Over the past couple of years, assistant director of baseball operations Rod Larson has become a more ubiquitous presence around the major-league team every day.
Some members listed on the White Sox baseball operations staff are seen passing through the clubhouse more often than others, and the differences in how much they deal directly with players and coaches are typically not plainly stated in their job titles. But it’s common, whether at home or on a road trip, to find Larson on hand as Sox pitchers are throwing bullpens with Rapsodos and high-speed cameras tracking their work. It is unsurprising to hear a pitcher refer to “Hot Rod” being part of the effort to figure out an issue with their delivery or pitch movement. He is not a member of the uniformed coaching staff, but is one of the people on hand working to make the White Sox better on a daily basis throughout the season. Someone voted for him to be the next White Sox manager in our reader survey, and I hope to find out who did it before I die.
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It is through this prism that the White Sox hiring former Washington Nationals assistant general manager Sam Mondry-Cohen, confirmed by the team, is best understood for now. Mondry-Cohen spent the past year as a consultant for the National League champion Philadelphia Phillies, an executive in residence at a biomechanics company called Reboot Motion and as a senior fellow for Wharton’s sports analytics and business initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. But Mondry-Cohen is best known for his time with the Washington Nationals, where he was credited with effectively creating their research and development department and developing their internal statistical database, beginning as an intern with the team in 2009 until he left after the 2021 season.
The White Sox roughly summarized Mondry-Cohen’s role as an offensive complement to Larson’s. And despite all the fancy front office titles and responsibilities, Mondry-Cohen’s experience with the Nationals is rooted in trying to distill analytical information into actionable takeaways for players on the field. That figures to also be the thrust of a role that per a source, will also involve traveling with the team throughout the season. As will also be the case with the White Sox, Mondry-Cohen’s time with the Nationals was an effort in blending advanced metrics into the process of a franchise that maintains an open reverence for old-school baseball concepts, and it culminated in a World Series championship in 2019.
Coincidentally or not, this staff addition comes as new manager Pedro Grifol has preached the importance of Sox hitters having their own baseline level of analytical competence, to better understand the nature of pitching that they will be facing every night. Grifol’s incoming hitting coaches have echoed the same message. For what it’s worth, the information Mondry-Cohen will handle is proprietary enough that the White Sox politely declined an interview request for him, as they do not typically make analytical staff members available to media.
While other sources disagreed at the time, the White Sox viewed last spring’s brief arbitration dustup with Lucas Giolito as a fluke brought on by the compressed timeline of the resolution of lockout and their file-and-trial approach of typically not negotiating with arbitration-eligible players after the initial exchange of figures. The team briefly softened that stance in light of that situation and wound up avoiding arbitration with Giolito to reach a deal roughly a week later, with their starting pitcher praising the front office’s work by the end. It seemed to serve as a testimony to the team’s views.
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This year, with something approaching a normal schedule again, the White Sox can point to an uneventful arbitration figure exchange deadline during which they agreed to contracts with all eligible players — Giolito ($10.4 million), Dylan Cease ($5.7 million), Michael Kopech ($2.05 million), Reynaldo López ($3.625 million) and José Ruiz ($925,000) — as a return to business as usual. Other teams weren’t nearly as lucky, and it’s better to not be in open contract disputes with the bulk of the rotation and a possible closer option.
When there aren’t disputes, these announcements are largely formalities, and fans understandably are only interested in them as proxies for future contract extension talks. Cease’s agent Scott Boras didn’t completely dismiss the possibility of his client ever signing an extension when I asked him about it at last November’s GM meetings. But the example he gave involved Stephen Strasburg signing a contract worth more than twice as much as the largest free-agent deal the White Sox have ever handed out. Cease was identified by the Sox as an extension candidate well before his dominant 2022 season with no results as of yet, and his striking $5.7 million first-year arbitration figure (Giolito received $4.15 million at the same point in his career) speaks to how much his value has accelerated from there.
Both Giolito and López are entering their final year before free agency, with the former having turned down a previous extension offer and looking to restore his value this season after a disappointing 2022 campaign. As reported earlier this week, Kopech recently switched his representation to Headline Sports Group. HSG represents both Seby Zavala and Lance Lynn; the latter signed a midseason contract extension in 2021, albeit at a very different point in his career.
(Top photo of Dylan Cease: Orlando Ramirez / USA Today)
