Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago White Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here.
Other Prospects of Note
Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.
A Whole Mess of Depth Guys
Jacob Burke, OF
Ronny Hernandez, C
Sam Antonacci, 2B/3B
Rikuu Nishida, 2B/LF
Riley Gowens, RHP
Mario Camilletti, 2B/3B/LF
Nick McLain, CF
Gil Luna, LHP
Tightly wound and short-levered, Burke has already topped his homer count from an injury-marred 2024. His quick hands spur pitchers to stay away from him, while his bat path leads him to swing inside a lot of right-handed spin, spiking his K-rate to the wrong side of 25% since he demolished Low-A pitching in 2023. Hernandez, 20, is a lefty-hitting Venezuelan catcher at Kannapolis whose feel for the barrel allowed him to hit .272 at Low-A last year, albeit with very little power. Antonacci spent two seasons at Heartland CC (IL) before he transferred to Coastal Carolina for his junior year in 2024. He’s a physically mature, contact-oriented hitter with good feel for the zone, but very little power for a below-average athlete and defender. After high school, Nishida came stateside and played for a few years at Mt. Hood CC in Oregon, where his academic advisor spoke Japanese and helped Nishida learn English while he played baseball. He played one year at Oregon before he was drafted. Nishida is a blast to watch. He’s a slash-and-dash hitter and 70 runner who plays his tail off on both sides of the ball. He’s got bottom-of-the-scale power and is such a tiny athlete that he’d be breaking big league convention if he were to make it (fingers crossed). Gowens is a depth starter type out of Illinois who struck out 145 guys in 122 innings split between High- and Double-A last year. Chicago’s 2022 eighth rounder out of Central Michigan, Camilletti is a career .265/.413/.356 hitter in the minors. He’s a good contact hitter with below-average bat speed, and he’s relatively inexperienced at third base and in left field, though he looks good at both in Birmingham. McLain is one of the many baseball McLains, and is a capable defensive center fielder with pretty substantial hit tool risk. Luna is a lefty reliever who’ll sit 95-96, but he’s walked a batter per inning each of the last two years.
Lefties with Good Breaking Balls
Brandon Eisert, LHP
Garrett Schoenle, LHP
Tommy Vail, LHP
Frankeli Arias, LHP
This is a pretty self-explanatory group. Eisert made his big league debut with Toronto last year; his fastball sits about 89. Schoenle, 26, sits about 93 and had a sub-2.00 ERA at Birmingham last year. Both of them have good sliders. Vail and Arias have 12-to-6 curveballs.
System Overview
For their second straight rebuild, the White Sox are working to upgrade aspects of their baseball operations infrastructure while simultaneously hoping to nail the drafts and trades that are supposed to fuel their next contending team. The system is showing signs of progress, but isn’t about to produce an imminent Goliath.
But this is still one of the stronger farm systems in baseball, clearly benefitting from what is now a years long focus on stacking minor league talent and fencing every major league asset of note, though the organization is still working to establish a defined strength as they get to the very end of the trade parade. Things on that front have been mixed, but are trending up. With Drew Thorpe going under the knife this spring, and what we’ve seen so far from Jairo Iriarte and Samuel Zavala, the Dylan Cease trade hasn’t proven to be a fantastic, instant reload. The Erick Fedde/Michael Kopech/Tommy Pham returns drew immediate pans across the industry (though credit for signing Fedde — that was the right idea). While Garrett Crochet was obviously more sought after, the return looks like the work of an org that’s figuring things out, and it started to address this system’s still-pressing need for everyday hitters, which should always be the main return in a blockbuster deal like that. A healthy first half of Luis Robert Jr. figures to be their last bite at the apple for landing a major prospect infusion via trade, but the Sox have (rightly in our view) been holding out for the offers to rise above the Edwin Arroyo and Carson Whisenhunt-fronted packages that seem to have been among the best during the offseason.
The White Sox amateur scouting department runs the Area Codes team for their region, and the devotion to defending their home turf’s prep talent is evident in their willingness to target Noah Schultz, Colson Montgomery, Caleb Bonemer, George Wolkow, Blake Larson, and Christian Oppor, who were all Midwest prospects at one point. They have their work cut out for them when it comes to developing usable hit tools from the positional half of that group. Drafting from the home region is part of the org’s identity, like the Southeast historically has been for the Braves.
This system’s most glaring need will take the longest to address. Bryan Ramos and Javier Mogollon are the rare products of an international operation that has turned up little outside of some painful seven-figure misses on older Cuban talent, prompting a staff overhaul at the end of last season. Knowing that they need to build their own internal depth from the Dominican Republic, and not just trade with the Dodgers for theirs, is half the battle, but it will be years before the efforts to fill that gap bear fruit because of the way teams have agreed to deals with players several years in advance.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com