A papal conclave is the ultimate news story. It’s an event shrouded in ceremony and secrecy, which takes place incredibly rarely; only three times in the past 40 years, in fact. Even in this era when seeing everything has made the mysterious mundane, the world is left waiting in total ignorance for news of white smoke. Billions of observers, Catholic or not, look on in rapt fascination. And when the conclave produced the first American-born pope, Leo XIV, things only got more fascinating.

I come from a Catholic extended family, but for the most part, I was a devoted low-church protestant in my youth and am largely irreligious now. Nevertheless, I’ve always held the Vatican in a certain esteem. Its grandeur, its rituals, its dense and ancient jargon — all of that looks mystical and romantic from a distance. Is it the sole conduit to Almighty God? Perhaps not, from where I sit. But it’s a fascinating institution nonetheless.

That cloud of fairy tale wonder evaporated in an instant on Thursday, when the cardinal electors chose Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago to inherit St. Peter’s throne. Read the rest of this entry »

Lucas Giolito is looking to return to form following elbow surgery that cost him all of last year. Now 30 years old and in his first season on mound with the Boston Red Sox, Giolito has made a pair of starts — one solid, another squalid — in which he has surrendered 15 hits and nine runs over 9 2/3 innings. At his best, he’s been a top-of-the-rotation pitcher. From 2019-2021, the 6-foot-6 right-hander fashioned a 3.47 ERA and a 3.54 FIP while making a team-high 72 starts for the Chicago White Sox.

Turn the clock back 10 years, and Giolito sat atop our 2015 Washington Nationals Top Prospects list. Our then-lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel was understandably bullish about Giolito, writing that the 2012 first-round draft pick had true no. 1 upside.

What did Giolito’s FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Giolito to respond to it.

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“Giolito was nationally known by scouts all the way back to when he hit 95 mph at age 15.”

“I always threw hard,” Giolito said. “I was one of the hardest throwers in Little League and everything like that. I started long tossing a lot around the time I got to high school, and just kept building and building. I think I hit 90 when I was 14, and then 95 maybe closer to my 16th birthday. So yeah, it kept going up until I blew my elbow out.

“Probably,” Giolito responded when asked if the velocity was too much, too early. “There wasn’t too much understanding on the medical side, like strengthening, stability — all the stuff that we’re doing now to maintain the little muscles, the big muscles, to support your body when it’s outputting that much force. I was also very skinny. My shoulder blades winged out. I didn’t have much muscular development at that age, but I was moving very fast. It eventually caught up to me.”

“[He] was in the running to go 1-1 as one of the top prep pitchers of all time, until he was shut down with a sprained UCL in his elbow. This led to an expected Tommy John surgery one outing after he signed for an $800,000 overslot bonus as the 16th overall pick.”

“I remember having an outing where I think the Astros’ GM came to see me pitch in person,” Giolito said. “I pitched really well that day. I was on top of the world. It was like, ‘Oh my God, I might be the first-overall pick if I just continue what I’m doing for the rest of the season.’ It was the next outing, or maybe two outings later, where I hurt my elbow. I had to shut down. We didn’t want to do the full TJ yet, because we thought that would hurt me in the draft. Plus, if I was going to get TJ, I wanted to be in a professional organization where you get access to the best care. I tried to rehab it.

“Going into the draft, I had no idea,” added Giolito, a product of Harvard-Westlake High School. “I thought I’d be picked somewhere in the first three rounds, that a team would take a flier on me. I didn’t know I’d be in the first round. That was kind of the beginning of the pre-draft-deal era, but I literally was watching the draft on the TV when they said my name. That was when I found out I was drafted in the first round.

“The Nationals picked me. I was a prep arm with a blown-out elbow, which is a big, big risk. I have Stephen Strasburg to thank, because he was a big prospect who came up, blew his elbow out, got Tommy John, and had a relatively successful recovery from that. The Nationals kind of saw me in that same vein. It was, ‘OK, we’ll get this guy. He’ll have TJ, but we feel confident with this.’”

“The stuff was all the way back this year as he dominated Low-A at age 19/20 in his first full year coming off of surgery. The Nationals were understandably conservative with pitch and innings counts.”

