Less than two years after taking over the White Sox’s international operations, Marco Paddy was trying to sell his bosses on José Abreu.

More specifically, he was trying to sell them on spending a lot of money on Abreu. Everyone needed to be on board, and executive vice president Kenny Williams wasn’t sold on the swing. Like many other evaluators, he was concerned about the length of Abreu’s stroke and how it would fare against well-located, major-league velocity on the inner half.

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So Williams traveled with Paddy to the Dominican Republic — where Abreu had established residency after defecting from Cuba in August 2013 — for a showcase he was scheduled to hold in front of a crowd of scouts. As that group waited for Abreu behind home plate, Paddy and Williams got word that their target was working in a batting cage near right field. So they walked down to see him.

Paddy had provided background on Abreu, lauding his makeup and commitment to be better than the mistake-clobbering, DH-type he was in international competition. Williams was impressed with the discipline he saw in his practice work. Some players swing out of their shoes in these showcase situations.

But he was really taken by what he saw in those back cages. Enough so that halfway through Abreu’s actual workout for scouts, Williams leaned over to Paddy and suggested they leave.

“He said, ‘What?! You don’t like him?’” Williams said. “I said, ‘No, let’s go.’ Marco has this look on his face, this dejected look on his face.”

But Williams was already sold on the viability of Abreu’s tighter swing path. He was convinced he would hit in the majors and do so immediately, and had swiftly transitioned from scouting mode to paranoid mode.

“They’re watching us walk out,” Williams said he told Paddy at the time. “So I’m going to shake my head no, and I’m going to simulate a long swing up underneath and I want you to nod your head yes, as I’m doing all this and put your hands up, and let’s walk out in kind of a disgusted looking way because none of these teams think we’re going to be after this guy.”

The White Sox would wind up dishing out what is still their largest contract in franchise history, a six-year, $68 million deal (with the right to opt for arbitration in the final three years) that dwarfed recent agreements for Yasiel Puig and Yoenis Cespedes, so there’s only much Williams and Paddy’s act could have done to cool the bidding war. But as much as it’s an all-hands affair with a contract as large as Abreu’s — or even Micker Adolfo’s then-franchise-record for an international amateur $1.6 million bonus, which was issued a few months earlier — by the end of 2013 it was obvious Paddy had delivered on the White Sox’s main goal: spearhead their access to elite international amateur talent.

In the months between the Sox signing Adolfo in July and Abreu in October, former White Sox senior director of player personnel David Wilder was sentenced to two years in federal prison, the final legal fallout for a scandal the Sox had fired him and two other scouts for over five years prior. Found to have been skimming bonuses from amateur players, Wilder’s deceit dealt the Sox two crucial blows. The first was that they had signed ineffective players who were not worth the inflated figures Wilder had presented. The second and more significant blow was the damage to their reputation in an industry powered by networking and relationships.

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Though Williams says many of their international contacts understood the scandal to be an aberration, the Sox needed someone who could rebuild their reputation among buscones, who had closed off their access to top players. Better yet, they needed someone whose reputation was sterling enough to command that access all by themselves. So Williams and Rick Hahn called around looking for recommendations, for someone willing and able to overhaul an international scouting operation, and take it from the bottom of the league, to competing at the top of the market.

“We both got the same name,” Williams said.

“When Marco came to Chicago to sit down with all of us, Kenny and I sat down right after the interview and compared notes,” Hahn said. “I don’t remember which one of us said ‘We can’t let this guy leave the building without an offer.’”

“I think I said my office,” Williams said with a laugh. “But the building works too.”

Paddy, a league scout since joining the Braves in 1993 after earning his master’s degree in public administration, had previously headed up international operations for both Atlanta and Toronto before he took an interview with the Sox. But where others might have seen a bad situation that would see him start out with a competitive disadvantage, Paddy, who was also picked by the Braves in the 56th round of the 1988 amateur draft, was interested in the challenge recovering from such a setback would bring.

“He knew what we were at the time,” Hahn said. “We had a self-inflicted wound down there that led to essentially requiring an entire overhaul with how we approached it. I think he was excited of an element of the challenge of it. It was a little bit of a leap of faith on his part in that we had never been huge spenders internationally prior to him getting here.”

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At the press conference for signing Luis Robert in May 2017, Hahn said that the Sox’s “infrastructure and talent base was virtually non-existent,” when Paddy arrived. But Paddy, sitting next to Adolfo’s father and watching some of his other signings like Anderson Comas and Luis Mieses take batting practice at the Sox Dominican complex in January, rolled his eyes and sighed with presented with the assertion that he is responsible for rebuilding the operation.

