Chicago White Sox Top 40 Prospects

The White Sox’s devotion to their Area Codes team was taken up a notch when they dropped $3 million on Bonemer, a tightly-wound Michigan high schooler with an atypical swing, in the second round of the 2024 draft. Bonemer’s strideless swing doesn’t start at a dead stop, but it could fool you at first glance, and the gradual hand pump that gets him going is something he’s been steadily adding since joining pro ball. After being limited to bridge league action in his draft year, Bonemer paired excellent strike zone judgment with an above-average in-zone contact rate in a scintillating debut season that saw him hit .281/.401/.473 overall, including popping two of his 12 homers in a late season 11-game cameo at High-A.

At 6-foot-1 and already touting a neck the width of a tree trunk, Bonemer isn’t the most projectable 20-year-old, but his high-end exit velocities are already nearing plus territory and there’s already an affinity for elevating balls to the pull side here. He can be beaten in the zone by fastballs up and away from him, and his awareness of that leads to some vulnerability to changeups. At the same time, Bonemer’s shift to a more level swing path has made it so that some of his most graceful cuts come when he can extend his hands to stay on soft stuff low and away.

In all, the hit tool, power and approach point to an above-average bat at… some spot on the diamond. Bonemer is a below-average runner, and not only would his glove work not unseat Colson Montgomery at short upon reaching the majors, but he already mostly slid over to third base when third-round pick Kyle Lodise arrived at High-A Winston-Salem. Bonemer is expected to play some shortstop next season, but with recent first-round pick Billy Carlson’s vaunted glove looming behind him, a move to third could soon become permanent. His bat and range could play there, but Bonemer’s short arm action was inconsistent throughout the year. Fewer rushed throws at a less demanding spot than short could help remedy that, but the same could be said for a move to second base or left field, the latter of which is already on Chicago’s radar. The quality of Bonemer’s stick lowers the stakes of this question, but could also bring it to the forefront by his anticipated 2027 debut.

After two years of careful workload management, Schultz was supposed to take on a traditional starter routine in 2025, only for repeated right patellar tendonitis flare ups to limit him to 73 innings. After two years largely defined by high volumes of strike-throwing, Schultz’s delivery stiffened from the ailment, his sinker lost sink and stopped generating grounders, his trademark slider became a tick slower and loopier, and he issued an uncharacteristic 45 free passes between Double-A Birmingham and Triple-A Charlotte. Already a profile built around the absence of a bat-missing fastball, Schultz’s strikeout rate fell from 32.1% in 2024 to 23.2% in 2025. Still, he out-talented the wildness until his promotion to the latter stop, where International League hitters put a 9.32 ERA on his résumé over 16.1 forgettable innings.

Schultz entered 2025 as the best left-handed pitching prospect in the game, and the White Sox had every intention of him debuting Chicago this past season. It’s important to remember that even after a very rocky campaign, the 22-year-old still touts a special combination of gifts. He’s 6-foot-10 with a funky low slot from which he’s shown potential plus command in the past, and while his average velo always seems to fall back around 94 mph, he’s repeatedly flashed 98 mph with plenty more room to add to his super long frame. He’s an extreme supinator with a slider that has looked like a 70 for much of his professional existence, but efforts to add a cutter as a bridge pitch or command a seam-effects changeup have yet to take hold, with the instability in his lead leg once again a likely recent culprit.

Unfortunately, injuries and limited innings have been part of Schultz’s story for a while now and always deserved extra consideration due to his outlier size. Any member of the Sox amateur department will tell you that Schultz wouldn’t have fallen to them 26th overall in 2022 if it weren’t for mononucleosis wiping out most of his senior season in nearby Oswego, IL, and he only threw 27 innings the following year between a forearm strain and a shoulder impingement. So while his 2025 struggles have the hallmarks of an outlier, Schultz’s prior track record of looking like a potential no. 2 starter wasn’t that long to begin with.

While Chase Burns and Trey Yesavage, fellow college pitchers taken in the 2024 draft’s first round, made ballyhooed major league debuts, Smith went through sort of an odyssey of a first professional season. Listed at a sturdy 6-foot-3 and 235 pounds, with a fully developed lower half, the draft day rationale around Smith was that his strength gains had added stability to his leg drive, lifting him above the reliever-y look of his first two years at Arkansas and allowing his ridiculous fastball-slider combination to play up. But his first season of pro ball showed that wasn’t quite the whole truth of it, as he walked 62 hitters in 89.2 total innings if you include his five Arizona Fall League outings, which were Smith’s best of the year. Prior to that finishing flurry, Smith missed six weeks in the first half for elbow soreness, dovetailing with the White Sox cycling through a number of leg kicks in hopes of finding something that would time up with the southpaw’s short, quick lower-slot arm stroke.

Smith settled on something with minimal counter rotation and a shorter path to his foot strike, but that’s not a full solution. He’s strong enough to dip into his back leg to an extreme degree and explodes toward the mound, and his resulting high-tempo delivery is difficult to sync up consistently. As a result, most of Smith’s 2025 was spent trying to re-establish his baselines rather than build out a third pitch. But just as was the case on draft night, Smith has two pitches nasty enough that it may not matter. His velocity fluctuated throughout the year; he hit 99 mph, but there were also some nights right before the IL stint when he sat 92, and then he worked 94-96 through the AFL. In any case, Synergy had Smith running a 30% miss rate on his heater in affiliated play, as his short arm action makes him difficult to time; the rise-and-run action on his fastball makes him an uncomfortable at-bat for lefties, and seemingly center-cut offerings can run up and away from righties (and catchers). Smith spins his freak low-80s slider off the skin of the baseball, but it’s where he demonstrates some of his most compelling command. That’s an odd thing to say about a pitch that’s in the strike zone less than half of the time, but he shows the ability to manipulate shape and speed, throwing hard benders that start at lefties’ shoulders before clipping the outside corner, and dropping in slower versions that resemble backdoor curveballs to right-handers.

