Breaking News: White Sox To Name Ethan Katz Pitching Coach, Per Barstool Sports
The White Sox are #BACK!!!!! See!!! The White Sox have not made one roster addition/subtraction yet and they're better right here, right now than they were when they lost game three of the WC series to Oakland in October.
Look, this is a home run hire. Katz has an EXCELLENT reputation baseball as a player development coach. Read this entire MLB.com article on Katz to get a quick glimpse of who he is as a person, coach and mentor, but here is a quick quotes:
"The biggest thing I learned early was getting the players to trust you," he said. "You have to make sure they know it's about them and it's not about you. Once that happened, it was pretty easy. That was something I focused on -- building the relationships."
After the high school season, in the summers of 2011 and 2012, Katz served as pitching coach of the La Crosse [Wisconsin] Loggers in the collegiate wood-bat Northwoods League. Andy McKay, who became a mental skills coach in the Rockies system in 2012 and was named the Mariners director of player development in October 2015, was the Loggers manager at the time. In Katz's second season with the Loggers, Tyler Servais, son of then-Angels assistant GM and current Mariners manager Scott Servais, was the team's catch
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All is well that ends well, and this next 5+ years WILL end well. It never wasn't going to end well. I'm dumb, but I'm not dumb enough to guarantee a World Series. That said, anyone with a brain can safely say that the organizational arrow is still pointing up, even with the PR snag they have found themselves in in the last week or two.
Katz worked with Giolito in HS and in the offseason throughout his ascension into a league ace, and now he will get his crack at other pitchers with grade A "shit that needs to be honed: Dylan Cease, Reynaldo Lopez, Garret Crochet, Carlos Rodon, and more. In a new age of baseball where analytics is king, the White Sox landing Katz is about as good a hire as they could have wished for to replace Don Cooper.
The fun is just starting. We're in the first inning of what will be a 9 inning gutter war that hopefully leads to a World Series title. The White Sox are going to keep getting better and better this winter and I will say it again: come mid February when pitchers and catchers report, White Sox fans should be chomping at the bit to snag tickets to every game they can afford to get to. It's going to be that much fun. That's a promise from me to you.
I'll have more quotes and all that shit from the organization, players and hopefully Katz himself in the coming weeks once it's official. Until then let's focus on the good vibes instead of the bad vibes. The good FAR outweighs the bad right now
PS - for posterity:
https://twitter.com/JonHeyman/status/1326931490576486408