Brewers’ Goodrum 1st female minor league hitting co-ordinator

Sara Goodrum has been promoted to minor league hitting coordinator by the Milwaukee Brewers, apparently making her the first woman to have that role in any Major League Baseball organization.

Goodrum’s official new title with the Brewers is co-ordinator for hitting development initiatives, but she essentially will be filling the role of a minor league hitting co-ordinator. Brewers vicepresident of minor league operations Tom Flanagan said Thursday that “to our knowledge, she would be the first” woman to hold that position in an MLB organization.

“Especially with the players who are coming up now, they don’t care if you’re a man or a woman,” Goodrum said Thursday. “If you can provide them with information and guidance that’s going to help them accomplish their dream of making it to the big leagues, they don’t care.”

Goodrum, 27, has been working in this role since October. The Brewers officially announced the promotion Thursday as they released the names and positions of their entire 2021 player development staff.

She had spent the last three seasons in the Brewers’ sports science department, working primarily on hitting. Her previous title was co-ordinator for integrative sports performance.

“Being able to observe her working around our hitters, it’s not like she’s coming in from some other department where she had no other interaction with our player development staff,” Flanagan said. “She’s been right there, kind of in the forefront, working with our hitters to some degree.”

“And I think her skill set is very unique,” Flanagan added. “It gives her a very different perspective in terms of different training techniques she probably has a lot of experience with that she feels she can implement and help re-establish our hitting curriculum and help our hitters train better and be better throughout our system. Just seeing her work from afar, all of our hitting coaches and player development staff definitely have that familiarity and think that she can really impact the hitting apparatus here.”