Smith’s spin talent speaks to why White Sox pitch dev types have often speculated that his third pitch might just be a slower breaker, and why the split-change he sprinkles in very cautiously and very rarely has limited arm-side action. The Sox have had pockets of success giving extreme supinators (Shane Smith, Davis Martin) changeup variants that don’t require turning over their wrist to execute. But Smith’s first pro season lends a certain logic to focusing on just getting enough strikes out of his two above-average pitches, which offers both the potential for no. 2 starter level seasons down the road, and a longer and rockier path to getting there than his college success might have suggested.

It’s been a longer wait for Oppor to become a relevant prospect than was anticipated after the A’s used an 11th round pick on the Wisconsin prep lefty back in 2022. He didn’t sign and pitched a year of JUCO ball before the White Sox’s love of their Area Codes players won the day and he was plucked in the fifth round for nearly $150,000 over his slot value. Still, it wouldn’t be until 2025 that Oppor escaped the complex, and he made up for lost time, with the 21-year-old earning a promotion to High-A after the first month and finishing with a combined 116 strikeouts against 42 walks in 87.2 innings of 3.08 ERA ball.

Walks spiked on Oppor during the second half, but so did his stuff, hitting 100 mph on his two-seamer repeatedly down the stretch and finding a sweeper that worked with both his lower arm slot and his pronation inclinations. Oppor gets less arm-side action on his changeup than his heater, which is typically problematic at upper levels, but he has shown the arm speed, velo separation and feel for location to carve with it (47% miss rate) thus far. Still slenderly built after some strength gains, Oppor’s delivery is both fluid and easy-looking, and also kinda weird. He lands with his front foot still closed off to the plate, pinning it to the ground so he can crossfire around it with a uniquely short stride. Along with a fastball that gets over a foot of arm-side run, it’s not the most typical look for commanding the glove side to right-handers.

There’s a threadbare history of strike-throwing here, especially with any spin, but the emergence of above-average left-handed velocity, his dynamic on-mound athleticism, and Oppor’s changeup performance has us buying this as an arrow-up profile.

A right ankle he fractured on a slide at Texas A&M knocked Montgomery out of 1-1 discussions in the 2024 draft, and a break in the same foot from a hit by pitch this September knocked him out for about six weeks and half the Arizona Fall League. But if you splice in Montgomery’s nutty 12 games in the desert, the 22-year-old switch-hitting outfielder slashed .278/.376/.460 in 133 games across four different affiliates in his pro debut season, showing no ill-effects from the injury and greatly improved performance from his right-handed swing. Oft-cited for being a voracious consumer of machine reps, Montgomery’s above-average plate discipline carried over to pro ball, with an especially commendable amount of in-zone aggression.

Despite Montgomery’s bountiful accomplishments against upper-level competition, his refined approach and his likely 2026 big league ETA, the case for him as an impact player is rooted more in seeing a superlative athlete with the potential for later blooming skills than a safe, finished project. Montgomery crept up toward a 30% strikeout rate in 34 games at Birmingham and ran a sub-70% contact rate for the year. There were 10 qualified big league regulars with a sub-70% contact in 2025 and they all had 25-homer juice, and Montgomery definitely fits that bill, with a super-developed lower half. He pins his lead foot in the dirt and fires his hips to create explosive rotational force, hard contact (106.8 mph 90th-percentile exit velo), and elite bat speed that can catch up to any fastball, but timing it up is a different matter, as he had a 30% miss rate on heaters in 2025 and in some video of Montgomery against 92-93 mph, you could swear he’s missing out in front. Overall, he’s vulnerable to velocity up and away from him as a right-handed hitter, but he struggles with changeups from both sides; his barrel looking like it was fired out of a cannon often results in swings that are in and out of the strike zone fairly quickly, and a lot of Montgomery’s work in pro ball has been focused on direction.

Montgomery’s defense is in a similar place. He doesn’t have the best acceleration but is still a springy, average runner who can mix in at center based on his present physical ability. His right field projection is driven by reads that are still raw and the bazooka that’s welded onto his right shoulder, reminding you that he touched 97 mph off the mound in his two-way player days. Between that, the switch-hitting, the missed time and the lauded work ethic, Montgomery offers a lot of reasons to be patient about the development of greater feel-to-hit to unlock his star-level tools, even as he currently resides at the border of too many whiffs.

McDougal finished the 2024 season in Low-A; he was demoted in July due to pronounced control issues that persisted through his second year out from rehab for a TJ he had after blowing out his UCL in his draft year. The 22-year-old then finished the 2025 campaign as a no-brainer addition to Chicago’s 40-man roster, wrapping up a season that saw him compile a career-high 113.1 innings with a pair of late-September outings where he pumped triple-digits while leading Double-A Birmingham to a Southern League title.

The son of minor league reliever Mike McDougal, Tanner didn’t get cheated in the genetic lottery in terms size (he’s 6-foot-5, 240 pounds), arm speed (he sat 96-99 mph and touched 101 for the season), or spin talent (his curveball averages 3,000 rpm). He’s big, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, but he’s also a deceptively loose and whippy athlete who creates freaky separation. While his heater plays under its elite velocity due to its downhill plane from a six-foot release height, he also throws his sharp and short high-80s slider pretty hard too, which played to a 49% miss rate. McDougal has a high-maintenance physique, and increased investment in his offseason training is regularly cited as a reason for the career-best 7.5% walk rate he recorded in 55.2 innings after his promotion to Double-A, though his stuff’s overwhelming in-zone performance is doing more of the lifting there than his still below-average command.

