Chicago White Sox Top 40 Prospects

On the one hand, it’s incredible that Schultz has been able to dominate the mid-minors with one great pitch. On the other hand, it’s imperative that his other offerings get better if he’s going to hit his ceiling. Schultz is the Oneil Cruz of pitching, so to speak, an XXL prospect with a couple of premium characteristics, some of which play down in games. He has one of the best sliders in the minors, a 3,000 rpm, 82-85 mph bender from hell with 10-to-4 shape. Schultz should also theoretically be able to run his fastball up the ladder to garner whiffs because even though he’s built like an Andean Condor at a lanky 6-foot-10, his low arm slot gives him a release height of just five-and-a-half feet. But while Schultz’s fastball sits comfortably in the mid-90s (he was 94-97 in his start before list publication), it barely ever misses bats; his heater surrendered an 89% zone contact rate in 2024.

Schultz also works with a cutter and a changeup, both of which are still developing. He can pretty consistently locate each of them to his arm side, back-dooring the cutter when he needs a strike with something that isn’t his fastball, which portends growth. There were stretches during 2025 spring training when Schultz would work a whole inning or two without using his slider, as if developmental focus is being put on his other secondary pitches. Despite his fastball struggling to miss bats, Schultz ran a 2.24 ERA at High- and Double-A last year at age 20. He’s freaky and performing, and yet he might just be scratching the surface of his potential. If Schultz can improve the effectiveness of any of his non-slider pitches in 2025, he might be the top pitching prospect in baseball in a few months.

Teel, who raked in high school, opted out of the 2020 draft, raked in college, was picked in the middle of the 2023 first round, and has raked so far as a pro. He posted a 145 wRC+ at Double-A Portland in 2024, his first full pro season, and was promoted to Triple-A Worcester in mid-August. It seemed plausible that Teel might debut in Boston in 2025, in part because he has played so well and in part because incumbent catcher Connor Wong had struggled. Instead, Teel became the most well-rounded member of Chicago’s fairly crowded big league/Triple-A catching contingent when he was included in the Garrett Crochet deal.

Teel does not have the prototypical size and bulk of an everyday catcher; he’s a leaner athlete, and there are times when his lack of size and strength impacts his receiving and pitch framing at the bottom of the zone. But he does virtually everything else well on defense. He’s a really great ball-blocker in some respects (Teel has sensational hands when picking balls in the dirt), though he’s limited in others due to his relative lack of size. His arm strength is average, but he is very accurate even when awkward pitch locations force him to contort his body to throw.

On offense, Teel’s skill set has taken on more and more of a power-over-hit flavor. His hands load really deep, so deep that Teel has a pronounced arm bar and is a little bit stiff looking in the box right now. He takes a lot of high-effort cuts, and the path of his classic, low-ball lefty swing is geared for lift. Teel has struggled to cover fastballs up and away from him enough that his contact rates have fallen a bit below the major league average (even at catcher), but both his playable power and selectivity (which helps him hunt pitches he can drive) are still pretty exciting for a guy playing a premium position. Teel doesn’t technically have to be added to the 40-man roster until after the 2026 season, which interestingly gives the White Sox time to perhaps try him at a second position as a way of creating flexibility around their looming catcher logjam. But Teel is already at Triple-A and is tracking to debut well before his chalk 2027 timeline. He’s more likely a mid-2026 debut candidate and should, along with Edgar Quero, be a meaningful part of Chicago’s offensive future as a combination of catcher and DH.

Smith spent his underclass seasons bouncing back and forth between Arkansas’ bullpen and rotation, working just over 70 innings each year. Entering the spring of 2024, he had more of a relief look, like a Brooks Raley 레일리 type, but Smith had an incredible season. He struck out damn near two batters per inning (161 K, 84 IP) and posted a .893 WHIP across 16 starts. Smith improved as a strike-thrower in 2024 even as his velocity climbed. He averaged 95-96 mph, both pre- and post-draft, and touched 100. The rise/run combo of his fastball helps get big swing-and-miss results, and Smith’s arm stroke (which is both very quick and very low) appears deceptive and makes hitters uncomfortable. It looks like the delivery of a shorter-levered Madison Bumgarner.