“My first full season back they had my innings count at 100,” Giolito recalled. “I got to 100 innings and they shut me down, and that sucked, because our team was so good. Our starting rotation consisted of me, Reynaldo López, Nick Pivetta. Austin Voth was in the rotation, but he got sent up to High-A at some point that year. We had a really nasty one-two-three with me, Reynaldo, and Nick, but then I got shut down with a few weeks left in the season and had to be a cheerleader. We ended up losing in the playoffs.”

“His knockout curveball, which gets 65 or 70 grades from scouts, is his signature offspeed pitch.”

“Not any more,” replied the righty. “I still have it, but I don’t throw it as often. I always say that Tommy John gave me my changeup. When I was recovering I messed around with changeup grips a lot and found one that was comfortable. I threw it a lot in that same season you mentioned, that Low-A season. I threw a ton of changeups, because the curveball made my elbow hurt that first season back.

“My curveball was good in the minor leagues — I still used it — but we mixed that changeup in a lot. Over time, especially when I developed the slider, the changeup really became the big pitch for me.”

“He has true no. 1 starter upside.”

“Yeah, I mean, I had that with the White Sox for a couple of years,” Giolito said. “I still have confidence that I have true no. 1 starter upside. I just have to come back from this thing and develop some good consistency.”

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Previous “Old Scouting Reports Revisited” interviews can be found through these links: Cody Bellinger, Matthew Boyd, Dylan Cease, Matt Chapman, Erick Fedde, Kyle Freeland, Randal Grichuk, Ian Happ, Jeff Hoffman, Matthew Liberatore, Sean Newcomb, Bailey Ober, Max Scherzer.

Yesterday, James Fegan wrote a great story at Sox Machine about how Chase Meidroth became one of the most patient players in baseball. The White Sox want Meidroth to be more aggressive, but after a recent call-up, he’s running a minuscule 17.3% chase rate. He ran that exact same chase rate last season in Triple-A, and it ranked fifth lowest among the 381 players who saw at least 500 pitches outside the zone. Here at FanGraphs, Michael Baumann also covered Meidroth’s overabundance of patience a couple weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, Baumann’s article featured something Fegan’s didn’t: a paragraph about nominative determinism. The defining characteristic of Meidroth’s profile is that he’s a Chase who doesn’t chase. But Meidroth isn’t the only Chase in baseball. Maybe he’s an outlier. Maybe the other players named Chase rack up chases, if only out of a sincere desire to obey the fifth commandment.

Chase Utley was the first major league Chase. He debuted in 2003, conveniently just a year after Sports Info Solutions started tracking pitches. That means that we can track the chase rate of every Chase who’s ever played. I went through his year-by-year chase rates in order to calculate a league-adjusted figure, which we’ll call Chase Rate Plus for the remainder of this article. Utley’s Chase Rate Plus was 88, 12% below the league average, and it helped him run a walk rate that was 6% above the league average. In other words, the first Chase in history didn’t chase much either. What about the rest of the bunch? Read the rest of this entry »

Ty France went into last season trying to be something he’s not, and the results reflected that. Over 535 plate appearances split between the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, he slashed .234/.305/.365 with 13 home runs and a 93 wRC+. Statistically speaking, it was the worst year of his career.

Now with the Minnesota Twins after inking a modest $1M free-agent deal in mid-February, France went into yesterday with numbers more in line with what he did from 2019-2023. A month-plus into the campaign, the 30-year-old first baseman has a 118 wRC+ and a .271/.341/.407 slash line.

How has he rediscovered the better version of himself?

“My swing is simple and compact right now,” France told me prior to an 0-for-4 Friday night that included his being robbed on a diving catch and lining an at-em ball at an infielder. “Instead of trying to do too much, I’m just trying to get in my best position and take a good swing.

“Guys are getting paid for homers and doing damage, so a lot of my training last offseason was geared toward trying to hit the ball in the air and drive the ball,” France added. “I kind of lost touch with what I was best at, which is using the right side of the field just collecting hits. This past offseason was about getting back to the basics and rediscovering who I am as a hitter.” Read the rest of this entry »

Brooks Baldwin doesn’t profile as a future star, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a long and productive major league career. Versatility is a big reason why.
A poor man’s Ben Zobrist, the 24-year-old switch-hitter has played every defensive position besides first base, catcher, and pitcher since debuting with the Chicago White Sox last summer. It may be only a matter of time before those three are added to his résumé. Counting his days as a North Carolina prep and a UNC-Wilmington Seahawk, there isn’t anywhere he hasn’t played.

