EARLY IN THE 2023 season, Aaron Leanhardt started asking New York Yankees hitters what they needed to perform better. He was a minor league hitting coordinator for the team, and with league-wide batting average the previous year at its lowest point in more than a half-century, Leanhardt approached that spring with a specific question: How, in an era ruled by pitching, could offense keep up?
"Players were frustrated by the fact that pitching had gotten so good," Leanhardt said.
An MIT-educated physics professor at the University of Michigan for seven years, Leanhardt left academia for athletics specifically to solve these sorts of problems.