Meet the MIT physicist Yankees brought in to fix analytics disconnect

TAMPA — Aaron Judge thought he had the place to himself.

Last month, the Yankees’ captain had gone to the club’s player development complex for a late-night workout. He wanted to get some hitting in and work on a few things as he continued his ramp-up for spring training.

Soon enough, though, Judge realized he wasn’t alone.

“I see this guy sneaking through,” Judge said with a grin.

A former MIT physicist’s quest to find some food during his own late night at the facility turned into an hour or two talking with Judge, laying the foundation for an important relationship.

Aaron Leanhardt, the club’s new major league analyst, is what the Yankees hope is the solution to a problem that became clear by the end of last season when Judge said they needed to do a better job of funneling analytical data to players in the right format.

Time will tell whether Leanhardt can make his impact felt in a way that benefits the Yankees in the win column as they come off a brutal 82-80 season. But he has made a strong early impression on key organizational figures.

“I’m excited about him,” Judge told The Post this week. “He’s in a good role, being that analyst that’s the barrier between us and the analytics. What I’ve seen so far, he does a good job funneling the information down. I think the guys are going to love him.”

Before Hal Steinbrenner revealed last week that the Yankees had promoted Leanhardt — better known in the clubhouse as “Lenny,” who has been with the organization since 2018 — into his new role, a Google search would have mostly shown his work outside of baseball.

There was the NASA-funded research study at MIT in which scientists, including Leanhardt (then a grad student on the way to a Ph.D), cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded.

There was a YouTube clip of Leanhardt, during his seven years as a Michigan physics professor, giving a lecture called, “A Brief History of Telling Time.” And there was the “Rate My Professor” web page that gave Leanhardt a perfect five stars.

“He’s definitely the smartest guy here. He hasn’t shown off his Nobel Prize yet,” Judge quipped. “I think he’ll save that for a good meeting or something.”

But Leanhardt left the lecture halls and labs behind for another passion. At a time when data and analytics were on the rise across baseball, he began his coaching career in 2017, making stops in New Jersey (an assistant in the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League) and Montana (the hitting coach and recruiting coordinator at Dawson Community College) before the Yankees hired him in 2018.

He served as the hitting coach for multiple low-level affiliates, including the Dominican summer league team, and then spent the last two seasons as the club’s assistant minor league hitting coordinator.

“He’s taken a road he didn’t have to take because of his love of the game and teaching and coaching and helping,” manager Aaron Boone told The Post.

Boone said the Yankees went through an extensive process to fill the major league analyst job — previously held by Zac Fieroh, who remains with the club in a different role — before landing on Leanhardt. In recent years, Leanhardt had been “a help” to the coaching staff by sharing some thoughts and ideas, Boone said, but now is part of that staff (though he won’t be in uniform).

“He’s got a great work ethic, an insane love of the game,” Boone said. “He’s the guy that’s here forever, just all things baseball. … He certainly has an analytical grasp of everything and a capability, just because of his intelligence, but I think the combination of the coach and how he sees things applied kind of stood out to me.”

Steinbrenner mentioned that, like Judge, Gerrit Cole had also raised concerns about how the data was being presented to players. The Yankees are banking on Leanhardt being able to sort through the loads of information and numbers that are available and parcel it into usable bits of information that can better help players when they take the field or step into the batter’s box.

“Just being a former hitting coach, he’ll be able to see some things,” Judge said. “That’s why I think he’ll be good at his job. He’ll be able to filter through the numbers, filter through stuff of maybe, ‘Hey, we’re getting these numbers,’ or, ‘We’re focused on this because of X, Y and Z’ instead of just looking at something and saying, ‘Hey, we gotta do this,’ or, ‘This needs to be fixed.’

“I think he’ll do a good job of understanding why certain numbers say certain things and filtering to us like, ‘Hey, I got five things, let’s focus on these two because it’ll actually play in the game.’ ”

Brandon Lockridge, a minor league outfielder who has worked with Leanhardt over the last few years, lauded his communication. Different players like different kinds of information, and Leanhardt allowed them to pick and choose what was most beneficial for them. And if there was an area he didn’t know much about, that would quickly change.

“From what I understand, he knew nothing about bats and in two weeks, he knew everything about bats,” Lockridge said, referring to information about which bat models were most favorable for hitters. “Just dove into it, researched it.”

Now, Leanhardt will be tasked with making the same kind of impact at the big-league level. Based on his late-night habits mirroring Judge’s, he’s off to a good start.

“I think the biggest thing that I like is he’s a hard worker,” Judge said. “He shows up every single day. Even when I’m sneaking in here and I know the clubbies are letting me in here when I want to get a late-night workout in, I see this guy’s still there when I’m working out and hitting. That gets me excited.”