The versatility dates back to his formative years.

“I’ve been playing all over the field since I was 10 years old,” explained Baldwin, who was announced as a third baseman when the White Sox selected him in the 12th round of the 2022 draft. “It’s something my dad instilled in me, not restricting myself to one position. He played pro ball a little bit [in the Cleveland Guardians system], and before that in college at Clemson. He did the same thing.”

Chuck Baldwin’s son has seen time at first base in the minors, and the other two missing positions at the major league level are ones he’s well acquainted with. The chip off the old block caught “pretty often” in his freshman and sophomore years of high school, and pitched all four years. Primarily a starter, he had a fastball in the upper-80s as a senior.

Baldwin has been switch-hitting since he was eight or nine years old. His father’s high school coach, Linwood Hedgepeth, made the suggestion. After watching the naturally-left-handed hitter in the batting cage, the member of the North Carolina Baseball Hall of Fame told the elder Baldwin,’This kid can switch it.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Anything worth doing is worth doing right, and when it came to losing games, the 2024 White Sox were the grandmasters of the art. Sure, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders had a worse record, but that was an intentionally terrible team thanks to an owner who sent the club’s good players over to another team they owned, the St. Louis Perfectos. The 1962 Mets edged the Sox in win percentage, but that notorious team had the advantage of being an expansion club in their first year after an expansion draft that was so short on talent, it resembled a grocery store’s toilet paper aisle during the height of COVID. Last year’s White Sox were just two years removed from a .500 record, and by all accounts, ownership and the front office intended to actually win games. A strong record, however, needs to be forged in the fire of new challengers, and this season, two early contenders have emerged: the Colorado Rockies and the reigning lastpions themselves.

The Rockies are off to a blazing cold start and are the current frontrunners with a 4-20 record. For a team with a winning percentage short of .200, Colorado has received some surprisingly competent pitching performances, with the two main splats being former Cy Young contender Germán Márquez and top prospect Chase Dollander. Where the Rockies have been stunningly poor is on the offensive side of things, with the team hitting .213/.287/.345 and just barely averaging three runs per game. Fourteen hitters have at least 20 plate appearances and more than half of them have a wRC+ below 70. Ryan McMahon’s performance is a particularly low lowlight; the third baseman has 39 strikeouts already thanks to an out-of-zone contact rate under 20%, a number so bananas that it looks like a programming glitch that proves our existence is actually a simulation.

ZiPS thought the Rockies would struggle in 2025, but not to this level. The system’s projection, for a mere 99 losses, even came with a (very) small chance of Colorado making the playoffs as a Wild Card team. After Thursday’s games, I did a full re-simulation of the 2025 season to get a projection for what the Rockies could achieve if they fail to get the wheels back on the cart:

Naturally, the team’s small sliver of playoff probability has been wiped out by April. In the preseason projections, the Rockies only had a 1.5% chance of matching 121 losses and a 0.8% chance of setting a new record. So while the feat was at least plausible, it was a long shot. The odds are still strongly against — losing this many games is really hard — but seven and five percent are bonafide countin’ numbers.

Colorado’s biggest obstacle in the pursuit of infamy is that there are real reasons for hope when looking at the roster. As mentioned above, Márquez and Dollander have been terrible, but there is still at least some remaining chance that the former can get back to where he was, and the latter is an elite prospect. Michael Toglia is a Triple-A-caliber first baseman, not a pitcher dragooned into the lineup, and will surely fall short of his -6 WAR pace. Ezequiel Tovar is a better player than this, and guys like Zac Veen and Adael Amador have legitimate upside. The Rockies simply have a lot of saving throws that could lead to more positive outcomes this year. The start makes it possible that the Rockies will match the 2024 Sox for futility, but when you watch Colorado, your eyes aren’t physically forced to stare blurrily into middle distance at the Stygian maw, where nothing will give your frozen gaze succor from the dread of oblivion and Chris Davis‘ contract.