For much of McDougal’s amateur career, his changeup was the only secondary he threw, so there’s greater comfort for executing it than his declining usage or supination bias might suggest. But its absence, along with his curveball command being a step behind that of his slider, helped open a notable platoon split in 2025 that will become more relevant soon, as he’s expected to debut in Chicago this coming season. McDougal still poses substantial relief risk — it hasn’t even been a year since the White Sox were seriously considering a move to the ‘pen at High-A Winston-Salem — but he’ll have monster arm speed and impact breaking balls wherever he lands.

The second of three Corona High School products popped in the first round in 2025, Carlson doesn’t quite have the arm of Seth Hernandez or the offensive polish of Brady Ebel, but the 10th overall pick’s slam dunk shortstop projection is a superlative skill on its own. Twitchy, long-levered and balletic, and with a well above-average arm, Carlson is a present plus defender at short with Gold Glove potential. His footwork and ability to make plays on the run would be good enough to work around a vulnerable throwing arm the way William Bergolla does in this system, but Carlson has a cannon anyway. Standing a very projectable and high-waisted 6-foot-1, Carlson is already generating plus bat speed and made an above-average amount of contact on the showcase circuit while displaying a good concept of the zone. Yet his swing still has its doubters in the scouting community; he had a case for 1-1 consideration if his hit tool had been viewed as having a safe 50-grade projection.

Carlson turned 19 a couple of weeks after draft day, but perhaps unsurprisingly for a rail thin prospect tasked with adding strength, his swing has been going through a lot of changes over the last 18 months. During his senior year, he added a leg kick with significant counter-rotation to load into his back leg and tap the power he flashed in pre-draft workouts in Knoxville, but it was toned down during glimpses of him in post-draft bridge league action on the team’s complex, and he also ditched the pronounced barrel tip in his hand load. Those encouraging developments, the readily apparent plus athleticism, and the high defensive floor make Carlson a pretty good Pick to Click target for the midseason Top 100, but the hit tool skepticism and threadbare exposure to premium velocity mean a glove-first soft regular projection for now.

The way Paez’s head stares down the first base coach at his release point doesn’t make him a top candidate to hold a sub-4% career walk rate; it also isn’t the sort of delivery quirk typical of a pitcher polished enough to justify betting the second pick in the Rule 5 draft on his ability to handle a three-level jump from High-A to the majors. But a glimpse of him dotting a sinker at the knees and immediately following it up with a slider and change in a similar spot gives you a good picture of the general idea here. Paez sits 90-94 mph, and doesn’t so much offer an out-pitch as he uses superlative command of a large suite of shapes (including two heaters) to generate swings in and around the edges of the zone. A right calf injury knocked him out for nearly four months in 2025 and held him down from 40-man protection consideration, as his 2.79 ERA and 27.7% strikeout rate came in just 19.1 innings while also limiting the industry’s looks at some curious delivery changes.

The degree to which Paez’s head points to the first base side can serve as a barometer for trunk tilt, especially since his release point was three to four inches higher this past season. His whippy arm action still produces oodles of strikes, but the change in release point seemed to sap some of the fun tilt and effectiveness of his slider; Paez mitigating it by throwing more curves and cutters around it is a very on-brand adaptation. It’s electrifying to see a 21-year-old with this sort of strike-throwing and sequencing savvy, even if his 6-foot-1 frame doesn’t suggest a ton of projection or a clear path to a new level of stuff. He’s both safer and less spicy than your typical Rule 5 arm plucked out of A-ball, with an arsenal so wide it’d be a waste not to have him face a hitter more than once, and stuff too light to stretch him beyond that.

The following is Eric Longenhagen’s report on Sandlin following the Jordan Hicks trade: Sandlin spent two years at an Oklahoma JUCO prior to his lone season in Norman, then was drafted as an over-slot ($400,000) 11th rounder by the Royals in 2022; he was traded to Boston for reliever John Schreiber just before the start of 2024 camp. With Boston, Sandlin climbed to Triple-A and was added to the team’s 40-man roster after the 2025 season before he was traded to the White Sox early in 2026 as part of a Jordan Hicks salary dump.

Sandlin throws hard, and after dealing with oblique and forearm issues in 2023 and 2024, he was finally able to work 106 innings in a completely healthy 2025. He was still sitting 96 and touching 100 in September, partially solidifying the notion that he can be a big league starter. There are still other potential barriers for that, however. Sandlin’s fastball lacks explosive movment, he still doesn’t have a great offspeed pitch with which to attack lefties, and he’s a control-over-command type who throws strikes (his fastball, slider and cutter strike percentages are all around 66%), but mostly in the heart of the zone.

His breaking balls — a slider in the 82-87 mph range, and a cutter that averages about 90 and will bump 94 — are both nasty and fairly distinct from one another. Against lefties, Sandlin peppers the top of the zone with cutters and sliders before elevating his fastball with two strikes. Against righties, he throws a ton of sliders, almost as often as his fastball and cutter usage combined. He was able to strike out a batter per inning in this fashion in 2025 but had pronounced splits (.807 OPS vs. LHH, .637 vs. RHH) and barely ever throws his changeup or curveball. The White Sox have had recent success coaxing better changeups out of pitchers with naturally-good breaking balls, and perhaps they’ll be able to do that with Sandlin. He has the size, and now seemingly has demonstrated the durability, to justify development as a starter during his first couple of years on the 40-man roster. His ultimate upside is something like a good fourth starter, but his more likely long-term outcome is as a really nasty reliever.

For the second straight year, the Sox dropped $3 million in the second round on a prep bat from their Area Codes team. Fauske is many things, but underscouted is not one of them. He grew up a Sox fan while attending nearby Nazareth Academy, where he was a teammate of 2026 draft prospect Landon Thome, son of the Hall of Famer and White Sox special assistant. Fauske only just turned 19 in November, but he has been around long enough for his hit tool to have built a strong track record. Possessing loose hands, a versatile barrel and an aesthetically pleasing lefty swing, Fauske made a ton of contact on the showcase circuit, which overshadowed an eventful amateur development path. Formerly a catcher and a pretty good high school football player, Fauske’s move to the outfield put a greater emphasis on the work he’s done to lean out his frame and should allow his advanced bat to drive his developmental path, but it also came after some throwing shoulder issues.

