MIAMI - The Miami Marlins named Dillon Lawson as their hitting coach Monday, bringing in the 41-year-old to lead a young position-player group that ranked 18th in the majors in runs per game at 4.41 last season.
Lawson joined the Marlins organization July 1 as a roving hitting coach and will work alongside Major League assistant hitting coaches Chris Hess and Corbin Day. The hire reunites him with Marlins director of hitting Joe Migliaccio, whom Lawson had hired as a hitting coach during their shared time with the New York Yankees.
“We’re excited to welcome Dillon to the Miami Marlins,” Migliaccio wrote to MLB.com. “He’s an excellent fit for our organization and our vision for player development. He combines a strong understanding of hitting with an innovative, collaborative approach and a commitment to continually evolving how we develop players.”
Lawson most recently served as the Boston Red Sox’s Major League assistant hitting coach in 2025-26 and their Minor League hitting coordinator in 2024. Before Boston, he spent five seasons with the Yankees as Major League hitting coach from 2022-23 and Minor League hitting coordinator from 2019-21. He began his professional coaching career with the Houston Astros, working as a Minor League hitting coach with Short-Season Single-A Tri-City in 2016 and Single-A Quad Cities in 2018.
The Marlins’ offense showed flashes of promise last season despite the low run total. The club ranked tied for fifth in on-base percentage at .326, seventh in batting average at .249, ninth in hits with 1,347, tied for ninth in OPS at .726, tied for 11th in FanGraphs’ offensive value, and tied for 16th in slugging percentage at .400.
Migliaccio credited Lawson’s ability to bridge analytics and on-field results. “Dillon understands the importance of connecting information, individualized development, and on-field performance, while helping create an environment where our staff works together toward a common goal,” he wrote. “We’re excited about the impact he’ll have on our hitters and our department as a whole!”
President of baseball operations Peter Bendix, who had flagged the difficulty of the search at his end-of-season press conference, said the organization’s layered hitting structure shaped what it was looking for. “Evaluating a hitting coach is very difficult,” Bendix said. “That role is very, very difficult. I think we have a unique structure here, not just in the hitting department, but in all of our departments, with a director, a director of hitting, in this case, that oversees our hitting space. And so really looking for that sort of alignment from top to bottom with our director, with our entire hitting coaches. That’s what we’ll be prioritizing.”