In Paddy’s mind, he’s just a cog in a larger machine. For instance, the Sox have revamped their facilities in the Dominican Republic, which Paddy uses in his recruiting efforts to sell the Sox as a good place to launch a career. He would defer credit to other international scouts under his purview, though he has played a central role in shaping that staff. He also argues that his efforts would be impossible without the Sox’s willingness to spend competitively on the international market, which thanks to handing Luis Robert a $26 million bonus and nearly doubling it with penalties, has exceeded $80 million during Paddy’s tenure by Hahn’s estimation.

“The new system has helped a lot,” Williams said in detailing the Sox’s return to competitiveness internationally. “No one can go in there and just blow you away because they’re in a big market and happen to have greater resources. It helps.”

But even if Paddy were just the face of that effort, he’s a face who produced immediate access and results, and immediately made inroads on elite prospects. It’s typical for high-level July 2 prospects to be the subjects of intensive scouting at the age of 14, meaning he was working on Adolfo immediately upon starting the job. He worked on Fernando Tatis Jr. in between signing Adolfo and Abreu, and first saw Robert play in an international tournament in 2012.

“We were able to get access to Micker and others at the top of that market that year even though it was Marco’s first year,” Hahn said. “He was our emissary and our representative in that market, but it was because of him and his reputation that the agents and the talent down there started taking us seriously. We then had to build up around him with various hires, we had to put our money where our mouth was so to speak in terms of signing that type of talent. But really on Day 1 he brought that level of credibility that brought us access.”

Hahn and Williams regularly travel out of the country to put their own eyes on targets that require major investment and are willing to take equal blame when a team decision goes awry, but the primary quality they value in Paddy is his fearlessness in providing his honest assessment of talent, and what it was worth. That trait was put to the test most memorably in October 2016, eight months before Robert signed.

At the Sox postseason organizational meetings, Paddy forecasted Robert’s arrival as an imminent concern worth planning for, even though he had yet to hit free agency. He noted the $31.5 million bonus Yoán Moncada had received in 2015 and predicted Robert would command an amount in a similar territory, even with all the additional penalties and restrictions on future signings such a larger figure would bring, and he had a clear thesis statement: Robert was the rare prospect who was worth it.

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“The passion and conviction and the knowledge of the player Marco had there got everybody excited,” Hahn said. “Including Jerry (Reinsdorf) to the point where once I think he was cleared, sometime in spring training, Jerry was really the one following up, ‘What are we doing to make sure we get this guy? What recruiting are we doing? What conversations? When can we have this? What is this going to cost?’ And everyone was on board with it. So it wasn’t like there was a lot of arm-twisting. There was a little trepidation given the unknown and the price point in terms of the talent, but it started with Marco’s conviction.”

Paddy’s first ever signing with the Sox, the tall, lanky pitcher Luis Martinez, whose $250,000 signing bonus already represented a major return to action after the low period of activity after the Wilder firing, is currently bullpen depth at Double-A Birmingham. Adolfo, who has seemingly been in the Sox organization forever, is only getting his first at-bats there too, and Robert, the biggest international prospect in the organization, is still at High-A. Tatis would be the first meaningful sign of Paddy’s impact at the major league level, but was dealt off to plug a big-league roster hole before his value could mature.

The flow of international talent slowing to a trickle and the domestic draft strategy shifting to more polished college talent with less upside to compensate were both small factors in the White Sox reaching the point of a rebuild in 2016. The other side of that coin is that the impact of Paddy’s work to restore international operations has yet to be truly felt. Between the difficulty and attrition that comes with projecting 16-year-olds, and a six-year lag between signing and major-league arrival in the best cases, how much more sustainable a functional international operation will make the Sox contending efforts remains to be seen. They believe it’s “completely rebuilt,” under Paddy’s supervision going forward though, which might be as reassuring as any of their big signings.

“I’ve told Marco all the time, I don’t know how many times we can say thank you because we seem to do it, and I’ve done it for quite a bit,” Williams said. “He definitely knows that he’s valued and it’s not just him, it’s the people who report to him as well. Because he has his own department, he has his own standards in which he will not be compromised.”

A couple reporters noticed Paddy at the Robert press conference, taking in one of his crowning achievements from the second row of the conference and learning center in the bowels of Guaranteed Rate Field. But bumping into Paddy, whether he’s taking in a day at the Sox Dominican complex or stopping by spring training, is rare considering by his own measure, he spends nearly two-thirds of the year on the road, getting looks on acquisition targets.

Williams may have weirded him out for a second five years ago when they walked out of Abreu’s tryout together, but really he was trying to do what Paddy aspires to do all the time: work in secret, without recognition.

“One thing I’m most confident about is that Marco is really not going to like this article being written about him,” Hahn said. “It’s going to embarrass him and he’s going to shy away from it and if you get him on the record, it will be begrudgingly.”

(Top photo: James Fegan/The Athletic)

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