It took White Sox pitching coach Ethan Katz many years to be an overnight success story

MINNEAPOLIS, MN - MAY 19: Pitching Coach Ethan Katz #52 of the Chicago White Sox looks on against the Minnesota Twins on May 19, 2021 at Target Field in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Brace Hemmelgarn/Minnesota Twins/Getty Images)
By Jon Greenberg
Jun 10, 2021

If you’re a big-league pitching coach, you generally want to stay hidden from the fans until there’s a parade and a rally. Because if you’re invisible during games, you’re probably doing your job. If you’re always walking to the mound, things aren’t going well.

But baseball is a game played in front of crowds and who doesn’t like a little time in the spotlight? That stroll from the dugout to the mound also lets everyone know you’re in control.

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This is Ethan Katz’s first season as a singular big-league pitching coach and that walk is about the only time the fans see the young, successful successor to Don Cooper. What’s it like going out to the mound with a crowd behind him, knowing that the crowd is watching?

“I mean, there’s been a couple of times I’ve walked in the crowd gets excited,” he said. “But, you know, for the most part, I really don’t want to be seen in the game. So I try to avoid it.”

There will be time for applause later if this White Sox team can get deep into October. For that to happen, Katz will have to do many things right. So far, so good. The White Sox have, by both old-school numbers and new-age metrics, one of the best pitching staffs in baseball, with a fearsome rotation and a power-packed bullpen.

Typically, Katz’s name is followed by Lucas Giolito’s high-school pitching coach, or, more recently when they faced off, Lucas Giolito and Jack Flaherty’s pitching coach.

But he’s more than the sum of his years coaching high-school baseball. Ethan Katz actually existed before taking over the pitching coach duties at Harvard-Westlake School and his career took off after he left. So, how did he get from there to here?


It was 2007 and Ethan Katz had a plane ticket to Modesto, Calif., where the High-A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies played. A 6-foot-5 right-handed pitcher, he was in this third season of professional baseball with the organization that drafted him in the 26th round in 2005. This was his chance, he could sense it.

But first, the Asheville Tourists needed one more Sally League appearance from him.

“They wanted me to throw an inning and I got two outs and kablooey,” he said.

It was his right elbow that went kablooey. He came back to pitch another year in the Rockies system, splitting between short-season Tri-City and Asheville, but he never got another plane ticket to his future.

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The next spring, he got released in spring training. He was going on 25 and no other organization wanted his services.

Now it’s 2009 and Katz is at the last resort for released baseball players. He’s pitching in Victoria. B.C., playing for a team called the Seals in the Golden Baseball League, an independent league with teams stretching from Calgary to the border of Mexico.

Ask anyone who’s done it, playing in the independent leagues will let you know if your career is over — if you listen. Late paychecks, bad travel, no infrastructure, it’s one long wake-up call with intermittent baseball.

“It made me really think about what’s next in my life, especially because I didn’t really do that well, either,” he said of his 6.75 ERA in 27 games. “When you’re in the moment, you think you still have a chance. I think you have to think that way or you’re going to cut yourself short. But if I were myself looking at where I’m at now, I should have walked away, quite clearly.”

Ethan Katz talks to Lucas Giolito on the mound, just like they did at Harvard-Westlake. (Photo by Ron Vesely/Getty Images)

But he still wanted to try pitching for one more year. Dreams die hard, even when you’re pitching a road game in the sweltering Arizona heat of Yuma’s Desert Sun Stadium. But that belief led to the first of many breaks.

During the offseason, Katz was working out with big-league pitcher Randy Wolf at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles. This had been their routine for years, going back to when they rehabbed together in 2007.

Why did they train at this fancy private high school? Wolf lived nearby and as it turned out, Katz knew a coach there. They would play catch and throw bullpens to high-school kids and that winter, a coach asked Katz if he wanted to help out with the team. Sure, he said. He went from JV pitching coach to varsity pitching coach in the span of a couple of months.

“I was going to go back and play in independent ball and I was like, I’m done,” Katz said. “I’m just going to focus on really enjoying this.”

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Katz’s time at Harvard-Westlake is probably all most White Sox fans know about him because that was when he started working with Giolito, Flaherty and Max Fried, all of whom became first-round draft picks.

“It’s unique,” Katz said of that experience. “Those players are unique.”

But while his connection with Giolito, which continued to be forged over years of ensuing offseason work, got him in the door for the White Sox, it didn’t land him in professional ball. That came from Katz trusting himself.


Now it’s 2012. His high-school coaching season was over and the Northwoods of Wisconsin were calling Katz’s name.

But would he answer this time? To be honest, his fiancée Stephanie Varlotta was kind of hoping he wouldn’t.

Katz had already spent the previous summer in the wooden-bat Northwoods League working with the college pitchers and catchers of the La Crosse Loggers. He was three years removed from his own pitching career, a man in his late 20s still chasing a dream.

“She said, ‘I don’t think you need to go back,’” Katz said. “And I said, ‘Look I don’t have an answer for you. But you know, I see something good happening.’”

Coaching high school baseball and giving pitching lessons on the side to earn a living wasn’t his career ceiling.