Smith’s control has backed up this spring. He scatters his heaters in the general direction of where its movement plays best, but it’s often too far from the zone to entice hitters. As of list publication, Smith has 13 walks in nine innings combined between Cactus League play and his first two starts at Double-A Birmingham, and in his most recent outing, he failed to get out of the first inning. Let us emphasize: These issues are not as severe for Smith as they were initially for Royals lefty Asa Lacy, the fourth overall pick in the 2020 draft. But in a similar vein, Smith had one good strike-throwing season in college after two not so good ones, and in Lacy’s case, the good (shortened) season proved to be an aberration. There’s a chance something similar has happened here, though we don’t think it’ll be such a severe and persistent problem that Smith’s prospectdom keels off entirely (clearly, he’s still 50’d here). Smith’s stuff is too good. His huge sweeping slider, which he commands more consistently than his fastball, has stretches where it’s untouchable. It doesn’t tip its break until very late in flight, and once it starts to move, it moves a ton, sometimes all the way from the arm-side edge of the plate to the dirt in the opposite batter’s box.

Those two pitches were enough for Smith to carve up SEC hitters, but he’ll probably need a third to truly hit his pro ceiling. Right now, he has a changeup that he can control the location of, but it doesn’t have great movement. Smith’s arm stroke is quick and he has feel for location, so his changeup projection is quite good, but he hasn’t been able to work into counts where he can deploy it. He could also take a route similar to Bumgarner and mix in a cutter, which he’d need to develop from scratch. He has mid-rotation upside with relief risk if it turns out his 2024 control was an anomaly rather than a true skill progression.

Part of the 2023 Lucas Giolito trade with the Angels, Quero is a switch-hitting bat-first catcher who has had success as a young-for-the-level hitter at each minor league stop, including Triple-A at the end of 2024 and the start of 2025. He lacks a plus tool, but he’s a well-rounded hitter and a viable up-the-middle defender. It’s particularly difficult to sneak one by Quero when he’s hitting righty, as his swing is short and flat, which helps him make plus rates of contact from that side of the plate. He has more power as a lefty and is adept at dropping the bat head to make low-ball contact.

Quero’s defense is less mature, and his unexceptional athleticism is evident in this part of his game, which is currently below-average (but not awful) across the board. He has below-average pure arm strength, but has posted a 25% CS% rate (basically average) the last couple of seasons thanks to his accuracy. Keep in mind that while Quero has been around for a bit and has been a fringy defender for much of that time, he’s been pushed through the minors aggressively and has been catching upper-level arms at age 20 and 21 the last couple of seasons. Team analysts think Quero is a better framer than he appears to the eye, especially when it comes to low pitches.

The presence of Kyle Teel and Korey Lee in the org clouds Quero’s future somewhat because he is the worst defender of that group and therefore the one most likely to move off the position. It’s possible Lee won’t hit enough for this to matter, and that a year or two from now Quero and Teel will be one of the more potent young catching tandems in the league. The White Sox still have at least a year for this stuff to sort itself out before they have to make actual roster decisions related to this potential logjam. Off to a good start at Triple-A Charlotte, Quero was called up the day before list publication. Though he probably won’t be a star, Quero is a well-rounded young hitter who should do enough to be in the lineup every day, even if half the time he’s a first baseman or DH.