Leaner and more fluid than he was even a year ago, Fauske will get an early shot to play center field, but he’s likely destined for left. He’s unlikely to have the typical plus raw power and bat speed of long-term regulars at that position, but his contact skills and approach could cut a winding road to producing OBPs that can play there. At present, Fauske’s approach is patient but borders on being a shade passive. He’ll likely pile up walks in the low minors, but also run deep counts that could limit his chances at getting pitches to drive, while striking out a touch more often than his raw contact skills would suggest. The work needed to strike the right balance could put Fauske on a bit longer of a development path to his prime than the polished nature of his at-bats might suggest. A corner defender without standout power can become replacement level pretty easily, but Fauske torched the showcase circuit and earned good enough reviews from his draft year action in bridge league games to foresee some Jake Cronenworth-like offensive seasons.

The Barons won their second-straight Southern League title in 2025 after getting a season-long Whitey Herzog Cardinals cosplay on offense, with Antonacci regularly batting third behind fellow high-contact chaos merchants William Bergolla and Rikuu Nishida and frequently turning the basepaths into the I-405 at 5 pm on a Friday. They teach their hitters to absorb hit-by-pitches at Coastal Carolina, and Antonacci only needed a single season there to become a zealot after two years of torching Division II pitching. If you count his AFL numbers, the 22-year-old lefty swinger got plunked 39 times in his first full pro season and hit .304/.444/.429 in 135 games. That is some notable high-level performance, even if the raw ingredients seem less compelling.

Antonacci’s swing is unsurprisingly compact and wristy, using a small leg kick from a slightly open position just to load into his backside, as he’s more interested in freeing up his hands to manipulate the barrel around the zone than he is in creating separation. He’s compactly built without much projection to improve his below-average raw power, but he’s also the type of hitter to choke up on the bat even when he’s ahead in the count in a spot where a single scores a run. Antonacci is capable of some jailbreak sprints a shade under 4.2 seconds out of the left-handed batter’s box, but he stole 48 bags with largely average run times. Maintaining third base versatility is important for his profile, but Antonacci’s arm is stretched there and it shows up in the form of rushed actions, though his range is also below-average at the keystone.

His contact rates are good, but he’s a little too vulnerable to velocity up and away to project Antonacci to be a 90% or better in-zone contact specialist. He only chased around 20% at Birmingham, but he’ll need to maintain his Caleb Durbin-levels of plunking absorbance to live as an OBP-machine with limited defensive value, though the Sox are entertaining the notion of trying him out in left field. Antonacci already has a reputation for the kind of relentless motor that minor league skippers love, and he’ll need one if he’s going to transcend a bench role. Because of their OBP-centered production and a burning intensity that allows them to outstrip meager physical tools, Antonacci seems comparable to Chase Meidroth. That Meidroth graduated as a 45-FV prospect is a testament to him being a meaningfully superior defender, but ironically, they could wind up as platoon partners by mid-2026.

The stress fracture Batista suffered in his throwing elbow in April didn’t end his season, but for the purposes of this list, it might as well have. The 22-year-old Dominican righty was originally traded from the Dodgers mid-2023 for international pool space, and he showed the strike-throwing to ride his low-slot, mid-90s tailing sinker to a back-end starter projection in a breakout 110.2 innings across two A-ball levels in 2024. But after a strong spring that saw him flashing 94-95 with a potential plus slider, Batista only made one start back at High-A before missing four months of the 2025 season, returning in time for six uneven relief appearances before a single blow up start in LIDOM.

Batista is an impressive and lean on-field athlete who won an organizational award for his conditioning, lending optimism that he would hold the solid-average velo he’s flashed. But the scant looks of his limited work found him spraying his sinker, which was down a tick. In a delicate and unspoiled talent incubator of our ideal, the ingredients for a no. 4/5 starter are still present. In the harsh reality of pro baseball, Batista was an expected post-2025 40-man roster addition pre-injury and his Rule 5 eligibility will still loom over his 2026 season, a year in which he’s ticked for Double-A Birmingham and could shift to the bullpen to accelerate his big league readiness during his option years.

As the first selection of the third round this past July, Lodise was taken 16 picks after his cousin Alex was nabbed by the Braves. They both thrived at small colleges before finishing out in ACC ball, and both have now had underwhelming pro ball debuts at High-A, as Kyle slashed .185/.319/.370 in an aggressive assignment to Winston-Salem. The .188 BABIP in 28 games was probably the biggest factor, and Lodise has a simple operation that’s always held up fine against premium velocity. But his contact rates are a little underwhelming for a hit-tool-fronted profile, and after flashing the ability to pull and elevate offspeed mistakes for 16 homers as a junior, he swung over a noticeable number of backfoot breakers in pro ball. Lodise is undersized without much projection, which shows up most when he has to complete throws deep in the hole at short or work across his body. But when his arm isn’t rushing his actions (and sometimes even when it does), Lodise is a slick fielder with quick hands. His defensive skills should translate well to a utility role, where his bat currently profiles.

Adams was a $75,000 senior sign out of the 13th round of the 2022 draft who has morphed into a high-performing command and pitchability righty, putting himself on the map by running a 5.7% walk rate over 120.1 innings of 2.92 ERA ball across Double- and Triple-A in 2024. Swapping out his collegiate trunk tilt to keep his shoulders square to the plate, Adams works east-west across the zone, with his slider playing as the standout. But a back injury slowed his meteoric rise in 2024 before TJ wiped him out the following spring. Adams’ sinker sits in the low 90s, and his arsenal is likely to widen out to six or seven pitches as he tries to realize his fifth starter potential. He won’t have a chance to work toward that until midseason at the earliest, and will be Rule 5 eligible again this coming winter if he doesn’t crack the 40-man sooner.

