The White Sox have yet to fill any of the coaching vacancies on their major league staff, but they have reportedly made a couple of hires in their minor league ranks over the course of October.
Nearly two weeks ago, College of Central Florida pitching coach JC Sanner announced that he'd accepted a coaching position in the White Sox organization. On Tuesday, the Baltimore Banner reported that another Orioles hitting coach is following the path Ryan Fuller cleared, as Sherman Johnson, previously Baltimore's assistant hitting coach and upper-level hitting coordinator, is joining the White Sox as their minor league hitting coordinator.
Over the last two years, the White Sox have employed Alan Zinter and Danny Santin as their hitting coordinator and assistant hitting coordinator, respectively. Santin ended up serving as Birmingham's hitting coach over the last couple of months after Nicky Delmonico left the team to attend to a family matter (Delmonico has since retired from coaching).
This marks the second consecutive year where the Orioles' once-vaunted hitting apparatus has been dissolved. Fuller, one part of a three-headed hitting coach setup, left the Orioles for the White Sox at the end of last year, and co-hitting coach Matt Borgschulte joined the Twins.
That said, the Twins hired Borgschulte after firing David Popkins due to Minnesota's disappointing finish in 2024, and Popkins is now getting a ton of positive press for his work with the Toronto Blue Jays' lineup, which is another example of why I've long departed the business of pretending like I can ascertain the quality or impact of a hitting coach.
Spare Parts
Speaking of Baltimore, their new manager is a guy the White Sox were interested in during their search last year. Albernaz reportedly withdrew his name from consideration before the White Sox hired Will Venable, and his reward for waiting is a job that's better on paper, but not without significant risks.
Iqaluit, the northernmost city in Canada and the capital of Nunavut, is big enough to have a curling club, so it makes sense that it'd also have a sports bar that draws crowds of hundreds for Blue Jays games.
As any White Sox fan will tell you, bad baserunning is bad baseball, but in the context of the World Series, bad baserunning is desperate baseball, which is compelling in its own right.
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The White Sox's CHSN partners are doing their best to provide a boost to the network's winter ratings with encouraging starts.
Big news out of the Vatican:
Pope Leo XIV welcomed His Holiness Mar Awa III, the Catholicos Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Members of the Joint Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East to the Vatican on Monday.
Speaking with them, the Holy Father explained how the combined visits of the Catholicos Patriarch and the Commission members “bear witness to the face that fraternal encounter and theological dialogue are mutually constitutive elements on the path toward unity.”
Mar Awa III, who is also from Chicago, gifted him a Cubs jersey, as you can see in the photo topping the story.
