MIAMI – Rachel Balkovec has agreed to become the Marlins’ director of player development, sources told MB.com. The club did not confirm the news.
Balkovec, 36, is no stranger to the minor league landscape, serving in various roles with three different organizations since beginning her professional baseball career in 2012. She has been the Yankees’ Class A manager for the past two seasons. In baseball, she was the first woman to succeed in:
according to Story by MiLB.com’s Rob Terranova, Balkovec has a background in start-up analytics where she was an NCAA Division I catcher on their softball teams as an exercise science major at Creighton and New Mexico. Balkovec earned a master’s degree in kinesiology from LSU in 2012.
After graduation, Balkovec served as interim strength and conditioning coach for Rookie Advanced Johnson City in the Cardinals organization and earned the Appalachian League’s Strength Coach of the Year Award. At 14, she became the first woman hired as a full-time professional baseball coordinator. Two years later, she was hired by the Astros as the organization’s Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator. At 18, she was hired as a strength and conditioning coach for the club’s Double-A affiliate.
Balkovec later did her master’s at the Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, where she studied biomechanics, the science of human movement. She spent time at Driveline Baseball, a data-driven performance center, researching eye tracking for hip motion for hitters and pitchers. Balkovec coached in the Australian Major League Baseball after the Covid-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 minor league season, and she was named to the coaching staff for the ’21 SiriusXM All-Star Futures Game at Coors Field.
Balkovec will be the latest front office hire by new president of baseball operations Peter Bendix, who brought in Gabe Kapler (assistant general manager) and Vinesh Kantan (director of baseball operations) as he restructures the organization. In September 2022, Miami fired Director of Player Development Geoff DeGroot. Since then, minor league director of operations Hector Crespo has filled but not had a title. The Marlins’ farm system has struggled to produce homegrown players in recent years, and it has dipped into the ranks of the MLB Pipeline as they move through the draft, development and trade deadline to reach the 2023 postseason.