Bush is a huge lefty (6-foot-6, 250 pounds) who has worked in the mid-90s in the past and has two vertical breaking balls that have both flashed plus. But between a lat strain-marred 2023 that saw him included in a panic deal to the White Sox as the Angels tried to mine the final months of Shohei Ohtani’s stay, a triceps strain that spoiled his 2024 big league debut, and him blowing out his elbow weeks before spring camp opened in 2025, Bush’s best stuff is looking more like his old stuff. At last sight, his fastball had regressed into the 90-94 mph range and was neither powerful nor precise enough to set up his breakers. There should be opportunities to crack into the White Sox rotation when he returns to action midseason, and Bush has multi-inning relief potential if that doesn’t work.

Carela was first acquired at the outset of the White Sox’s teardown, when they flipped Keynan Middleton to the Yankees at the 2023 trade deadline. Originally seen as a kitchen sink low-90s righty, Carela pitched well down the stretch at Double-A Birmingham in 2024, even touching 95-96 mph while starting the Barons’ Southern League championship clinching game. It was enough to earn the 24-year-old a surprising 40-man selection as potential starter depth, but he blew out the following spring and has since been released and re-signed on a minor league deal.

Carela is a lean and high-waisted athlete, but there’s some stiffness to his lower half, and he arguably commands his above-average slider better than his sinker. Reps are probably the key, as Carela throws it more often than anything else, showing some feel for varying its speed and shape. The approach gives him a reliever look and his platoon splits concur, and his TJ rehab keeping him out until midseason could be another nudge toward the ‘pen.

The son of a similarly slap-hitting Venezuelan middle infielder, Bergolla had a single professional home run to his name when the Phillies traded him to the White Sox for Tanner Banks at the 2024 trade deadline, and he evidently decided it was time to give up his power-hitting ways. Short and slight, spread out and almost always choking up, Bergolla posted the third-lowest swinging strike rate (3%) in minor league baseball in 2025 and also hit a ball to the wall on the fly twice in 551 plate appearances, slashing .286/.342/.333 overall.

Primarily manning shortstop while spending the full year at Double-A Birmingham, Bergolla doesn’t have the physicality to rely on stand-and-plant throws, but his quick hands and nifty footwork consistently get him moving downhill toward first, where he’s accurate from a variety of arm angles. A great defense probably puts Bergolla at second, but capability at short should be considered a firm part of his reserve utility, which is pretty much the only thing you can do with someone who has slugged .345 in pro ball.

Unlike other extreme-contact types, Bergolla maintains average chase rates, and his minor league production isn’t too different from Luis Arraez’s at a similar point; they posted pretty much identical hard-hit rates (sub-17%) and 90th-percentile exit velocities (sub-97 mph) at disparate levels of competition. Arraez the prospect mostly got projected as a bench player, though, and that’s certainly what Begolla looks like, albeit a slick-fielding one.

To the extent that a measurement can have sentience, exit velocity doesn’t believe Perez is a power hitter, but the fire hydrant-shaped Dominican infielder strives to turn his doubters into liars. He led the South Atlantic League with 22 home runs while playing the entire season as a 20-year-old, slashing .244/.315/.448 on the strength of his unabashed devotion to pulling and lifting the baseball. The Dodgers placed Perez on top of the plate just before including him in the three-teamer that brought Tommy Edman and Michael Kopech to Los Angeles, but there are limits to how much doing so can mitigate the issues with outside coverage that his swing path and approach bring. Perez’s dedication to maximizing his pop is such that he saves his biggest hacks for when he’s ahead in the count, and he has a well above-average two-strike contact rate, which has kept his K-rates in the low-20s throughout his career so far. While his speed and arm have their clear limits, Perez has slick hands and is capable of acrobatic finishes to plays, and a midseason move to second base saw him play a cleaner brand of defense. Perez lacks projection, he hasn’t faced a ton of high-level velo, and his contact rates have already started to slide under the big league average. But for a potential second and third base reserve, there’s an interesting amount of pull-side pop here. He’ll make sure of it.

It’s not quite fuel for Alanis Morissette to write a new verse, but Murray waited five long years to get that 40-man nod after the Rays drafted the UC-Davis star in the fourth round of the 2020 draft, and the day Tampa Bay added him was also the very same day he was flipped to the White Sox alongside Everson Pereira in a four-player deal that sent back Yoendrys Gómez and Steven Wilson. Murray won’t wow you with the elastic athleticism typical of the modern shortstop, but he has the hands and plant-and-fire arm strength to fill in there and man all three infield spots, and that, along with his three minor league options, will enable a lot of his future usage since his limited outfield reads have looked raw. Murray has surprised some draft day evaluations by growing into borderline plus raw power. He hit a career-high 18 homers for Durham in 2025 but lacks the lower half flexibility to easily cover the outer half, and he winds up forcing some early decisions and chasing excessively. It shakes out to below-average contact rates without the approach to actualize all the pop. Murray has been on a reserve infielder trajectory for a while now, but his .241/.299/.400 line at Triple-A makes it unclear if his new power-over-hit orientation is a more functional route.

Between COVID and a medical redshirt season, Franklin was a sixth-year senior at Missouri in 2023 with ugly surface numbers and an uglier delivery when the Sox took a $10,000 flier on him in the 10th round. But his short-armed, vertical riding mid-90s heater has always piled up whiffs, and while the right-hander is entering his 40-man platform year at age 27, it also comes on the heels of a season that saw him strike out 35.3% of hitters in 56.1 innings while finishing the year at the end of the Triple-A bullpen. The Sox have added a Garrett Crochet-esque leg kick to keep Franklin’s weight back in his delivery, which has had mixed success in allowing his arm to get on time (11.2% walk rate). Given his heater’s sub-70% in-zone contact rate, Franklin has been extremely fastball-heavy throughout his pro career, but most recently he has leaned on a mid-80s splitter as his primary secondary, which alternates gorgeous finishes and arm-side misfires.