But hey, we still have the OGs, the White Sox, to look at. At 6-19, they’re a game and a half behind the Rockies for these purposes, but if ZiPS is to be believed, they’re a fundamentally worse roster. Chicago’s 52-110 projected record coming into the 2025 season is the worst projection ZiPS has ever given a team (not counting that article last year where I projected how Triple-A teams would fare in the majors):

ZiPS gives the White Sox a 16% chance of matching last year’s loss total and a 12% chance — better than the probability of an Aaron Judge homer — of besting it. Where the White Sox and Rockies differ in the pantheon of lousy teams is that the Sox are currently configured in a way that greatly limits their upside. For a rebuilding team, the starting lineup is surprisingly old and established; players like Nick Maton, Michael A. Taylor, and Matt Thaiss have a use as role players on a good team, but the ceiling on their performance is quite low. Currently injured players such as Josh Rojas and Mike Tauchman are in the same boat. The Sox have built a Triple-A-caliber team with a roster that looks like one. If you had been out of the country and behind on the baseball news and someone gave you a printout of this roster with “Charlotte Knights” at the top, would it immediately register as wrong?

That’s not to say there aren’t any players with upside. I actually like the return the Sox got for Garrett Crochet, and think that Kyle Teel, Chase Meidroth, and Braden Montgomery could all have futures in the majors. Shane Smith has been a highlight for me as a starter, and I’m totally digging Brandon Eisert’s hot start as a junk-tossing Doug Jones-esque reliever, an archetype you don’t see very often in modern baseball. But the prospects won’t be prominent quickly enough, and the interesting pitchers are too few, to give this team a real sense of short-term optimism.

There’s even a chance that both teams tie or set the record, with the Rockies and White Sox both at least tying the record in 1% of simulations and both beating the record in 0.6% of the runs. It’s too soon to known whether we’ll see a true Lossapalooza or merely two ordinarily lousy teams come September, but it’s fun to dream… darkly.

Penn Murfee was mentioned in the interview with Trent Blank that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. Discussing pitch profiles, Seattle’s director of pitching strategy recalled the erstwhile Mariners reliever being “a guy who had cut-ride” on his four-seam fastball.

Murfee is now with the White Sox, and Chicago’s South Side club is in Boston for a weekend series, so I took the opportunity to get his own perspective on the offering. What I learned talking to him at my home base of Fenway Park is that the movement he gets on his heater is circumstantial. Moreover, it’s legal.

“Back in 2021, in [Triple-A] Sacramento, my pitch profile changed from a running arm-side fastball,” explained Murfee, who was in the Seattle system from 2018-2023, the last year-plus of that span in the majors. “For whatever reason, I started choking the ball a little tight, and began throwing what was classified as a cutter. It went to zero inches of horizontal movement. My pitching coach at the time said, ‘Whatever you changed, don’t change it back.’ He said that I went from having a very average fastball to something unique.”

The reason behind the movement change? He stopped using sticky. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox, coming out of the worst season in modern major league history, started 2025 with a bang: an 8-1 win over the Angels on Opening Day. They lost the next two games, then pounded the Twins into smithereens on the last day of March. Since then, the Sox have dropped 12 games out of 14 and once again settled like silt on the bottom of the American League standings table.

It’s not going to be their year after all. But I don’t think it’s going to be as miserable as it was in 2024, and Chase Meidroth is one reason why. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

If White Sox fans hadn’t already been inured to calamity by now, surely the ending of Tuesday afternoon’s game would’ve sent them into an incoherent, frothing rage. Having made it to the bottom of the ninth inning in Cleveland tied 0-0, Mike Clevinger took the mound. Clevinger, for reasons I do not remotely understand, is Chicago’s closer, and the inning before he’d come in to retire José Ramírez with two outs and the bases empty to preserve the tie.

Clevinger started the inning by allowing an infield single to Carlos Santana, alerting the world to the hitherto unknown fact that Santana can still run at this phase of his career. Then, the once-coveted workhorse walked three straight Guardians on a combined 21 pitches to force in the winning run. By the end of his stint, Clevinger’s fastball velocity was dipping into the 91 mph range. It was the second time in the first 10 games of the season that Clevinger took the decision in a 1-0 defeat, and Chicago’s second walk-off loss in as many games.

A game like this invites many questions, most of them more easily answered by the works of Nietzsche or C.S. Lewis (depending on your philosophical predilections) than baseball analysis. But there is good news, other than the fact that we’re all going to die one day, and when we do, we won’t have to watch the White Sox anymore.

See, Shane Smith was nails. Again. Read the rest of this entry »