.  

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