“I wanted to try to challenge myself and do more with the coaching,” he said. “So I went to Wisconsin for two years in a row. And (Varlotta) was not thrilled with that. But she supported me and I ran into some luck there.”

And by luck, he ran into Tyler Servais, a Princeton catcher, who was on the Loggers. Tyler’s dad was Scott Servais, the ex-major leaguer who, at that time, was in the front office of the Los Angeles Angels organization. The elder Servais, who was born in La Crosse, was a regular at Loggers games that summer.

“So, he just saw how I worked with the pitchers every day and I interacted with his son and he was there a lot and when the season ended, we won a championship and he came up to me and was like, ‘You know, if I get an opening with the Angels, I want to hire you,’” Katz said. “Great, thank you. You know, I didn’t think much of it. and two days later he called me and said would you like to be an AZL pitching coach and I was like, ‘Let me talk to my wife and see.’ The rest is history so I kind of got my foot in the door in pro ball.”

Ethan Katz was the pitching coach for the Angels’ Class-A Burlington Bees in 2015. (Mike Janes / Four Seam Images via AP)

He went from the Arizona League to two years in the Midwest League for the Angels organization. Katz moved to the Seattle organization, where Servais started managing the big-league club, and finally made to the High-A California League, where he was named the coach of the year in 2016. He spent two years coaching in the Double-A Texas League before moving to the Giants organization before the 2019 season.

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In December of that year, he got the call to the majors to work on Gabe Kapler’s staff as an assistant pitching coach with the San Francisco Giants. After Cooper’s job-for-life suddenly became open and Tony La Russa was named the new manager, it made perfect sense for the White Sox to bring in Katz, who was already a household name on the South Side because of his work with Giolito.

But Giolito’s rave reviews weren’t enough on their own. After his first interview, La Russa gave Katz, who was born midway through La Russa’s famed “Winning Ugly” season, the ultimate compliment.

“When the interview was over I mentioned to guys that were in the room, Kenny (Williams) and Jeremy (Haber) and Rick (Hahn), a lot of responses reminded me of Dave (Duncan),” La Russa said of his longtime pitching coach with the White Sox, A’s and Cardinals.

“The great thing that we really connected (on) was how detail-oriented he is,” Katz said. “We just meshed really right off the bat, because the things that are important to him are important to me.”

Katz was known as the Giolito Whisperer for his offseason work that helped the pitcher go from one of the worst starters in the AL to a Cy Young finalist. After that, White Sox pitchers were asking Giolito if Katz could work with them in the offseason too. (Because he worked for another organization, he mostly limited his offseason instruction to the Harvard-Westlake trio.)

The Sox cut out the middleman and just hired Katz to lead a burgeoning organizational pitching department that includes well-regarded coaches like Curt Hasler, Everett Teaford and Matt Zaleski.

But Katz doesn’t have an official assistant pitching coach. The onus is on him to lead a major-league staff. And since becoming the Sox pitching coach, the results have been plentiful. The most notable achievement thus far is Katz helping clean up Carlos Rodón’s messy delivery, which has led to a career rejuvenation for the former first-rounder.

“He’s the architect behind everything I’m doing right now,” Dylan Cease said. “It’s nice knowing that I can put my mind on how I’m going to execute pitches and not all the prep work and mechanical work. He’s taking care of that.”

Ethan Katz has quickly made an impact on the White Sox pitching staff in his first season. (Quinn Harris / USA Today)

Katz has already built a reputation for being highly organized, going back to his first days as a coach. He has restructured White Sox bullpen sessions with the aim of keeping players focused. During his pitching days, Katz felt the more detailed the instruction, the more pitchers paid attention.

“Everything had a purpose,” Giolito told The Athletic’s James Fegan of their early work in high school. “Everything had a goal. So it was easy to be like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to buy into this,’ because he laid it all out. I just show up and do what you say.”

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But there was no singular coach Katz modeled himself after. He was a good athlete at University High School in Los Angeles. He pitched at Sacramento State in college and he was a low-level draft pick. He didn’t go to the kind of prep school that could hire an ex-minor leaguer like himself. There was no guru to follow.

“I didn’t have a pitching coach in high school,” he said. “I just really studied a lot of things, listened to a lot of people talk and just soaked in as much information as I could. I still do and I try to keep learning. There’s been a lot of stuff that’s been thrown my way as a pitching coach and I’m just trying to keep up and trying to stay ahead of things.”

And now it’s 2021 and Katz has his dream job. He’s almost 38. He and his wife Stephanie, who were finally married in 2014 after a long engagement, have two young children. She’s the chief marketing officer at Technicolor. He’s the pitching coach of an ascendent White Sox team. They’re buying a house in a nice suburb.

And to think, if he didn’t want to eke out one more season of pro ball, maybe he wouldn’t have been working out at Harvard-Westlake and maybe he doesn’t get a job coaching Giolito and maybe, well, sometimes it’s better just to focus on what did happen to Ethan Katz.

He made it.

(Photo of Ethan Katz: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)

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Jon Greenberg

Jon Greenberg is a columnist for The Athletic based in Chicago. He was also the founding editor of The Athletic. Before that, he was a columnist for ESPN and the executive editor of Team Marketing Report. Follow Jon on Twitter @jon_greenberg