Yankees fire hitting coach Dillon Lawson as Brian Cashman makes first in-season change

Dillon Lawson is taking the fall for the Yankees’ first-half offensive struggles.

The Yankees fired Lawson, their second-year hitting coach, Sunday night after heading into the All-Star break with a 7-4 loss to the Cubs in The Bronx.

Lawson, 38, became the first coach or manager that general manager Brian Cashman has fired in-season during his 26-year tenure.

Cashman said he was not fully comfortable with having to make the decision in the middle of the season, but felt the Yankees would be best served by having a “different messenger.”

The team had not yet offered the job to anyone else, Cashman said, but he will go outside of the organization to replace Lawson as the top hitting coach and hopes to have the person in place by the time the Yankees open the second half on Friday in Colorado.

Assistants Casey Dykes and Brad Wilkerson will remain on the staff.

“Our offense has struggled mightily, more so than I can recall,” Cashman said Sunday night on a Zoom call. “The team that we have, in fairness to Dillon, we have had some injuries without a doubt, but collectively we’ve really struggled. I feel like we’re best served kind of changing things up a little bit as we move into the second half here.

“Once that second half starts, we have a short window to try to re-achieve all of our capabilities, including good health. I feel like finding somebody else to take that top seat on the offensive side is going to be in our best interest as I problem-solve with our entire operation.”

The Yankees entered the break 49-42, looking like a shell of themselves since Aaron Judge went down with a sprained right big toe on June 3 at Dodger Stadium.

But their lineup’s performance was inconsistent even before Judge went on the injured list for the second time this season, and since then, most of the Yankees’ veteran bats — including DJ LeMahieu, Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo — have largely gone silent.

Through Sunday’s games, the Yankees’ offense ranked 21st in OPS (.710), 28th in batting average (.231), 26th in on-base percentage (.300) and 19th in runs (400).

The anemic offensive performance showed up again on Friday, when the Yankees were two-hit by a struggling Jameson Taillon and the Cubs.

Then on Saturday, Cashman broached the idea of dismissing Lawson with Hal Steinbrenner and got his blessing before speaking with Boone about it on Sunday morning.

They decided to deliver the news to Lawson after Sunday’s game, after most players had left Yankee Stadium, though manager Boone spoke to Judge, the captain, to give him a heads-up.

“Ultimately the end results are not that Yankee DNA that we’re used to seeing,” Cashman said. “For anybody that’s played golf … you can [hear] a number of different people say the certain thing that ails you individually, but then one person says it in a way that the light bulbs go on and things click in and all of a sudden, you find nirvana. That’s ultimately what I’m looking at right now.

“I feel like we have a lot more potential than we’ve shown, injuries notwithstanding. We’ve gone now for a long period of struggles, but I think our philosophy per se is get guys on base, slug and dominate a lot of those categories, which ultimately lead to usually a lot of runs scored. But we’re far too many times putting too much pressure on our pitching by playing way too many low-runs-scored games.”

Lawson, who spent 2019-2021 as the Yankees’ minor league hitting coordinator, came through the organization preaching the mantra “Hit Strikes Hard.”

The Yankees are among the league leaders this season in average exit velocity, but that failed to translate into offensive production.

By the middle of June, the Yankees’ widespread struggles had turned the spotlight on Lawson.

He was brought out to speak to reporters in between games of a doubleheader at Fenway Park on June 18, insisting he and his staff were turning over every rock to fix the issues.

But time ran out, with Cashman using the All-Star break as a reset in hopes of giving the Yankees a second-half boost as they try to reclaim a playoff spot.

“It’s a blame game I guess and I can’t run from that if I’m making a change,” Cashman said. “But I also don’t want to blame Dillon completely, even though I’m making a change. I just feel like the job that I have, I have to make a decision here in this particular case at this particular time. I feel like our crew has a chance to be better for it. It doesn’t mean it will be better for it. But I have to try to see if it will be better for it.”