The White Sox are on the precipice of naming their new major league coaching staff under manager Will Venable, with formal announcements expected to begin today.
Sources confirm to Sox Machine that the club is preparing to name Marlins assistant hitting coach Derek Shomon as their new hitting coach, and Royals assistant pitching coach/director of major league strategy Zach Bove as their new pitching coach. Shoman and Bove will be replacing Marcus Thames and Ethan Katz respectively, after the latter two did not have their contracts renewed at the end of this past season.
For both Shomon and Bove, their first jobs with an MLB organization came with the Minnesota Twins. A Glenbrook South grad, Shomon spent many years in a variety of coaching roles for the Schaumburg Boomers. He was named hitting coach for the first time in 2020, but the pandemic canceled the Frontier League season, and Boomers Stadium was instead used as the White Sox's alternate training site.
The Twins then hired him as a hitting coach for Low-A Fort Myers in 2021, where he worked his way up the ranks until joining the major league staff as an assistant hitting coach in 2023. Shomon spent two years working under David Popkins, until they were both replaced after the 2024 campaign.
If Popkins' name sounds familiar beyond AL Central reasons, it's because a year after being a target for blame with the Twins' offensive struggles, he's the toast of the league for leading the contact-oriented Blue Jays offense. Shomon moved on to the same role with the Marlins. In lieu of direct working overlap with director of hitting Ryan Fuller, his year in Miami would give the pair something to talk about as former Orioles prospect Kyle Stowers blossomed into a 35-homer, All-Star campaign. To the degree that an entire team's offensive performance can be attributed to the assistant hitting coach, the Marlins had the 18th-best wRC+ in MLB as part of their surprisingly spunky 79-83 campaign.
Bove spent a year as a rookie league pitching coach in the Twins organization before spending three years in various minor league coordinator positions. The Royals hired Bove away to join their major league staff to begin the 2023 season with a unique hybrid title that underscored his proficiency in leveraging biomechanics and analytics. Again, for what it's worth, the Royals were a top-10 pitching staff in terms of ERA each of the past two seasons, with young pitchers like Cole Ragans, Kris Bubic and Noah Cameron all taking notable steps forward of recent.
Neither Shomon nor Bove played so much as affiliated ball, let alone saw major league action, with Bove playing as a hitter in college and not shifting to the pitching side until his coaching career had already begun. And other than Bove having a year of overlap with assistant GM Jin Wong with the Royals, or simple industry familiarity with Fuller and Brian Bannister, they're both out-of-organization hires who emerged via the interview process without pre-existing connections to Chris Getz.
In the absence of easy paths for developing preconceived notions of their abilities and tendencies, there's still time to dream that Shomon and Bove will just be defined by their work. They'll each take over units that have promising pieces but are years removed from their last instance of above-average performance.
The Sox made an official announcement of their pitching coaches on Tuesday, within which they confirmed that Matt Wise will return for his third season as the bullpen coach. An official announcement of the hitting staff under Shomon is expected later this week.
