What the Yankees need from their hitting coach

Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images Though hitting at the major league level is a technically complex biomechanical process, the fundamentals for optimizing a hitter’s success are largely the same for every hitter. Even amidst the launch angle revolution, pretty much everyone agrees that the best thing a hitter can do to generate the most quality contact is to get their swing to match the plane of the incoming pitch, exactly as explained in Ted Williams’s The Science of Hitting from 1970.

The ideas expressed in Williams’s book are still so prevalent that the Dodgers’ new wunderkind hitting coach, 33-year-old Robert Van Scoyoc, recently cited them as the tenets of his own hitting philosophy.…