Taking a macro, industry-trends perspective on his professional future, Davitt is a thinning polar bear on a rapidly shrinking ice floe, at least in terms of his work covering prep sports at the Indianola Independent Advocate, a local Iowa newspaper his parents own and operate. As far as his existence as a seven-pitch depth starter who covered 152 innings last season, things are looking up, as the White Sox added Davitt to the 40-man roster after acquiring him as part of a three-player return from the Rays for Adrian Houser at the deadline.

Davitt boasts a compact and controlled delivery that supports an attack that depends a lot on dotting a cutter after a hitter has spit on a slider, or trying to induce a chase on a sweeper after nicking the corner with a slider, and the like. He racked up a 5.40 ERA with an uncharacteristic 30 walks in 68.1 innings after a midseason bump to Triple-A; the spike in walks came as he ramped up his curveball use and pushed his slider to the backburner, swapping out the more reliably located breaker for the bigger bat-misser. If you look past the surface level stats, Davitt projects as a low-variance depth starter or multi-inning swingman.

The former MAC Pitcher of the Year started his 40-man platform season humming in 95-mph fastballs with cut-ride at Double-A Birmingham. He carved with a five-pitch mix, with a shorter slider being Schweitzer’s most reliably located secondary. Even if being Grant Taylor’s piggyback partner did his stuff few favors, it was still kinder than how the left-hander’s heater played when he got bumped up to the launching pad that is Triple-A Charlotte, this at the same time that his velo regressed to the 92-93 mph band. You don’t see splits this stark everyday. To wit, at Double-A: 49.2 IP, 32 H, 0 HR, 1.27 ERA. At Triple-A: 50 IP, 61 H, 13 HR, 7.92 ERA. Yikes.

Schweitzer leverages his plus arm speed to reliably be on time at foot strike and offers starter command of fringy stuff. He ended the year as a multi-inning reliever in Birmingham, dominating again, and that’s where his skill set projects if he can ever weather the horrors of Charlotte.

As a 21-year-old lefty-swinger who plays a smooth, if not stellar, center field, flashes borderline plus max exit velocities (111 mph), and hit .286/.396/.398 at High-A from June 1 on, Zavala can seem like he’s subject to an undue level of prospect fatigue. But he repeated the level, and while there’s clear evidence of his work to add strength and tamp down the Rube Goldberg elements of his leg kick and hand load, this is still a slender man exerting a lot of effort to swing hard and sacrificing barrel control through the zone to do so. Zavala still tracks spin exceptionally well and has tilted his approach to the right side of the line between patient and passive, even if he’s more likely to draw a walk than pounce on a pitch to drive. But his swing still possesses an exploitable hand loop that leads to lots of whiffs on fastballs above the belt, lending pessimism to how Zavala’s OBP-loaded form of offense will translate to the upper levels. Zavala is a smooth, assured route runner who plays a better center field than most A-ball burners, but his average speed makes it another ‘tweener element of a fourth outfielder’s skill set.

This report is from Eric Longenhagen’s overview of the 2026 international class: A well-built catcher with power, Graterol has work to do on defense and will need to rely on his pop to generate offense, as he strikes out quite a bit.

Larson’s 6-foot-2, 180-pound listing falls a little short of explaining the gangly pack of long levers he offers on the mound. The Iowa high schooler transferred to IMG Academy for his senior year, and even with a lengthy and unorthodox operation that features a Twilight baseball scene-sized leg kick, he threw enough strikes for the Sox to sign him away from a TCU commitment for nearly $1.4 million. He flashed a running 95-96 mph heater at times in 2024 with tons of projection left, and strength gains lowered his arm slot to give some real Chris Sale vibes to his sweeper shape and angle. Larson is a big supinator, and his feel for the location of a grip-and-rip changeup is quite raw, but it showed some potential with its vertical drop. Or at least it did well over a year ago now, as Larson blew out the January after his draft year and hasn’t pitched a professional game yet. There are compelling raw tools here to dream on mid-rotation potential, but Larson is obviously a long-term dev project.

Having never been 6-foot-8 nor touched 101 mph, it seems wrong for me to judge how many times Alberto fell on his face mid-follow through over the past year. Despite the “baby giraffe running for the first time” visuals that pop up every now and then, Alberto gained nearly two ticks on his heater and sat 98 mph through a career-high 48.2 innings, and improved feel for his mid-90s cutter helped him maintain a serviceable 10% walk rate while spending most of the year in High-A. At his height, everything Alberto throws has downhill plane even though he dips into his back leg enough to sometimes take a seat on the pitching rubber, and his high-80s slider has the two-plane break to rack up a 60% miss rate. It’s also rarely in the zone, and the White Sox taking Alberto with their second pick of the Rule 5 draft is a heat check in the wake of their recent success in that market. The 24-year-old has the stuff to become one of their leverage options, but he is probably just as or more likely to start the year in Double-A Montgomery after he’s failed to throw enough strikes to break camp with the team and has to be returned to the Rays.

Wolkow won’t turn 20 until January and already has well above-average left-handed raw power that could/should mature into true 80-grade juice. A tireless worker, Wolkow made meaningful, if still incremental, progress to drag his chase rate toward league average (31%) in 2025, and continued strength gains on his Aaron Judge-sized frame allowed him to load his hands closer to his body. The tighter turn radius made Wolkow’s swing more viable against inner-half velocity, and his 66.5% contact rate is both a nine-point leap from the previous year and puts him in line with a larger sliver of past extreme power-over-hit big leaguers who have been successful. He isn’t a reliable outfielder at this stage, but he flashes a plus arm and still moves well enough to moonlight in center in A-ball.

