💥 BREAKING NEWS: Derek Shomon pledges to inject nonstop fire into a White Sox offense hungry to finally play with the same relentless edge he lives by ⚡.DD

Derek Shomon is at the far left|Kevin Jairaj-Imagn Images

James Shields’ post-pitch grunts and Adam Engel’s piercing calls for fly balls have already achieved the feat of being regularly audible from the press box, but new White Sox hitting coach Derek Shomon is pledging to join the chorus.

“When a right-handed hitter on a two-[strike] count backs it up, picks it out of the catcher’s mitt and shoots it through the four-hole, you will hear me probably from wherever you’re sitting,” Shomon said. “This game’s fucking tough, man. It beats the shit out of you. The valley comes for everybody. No one is free of the valley. It’s about how long am I in the valley? How long until I climb out of this shit?”

This boisterous and upbeat demeanor has been immortalized on film, was beloved by the Miami front office, and while new Sox pitching coach Zach Bove was mostly sheepish to be reminded of the time he showed off his jiu jitsu skills in his college coaching days and said he wouldn’t be demonstrating any techniques on players, he allowed “maybe for Derek Shomon.”

Shomon both feels he has no choice but to be a font of energy (“It’s ADHD, dude, I’m a whack job, I’m all over the place”), but it’s also purposeful. The dynamic of hitting coach as occupational therapist has existed for ages, only there’s more necessity for warmth to counterbalance his demand for the Sox offense to be “relentless” in committing to their approach, and prioritizing practice and drills geared to be as difficult and as close to game speed as possible.

“This isn’t just Derek Shomon’s thought, this is something that’s been discussed for a long time, researched and something I’ve listened to feedback from players about,” Shomon said. “When they leveled up, upped the ante, raised the challenge point pregame, how much more prepared they felt in the game.

“I think about Kyle Stowers last year and I know I reference him a lot, but it’s because this guy did a ton of really good work. When he hit the walk-off grand slam against Mason Miller at home last year in Miami on 102 mph up and away, after the game he said ‘You don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of preparation.’ And Stowers was a guy who hit 100 mph foam balls so the spin rates exaggerated on them at the top [of the strike zone] every day while walking closer to the machine.”

The White Sox bought their Trajekt machine last year as Ryan Fuller took over the hitting operation, and there are similar-sounding quotes about the importance of game-speed hitting reps from Pedro Grifol when all they had were iPitch machines back in 2023. Shomon wouldn’t sell himself as a singular agent of change anyway. He points to organization-wide gains in chase rate and xwOBA last seasons as early signs he was in alignment with team’s goals under Fuller, refers to Joel McKeithan as a co-hitting coach whose systematic approach to his work complements his own, and professes comfort with every hitter having their own private coach nowadays, because he’s been the private coach.

While Shomon was shuffling through a bevy of coaching roles with the Schaumburg Boomers, his progression toward becoming a big league hitting coach has been percolating at Athletes HQ in Elgin, a facility he’s run alongside fellow former Boomer Jordan Dean since 2018. But asked when his hitting knowledge matured to something approaching his current level, Shomon said it’s all about taking constantly taking on new elements from people around him. So, he touches upon how much he learned just from interacting with Marlins franchise icon Jeff Conine last year, or how he benefitted from being in the same organization as Marlins field coordinator Aaron Leanhardt, who invented the torpedo bat that became a notable tool for Colson Montgomery and Edgar Quero last season.

In technical language, Shomon explains that bat-fitting has been a hot topic in hitting instruction circles for years now, demonstrating his understanding that hitters with different swing planes might shift the meat of their barrel in different directions. He also explains he wants it to be something White Sox players are experimenting with, in addition to biomechanical analysts’ recommendations, but Shomon explains that in a plain language in which he seems most comfortable.

“We have this really long work day, there’s a lot of really good opportunity, especially far away from first pitch, to explore some of that shit, so we want to encourage guys to do that,” Shomon said. “It’s just like golf, dude. You kind of fuck around and explore. Have different solutions. I certainly know guys who swung different bats against different types of pitching. That’s totally in play, and it’s even more in play when you are practicing it.”

It’s in keeping with Shomon’s emphasis that the White Sox can leave no stone unturned in the effort to “create 90s,” terminology he adapted from Mets player development staffer Tucker Frawley to fit slugging, contact-hitting, plate discipline and baserunning under the umbrella of creating and advancing baserunners. While he appreciates that “ball go far, team go far” is a frequent commonality among elite offenses in the game, he’s not talking — nor is anyone else — like the 2026 White Sox are going to be defined by outslugging everyone.

Failing the roster transformation necessary to make that possible, and fitting into the concepts which Sox hitting development is already preaching, Shomon just wants to focus on ways to emphasize the strengths of who is in tow. For veteran hitters who search for specific feels in their swing like Andrew Benintendi and Luis Robert Jr., Shomon wants to lock on a really detailed biomechanical view of what their swings look like when they’re “super crispy,” (another term of his) to shorten the path back to their norms when they fall out of sorts. He’s opposed to preaching a message of “don’t chase” to free-swinging hitters, because Shomon feels it instills passivity; a complaint Robert has had about the accidental side effects of his efforts to be more patient.

When Lenyn Sosa came up, Shomon quickly referenced that the infielder’s chase rates hew pretty close to league average earlier in counts, suggesting a more specific issue to clean up with his two-strike than a blanket inability to recognize pitches. As is often the case he contends, a partial remedy is a more specific plan about being aggressive in certain locations earlier in the count–which often double as the best opportunities to slug. After 45 minutes of listening to Shomon talking about wearing his heart on his sleeve, being relentless in approach, and having as many “clubs in your bag” as possible for different offensive situations, it starts to build the impression that Chase Meidroth might be his ideal kind of player.

He mostly confirmed as much, but there’s always something to augment.

“What’s not to like?” Shomon said. “Now how do we get a better version of Chase? I think Chase would tell you if he was on this call that it’s continuing to be who he is, which is somebody who makes elite swing decisions, makes elite contact, now how do I hit balls hard on a line more often, and trade out some of the ground balls?”

For someone whose slow crawl up the indy ball coaching ranks saw him bouncing between strength and conditioning coach to bullpen catching, Shomon wants to explore — and celebrate — every angle of offensive production for a White Sox team that is trying to slowly crawl back toward respectability. But there’s still a singular idea of what the finished product is supposed to eventually look like.

“More times than not, the situation is going to call for a hard-hit ball on a line in a gap,” conceded Shomon, but perhaps the benefit of hiring a lifelong Sox fan is that he’s already consumed with what needs to be considered when the best-case scenario is off the board. “I want them to be playing in a way and having at-bats in a way where pitchers are going ‘Fuck dude, I had to work. Literally I had to work every fucking at-bat.'”

“Within our profile, within our identity individually as a hitter, but ultimately as a collective, it’s that these guys are a fucking pain in the ass. They had multiple solutions, they pivot when they need to, but these guys aren’t a one-trick pony. When I think about hitting, I think about that.”