The White Sox haven't announced the entire 2025 coaching staff, but Will Venable tipped another hire to Foul Territory earlier today, and it's the first confirmed member of his dugout brought in from outside the organization.
"We have a couple positions that we're still filling out," Venable said. "We were able to go get a bench coach, Walker McKinven."
That's Milwaukee Brewers run prevention coordinator Walker McKinven, an Evanston native and New Trier graduate who had spent the last nine seasons with Milwaukee. He had started as a video advance scout, followed by a series of promotions with increasingly jargony titles ...
- Advance scouting coordinator
- Major league strategy manager
- Associate pitching, catching and strategy coach
... before receiving his final promotion as run prevention coordinator in the wake of Craig Counsell's departure to Chicago, and Pat Murphy's ascension from bench coach to manager. In sum, McKinven has grown to become someone the Brewers increasingly valued and centered, with some in the organization speculating his Chicago ties prompted a departure that will be rued in Milwaukee.
Adam McCalvy, the Brewers beat reporter on MLB.com, said McKinven has had a significant role in game planning, as well as the organization's development of catchers. Murphy raved about McKinven's work in the latter department in an article at Brewer Fanatic back in February:
"Well, Walker's the receiving guru. He's taught himself, and he's had teachers like Charlie, Nestor [Corredor], and catching guys around the league who've tutored Walker on what they look for, and he's dove into it," Murphy said of McKinven, who will continue to work closely with catchers this year in collaboration with both Greene and Corredor. "This guy's an underrated part of our staff. It's amazing the amount he does for this team. Walker's a genius of getting those receiving numbers up."
McKinven was a pitcher in his playing days, so he almost automatically stands astride the frequent divide between position players and pitchers. He's one of several people in the clubhouse whom Murphy envisions knitting the roster together.
In today's appearance on Foul Territory, Venable went on to say that Foul Territory co-host Eric Kratz had been a fan of McKinven's work, seeing it up close for himself with the Brewers in 2018. Sure enough, there's a 20-minute video from 2023 in which McKinven details his work two titles ago, including plenty of compliments from Kratz:
For those who can't set aside the time to watch the whole thing, the most important takeaway is McKinven's description of his role:
"The main purpose of my role is to offer insight to [pitching coach Chris Hook] during the game, to our catcher during the game, to our starting pitchers during the game, on not only what we planned before the game, but adjustments and tweaks throughout the game," McKinven said. "As far as the information stuff, yeah, there's more and more and more. So continuing to turn that into concise, usable, actionable information for our players is essentially the task here."
But it's also worth hearing McKinven go into the details for how Milwaukee turned William Contreras into a plus defensive catcher, the latest triumph for a team that has been able to fashion starters out of other team's backups. Before Contreras, it was Victor Caratini. Before Caratini, it was Omar Narváez. Before Narváez, they splurged on the position with Yasmani Grandal on a one-year deal, but Manny Piña had handled the position before that, all to average-or-better results.
On the flip side, attempts to add catching-specific coaches to the major league staff during the Ken Williams-Rick Hahn era stopped short of ever being fully realized. Even with all his catching instruction history, Jerry Narron's title in the Tony La Russa regime didn't carry such specificity. Drew Butera was hired as a catching coach in the first season under Chris Getz, but wound up doing a speed run of McKinven's career progression when he was moved to co-bench coach in the wake of Pedro Grifol's firing in August.
The White Sox hope that Edgar Quero will be the team's long-term backstop and his defensive development is worth plenty of attention on its own, but they'll still have to figure out an Opening Day plan for the position. That makes Korey Lee's situation a little more interesting than it had been, because his game-calling and receiving weren't held in high regard last year. McKinven could theoretically be a guy to turn him around ... unless the ingredients just aren't there.
McKinven joins pitching coach Ethan Katz and hitting coach Marcus Thames as members of Venable's staff. Grady Sizemore will also be around in some capacity, although he could end up in the front office. And given their similar specializations and that he's spent the last two springs working with Quero, it will be interesting to see if Butera is viewed as supplemental to or redundant with McKinven.
All that still leaves several positions unaccounted for, as well as some uncertainty for how traditional or untraditional those coaching titles will be.