Those are the reasons to stay on him after an otherwise dispiriting 2025, a season in which Wolkow didn’t get to his power while repeating Low-A, slashed .223/.317/.362, and still whiffed nearly 30% of the time. He does not track spin well, racking up a 47% miss rate on breaking stuff with plenty of it coming in-zone, and he has lacked the barrel control to do much damage even on benders that stay thigh-high. Physical marvels with an elite tool and a great work ethic are worth waiting on as a matter of principle, but Wolkow entered the fray as a low-probability big leaguer who hasn’t yet shown signs of beating the odds.

High school catchers are generally all risky long-term development projects, and in that realm, Hodge is a slow-burn bet on athleticism. The SoCal native moves like he could man the infield or outfield because he did until transferring to Crespi Carmelite High School during his sophomore year, but he has a former catcher and Dodgers draft pick for a father and instructor. Hodge didn’t make a ton of contact in his early tours through the showcase circuit, but he installed a leg kick as a senior that’s helping him keep his weight back better. A bridge league look at him post-draft shows that Hodge has already added meaningful bulk to his 6-foot-1 listing, lending some hope to eventual average raw power, or a touch more. Hodge’s defensive acumen deserves greater confidence at this point, but this is a long-term play.

With all apologies to Bruce Bochy’s army brat origins, LaCombe is gunning to be the first French native big leaguer, even if his draft story is more straightforwardly a tale of the White Sox dropping $450,000 on an Arizona JUCO late-bloomer in the 2023 12th round. After a shoulder impingement and a lat strain made him a long-term resident of the team’s Arizona complex, LaCombe finally emerged in 2025 to shred Complex League kids until a choppy 17.2-inning cameo at Low-A Kannapolis (17.2 IP, 13 BB, 23 K) that had a relievery look to it.

The right-hander has some real stuff. His low-slot running two-seamer sat 94-97 mph and touched 98, his 2,600 rpm slider has big-time sweeping length to it, and he’s flashed a cutter that should probably get used more, especially given his strike-throwing issues. LaCombe has a stiff lower half and an uncommonly short stride, often setting him up to be unbalanced and late at foot-strike and leading to uncompetitive misfires. His splitter is metrically impressive if for no other reason than how much spin he’s able to kill on it, but it seems like a hard pitch to command from his arm slot and its early performance isn’t mounting much of a counterargument. Lacombe is already 23 and hasn’t faced age-appropriate competition since becoming a professional, but his injury history and non-traditional baseball background should lend him a fair amount of grace, especially with stuff that wouldn’t look out of place in the seventh inning of a big league game.

The White Sox fell in love with Iriarte’s video in 2023, when he was a whippy and hypermobile righty who had touched 100 mph with a plus slider, still held some potential to start and was likely Top 100 bound if he held his stuff through the following spring. He was part of a four-player return for Dylan Cease in March of 2024, but now that he’s filled out and seen his velo back up to 92-95 mph with more flat, tailing action compared to his old uphill angle, that 2023 video might as well be the picture on the front of the box containing Homer Simpson’s barbecue pit.

Iriarte’s changeup still offers a ton of arm-side fade, and it looks like his best pitch in the wake of a season that saw him rack up a 7.24 ERA and 16.7% walk rate at Triple-A, spend a month working on his mechanics at the team complex, and likely move to the bullpen for good. Both his slider and change have a lot of horizontal movement to harness if Iriarte re-emerges as a backwards-pitching, single-inning reliever, which looks like the last resort heading into his final option year.

Players like Mogo are worth the price of a ticket to a Low-A baseball game. The 20-year-old Venezuelan middle infielder has forearms like Popeye, but only his pompadour gets him above five-and-a-half feet tall. He plays hard and might swings even harder, producing present max exit velocities near the big league average and a 41% hard-hit rate despite his size. He’s not exactly projectible, it takes a lot of effort for him to produce plus bat speed, and his .220/.347/.387 line at Low-A with a 25% K-rate doesn’t exactly stand out. But he was a more extreme version of this player – and just as fun – on the complex, and his 68% contact rate actually represented a big step forward, with a more controlled version of the loading actions he was just learning back in 2024.

Between Tommy John surgery and the pandemic, Gowens didn’t pitch during his first two seasons at Illinois and entered pro ball as a 23-year-old. At the end of his draft year in 2023, the Braves included him as part of a five-player return for reliever Aaron Bummer. Two years later and Gowens is the only one of the five who is still in the Sox organization, and he’s struck out 296 hitters in 254 innings since joining, finishing out this past season with a 3.34 ERA in Double-A Birmingham. Gowens is 26 and his fastball only sits 92-94 mph, but he hides his arm action well behind his burly 6-foot-4, 225-pound frame, and has a smooth stride down the mound that generates above-average extension and a 31% miss rate for his heater. While he commands his high-80s downer slider well, none of his secondaries stand out. The lack of a changeup and related platoon issues offer an up/down reliever look, but Gowens’ consistency with pounding the top of the zone and maintaining his stuff shows multi-inning potential.

There are multitudinous cultural signifiers that it’s not 2019 anymore, but surely chief among them is the diminishing returns on Peoples’ intensely vertical four-seam/slider combination after a full-time conversion to relief (48.2 IP, 23% K%, 12.7% BB%). The whippy and fluid right-hander was part of a trio of players with pending roster decisions who the Rays flipped for Adrian Houser at the 2025 deadline, and despite ticking up into the 94-97 mph range with near 18 inches of induced vertical break and zero horizontal out of the Triple-A ‘pen, Peoples struggled after the trade and again went unprotected and unselected in the Rule 5 Draft. In 2025, he leaned more on a traditional bullet-spin slider that tunneled better with his heater to the tune of a 40% miss rate. But high-slot righties trying to bang the top rail of the strike zone don’t have the benefit of taking anyone by surprise, and Peoples’ loose athleticism will need to translate into greater precision – or a consistent changeup that opens up the bottom of the strike zone – for him to profile as more than an up/down reliever.

