White Sox hiring Matt Roffe from Brewers to lead scouting department

The White Sox have cited the Brewers as an organization to emulate, and their actions are backing up their words.

The morning after the Brewers won their first World Series title in franchise history, Katie Woo and Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic are reporting that the White Sox are hiring Matt Roffe away from the Brewers as the new leader of their domestic draft efforts.

Roffe had worked for the Brewers since 2021, advancing from a coordinator to manager in scouting operations before ascending to his most recent role of assistant director of domestic scouting last November. He'd joined the Brewers after spending his first two years as a full-time employee as an analyst with the Diamondbacks. He's a 2018 graduate of Washington University, where he also played baseball.

Roffe replaces Mike Shirley, who resigned in September amid an investigation into allegations of verbal harrassment. Shirley had been a White Sox employee for most of the century, had overseen the White Sox's drafts since 2020, and recently put the finishing touches on the most expensive draft class in White Sox history, headlined by the selection of No. 1 overall pick Roch Cholowsky.

It remains to be seen what the exact title will be, but Roffe is the first external hire for the scouting director position in decades, as Shirley, Nick Hostetler, Doug Lauman and Duane Shaffer were all promoted from within, sometimes multiple times. You have to go all the way back to 1986, when then-GM Larry Himes hired Al Goldis away from the California Angels, to find the last time the White Sox hired a scouting director from outside their own ranks. The White Sox selected Jack McDowell, Robin Ventura, Frank Thomas and Alex Fernandez in the four first rounds under Goldis' supervision, so perhaps it's a strategy worth returning to.

That said, all of those selections were top-10 picks, whereas these White Sox are hoping to select in the back half of the first round for the foreseeable future. So it makes sense that the White Sox would couple the external search with the strategy of hiring from the Brewers, who have pulled off the neat trick of improving their win total without sacrificing their Baseball America farm system ranking in each of the last four years:

Replicating this sort of success in Chicago won't be so simple because Milwaukee has the kind of international operation the White Sox are years away from even dreaming of, but the domestic draft helped supplement the World Series roster, and without the aid of the draft lottery. Jacob Misiorowski was a second-round pick in 2022, Logan Henderson came from the fourth round in 2021, and Cooper Pratt was a sixth-round selection out of the Mississippi high school ranks in 2023.

The Brewers have been exceptionally aggressive in drafting prep players, and this is one trait worth tracking as Roffe takes over the White Sox's operations. Since the draft shrank to 20 rounds in 2021, the White Sox have failed to sign just two of their 122 selections, as they generally opt for college players over the last 10 rounds. Meanwhile, the Brewers spend Day 3 taking shots on prep players, even if it means they'll finish the draft with several players unsigned:

While the White Sox have picked high school players they could sign, they have demonstrated some curiosity towards using their later-round picks in such a fashion. They opened Day 3 this past July by signing Pennsylania prep pitcher Kyle Casteel for an eye-popping $1,247,500 bonus. It was the second consecutive year they used an 11th-rounder on a high schooler, as they picked Texas prep athlete Matthew Boughton to start Day 3 in 2025.

It's also worth noting that the Brewers' most successful picks from this strategy have hailed from the White Sox's traditional turf. Outfielder Josh Adamczewski is a top-100 prospect and Indiana native whom the Brewers drafted away from a Ball State commitment in the 15th round in 2023, and you'll see a number of others from Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin as well, some of which (Bishop Letson, Luke Adams) have populated Milwaukee's top-10 lists.

That's probably the sort of strategy that's easier to pull off when the international scouting is producing the likes of Jackson Chourio, Jesús Made and Luis Lara. Still, it seems like Roffe is a scouting director who with the potential to achieve dual goals in his own way. He represents the idea of an external hire who can bring fresh ideas from one of the best player development engines in the business, but that experience is also geared toward advancing what the White Sox are already doing somewhat well.