Quite quickly, Evans found himself immersed in the club’s decision-making processes. His has been a long and fruitful baseball life.Īnd it all started with what was no ordinary internship. He’s also worked for the Cubs, Mariners and Blue Jays and now, at age 61, runs Evans Baseball Consulting, which had an influential role in making this year’s MLB at Field of Dreams game happen. From 2001 to 2004, he was general manager of the Dodgers. He would wind up spending nearly 20 years with the White Sox, playing an influential role in drafting Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura and acquiring Paul Konerko. That job served as a special springboard for Evans. So my job was a hybrid between the baseball department and the media relations department.” “Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn had just bought the team in January of ’81, and they only had about 20 full-time staff members. “I was their first intern in who knows how long,” Evans says now. Once Evans stepped into Comiskey Park in a work capacity, he began to view his job prospects quite differently. But the opportunity to intern for his hometown White Sox during the spring semester of his junior year of college in 1981 was too good - or at least, too fun - an opportunity to pass up. Evans studied pre-law and communications at DePaul and was under the misguided impression that he was going to be a criminal prosecutor. The internship was supposed to be a lark, a diversion. This is the story of how the 1983 White Sox changed their fortunes by changing their field. Yet that’s nothing when compared to uprooting and repositioning a 72-year-old diamond in order to hit more dingers. Sure, it was unusual when the present-day Sox hired a 76-year-old to manage an up-and-coming club. The story of the White Sox in 2021 is that an elderly skipper named Tony La Russa made an unexpected, at-times-awkward and ultimately successful return to Chicago, guiding the club to its first American League Central title in more than a decade.īut back in the early 1980s, when La Russa was one of the youngest managers in the Majors, his openness to unorthodox ideas and his team’s trust in what Evans and the computers were documenting helped the Sox overcome an even deeper drought. “If the dimensions were different, we could have had about 30 more home runs.” “To that point in the season, our opponents had benefited something like 30 times more than us, because our fly balls were going to the warning track,” Evans says now. The cavernous confines of Comiskey, Evans confirmed, were working against the home club.
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