Mostly sidelined from pitching by TJ rehab, Davis hit .423/.491/.621 as a 24-year-old super senior at Sam Houston State in 2023. That wasn’t enough to get him drafted, but it did pique the interest of the Indy ball Oakland Ballers, who signed Davis as a two-way player for the following season. Not only did the Ballers quickly deduce that Davis’ hoppy mid-90s heater was his meal ticket, but he didn’t make it back from their first road trip in 2024 before the White Sox had signed him away. Now 27, Davis spent all of 2025 at Double-A Birmingham, where he used his heater, which has 19 inches of induced vertical break, to strike out 28% of opposing hitters. His stuff was a similar blend of lively and messy in the AFL, and his feel for his slider and changeup comes and goes. But this combination of big league caliber arm speed and a unique development path lends some latent up/down reliever potential to his profile.

Whatever wound the White Sox front office felt about Kyle Teel getting popped a pick before Gonzalez in the first round of the 2023 draft, they’ve obviously been able to mostly heal. Still, at the time, Gonzalez was selected as a safer, high-floored SEC performer at a premium spot who was willing to sign under slot, enabling a $1 million swing on the boom-or-bust George Wolkow six rounds later. But upon arrival in pro ball, Gonzalez’s college pull power production was immediately revealed to be enabled by selling out for the inner half of the plate, and a myriad of swing and setup tweaks to straighten out his direction – and subsequently build a new loading action – have yet to produce consistent results.

Still a lanky 6-foot-2 after a couple years in a pro strength program, Gonzalez is a graceful athlete but not an explosive one. He has below-average raw power, and a mid-season promotion to Triple-A Charlotte, one of minor league ball’s best launching pads, still saw him hit just two homers and post a sub-.100 ISO in 45 games. His strikeout rate spiked to 20% in the International League, and his avoidance of punchouts has typically oversold his raw contact ability because of how pesky he can be spreading out his stance with two strikes, allowing him to fight out almost anything but to little useful contact. He generally plays the middle infield with the sort of headiness and play clock that allows him to transcend a lack of typical shortstop range, but Gonzalez’s hands looked out of sync at times last season as the Sox shifted him toward more utility work. He profiles as an up-down sixth infielder at present.

Murphy was taken in the 14th round out of an Arizona JUCO about an hour’s drive from the White Sox spring training complex, but he missed most of his draft year while rehabbing from TJ. A stint in the MLB Draft League, where Murphy flashed good four-seam carry (18 inches of induced vertical break) and a big overhand curveball from a high-three-quarters slot, earned him a $125,000 bonus. He topped out at 92 mph in 2025 and sat a couple ticks below, and the mid-70s curve is the only thing missing bats. But after being used as an org arm in 2024, Murphy ended the year in Triple-A, walked just 25 hitters in 135.1 innings on the season, won Southern League pitcher of the month twice in a row, and posted a 1.66 ERA overall. The extreme control numbers are as much about approach – working behind in the count isn’t going to make his stuff any louder – as they are the ease of his operation. The White Sox left him unprotected in the Rule 5 draft and the league didn’t make them second-guess themselves, but Murphy has multi-inning up/down guy or emergency starter potential.

After throwing 33.1 innings in three years at Virginia Tech, Umberger went undrafted after a strong senior year at Toledo. Now 24 after his first pro season, the left-hander spent 102 of his 105.2 innings at Low-A Kannapolis running roughshod over less experienced hitters with plus command of a three-pitch mix, posting a 27% strikeout and 7.9% walk rate. There are some of the usual markers of an older pitcher outfoxing a rung of the pro ball ladder that has drifted toward rookie level since minor league contraction, but Umberger has filled out a 6-foot-4, 225-pound frame and substantially altered his torso posture since his VaTech days. He touched 97 mph after sitting in the 80s for parts of his college years, and after never showing much of a consistent breaking ball until late in his amateur run, he ran nearly a 40% miss rate with his slider. There’s depth starter, multi-inning relief potential here.

Pauley was a draft-eligible sophomore at Harvard who added two ticks to his fastball in 2025 (he’s sitting 93 now), but struggled with walks in his first year as a starter. His stuff has interesting characteristics; his fastball averages 19 inches of induced vertical break, and his slider spins at nearly 2,800 rpm. Pauley added a cutter after the draft and committed to its use. He threw it more than any of his other offerings and had strike-throwing success with it in a small post-draft sample. That pitch has tight, late movement in the 88-92 mph range, while Pauley’s slider is more 82-85 mph. It looked like he was experimenting with a splitter late, too. Though Pauley lacks any kind of starter-quality strike-throwing track record, his repertoire improved enough after the draft to justify development as a starter in his first full pro season and beyond. Included in the return for Luis Robert Jr. from the Mets, he’ll enter the White Sox list as a 35+ FV prospect, more an “arrow up” flier who has improved quite a bit in the last 12 months.

Jacobs is as big as a house at 6-foot-9 and sits 94-97 mph while touching 99 mph with 20 inches of induced vertical break. He releases the baseball from just under where the moon sits in the sky, giving him freaky downhill angle and allowing his cutter/slider and splitter to pile up huge miss rates. Including his end-of-season promotion to Double-A and his Arizona Fall League stint, Jacobs struck out 97 hitters in 63.2 innings. He also walked 50 dudes in that span, with an especially messy turn in the AFL. Jacobs is a big man with a very long arm action. The stuff is here for a short and volatile medium-leverage peak if he can make it to 35-grade command, but he has struggled to repeat his delivery in two years of pro ball.

This is another report from Eric’s overview of the 2026 international class: Romero is a projectable, lefty-hitting corner outfield prospect with advanced feel for contact and modest present physicality.