Montgomery was the 12th pick in the 2024 draft and probably would have gone higher if he hadn’t fractured his right ankle sliding into home during the 2024 collegiate postseason. Selected by the Red Sox, he was traded to the Pale Hose as part of the Garrett Crochet swap. Montgomery comes from a family with multiple Division-I athletes and was among the most prominent of the 2021 high schoolers to go to college rather than sign. He spent two seasons at Stanford, where he played both ways and showed meaningful bat-to-ball improvement as a sophomore after a strikeout-prone freshman year. He transferred to Texas A&M for his draft year and was the most talented player on the College World Series runner-up squad. Montgomery slashed .317/.428/.646 throughout his entire college career, with a 20% K% as a junior.

A super physical 6-foot-2 switch-hitter, Montgomery has monster bat speed from both sides of the dish. The way his hips explode as his swing ignites and his barrel finishes in the dirt behind him are explosive characteristics that generate power to all fields. Montgomery has improving feel for altering his body’s posture during his swing in order to clear out the top of the zone with dangerous loft, something that he only seemed to develop during his time at A&M. It has made him incredibly dangerous against pitches all over the zone, though he is still swinging and missing a lot. Montgomery is vulnerable to changeups as a lefty, and to up-and-away fastballs and back-foot breakers as a righty, but he might yet improve as a contact guy. Remember this is a switch-hitter who was also a two-way player until 2023; there are reasons to project late growth for his feel for contact. Above-average plate discipline and a swing geared to get to his power will help Montgomery overcome elevated strikeout totals if they persist.

Whether he’ll also be a center field fit, which would create even greater margin for error on offense, is less certain. He’s running well coming off his injury and the White Sox are rotating Montgomery around all three outfield positions, but he lacks great feel for playing defense in general and is probably a long shot to stay in center. Montgomery might, however, be a weapon in right field because of his ridiculous arm. He was touching 97 mph as a freshman reliever and was hosing college baserunners from the warning track. Coming off his injury, his tools are intact, and switch-hitters with this kind of power are rare. Montgomery has some late-bloomer characteristics because he’s only focused on hitting for a little while, and he seems like disciplined and motivated young guy. He has All-Star ceiling even as a corner outfielder.

Readers might recall that the fall prior to their draft year, it was Taylor who was slated to be LSU’s Friday night guy the following spring, while Paul Skenes, fresh from the transfer portal, was the team’s presumptive number two. A draft-eligible sophomore, Taylor blew out and needed Tommy John right before the start of the 2023 collegiate season and, as a result of his injury and a meager statistical track record that included just one walk-prone season, he fell to the second round of that year’s draft.

Taylor was only able to squeeze in 19.1 innings during the 2024 regular season once he was finished rehabbing, and came to the Arizona Fall League to pick up reps. At times he looked great there, flashing four average or better pitches, including a plus-flashing changeup that wasn’t part of Taylor’s college repertoire at all. Taylor sat 96-98 mph range early in outings and 94-98 overall. He was touching 101 at times during 2025 big league spring training, but on the backfields and in his first couple of 2025 minor league starts at Double-A Birmingham, he’s been back in the 96-98 mph range for the bulk of his outings.

Taylor’s fastball has vertical shape and plus ride, which pairs nicely with the shape of a 83-ish mph curveball that has plus depth and bite. Taylor’s 84-92 mph slider (on the harder side when he’s going one inning at a time) and 87-89 mph changeup could be his two nastiest secondary pitches at peak, the slider because of its rare velocity and the changeup because of its late, surprising vertical drop. Breaking ball consistency will be key for Taylor moving forward. His slider’s finish is inconsistent, but when it’s right, it’s plus. His changeup is going to give him a weapon to neutralize lefties that’s better than his curveball; the bottom falls out of it just as it reaches the plate, but again, it’s a brand new piece of Taylor’s repertoire. Taylor’s profile is fairly risky even though he’s at Double-A because we don’t know whether he’ll be able to sustain plus velocity across a true starter’s innings workload yet. But he has the makings of at least three or four plus pitches and the ceiling of mid-rotation starter.

Smith had Tommy John surgery during his draft year and signed with Milwaukee as an undrafted free agent in 2021. Back from rehab in the fall of 2022, he was 93-95 mph with a good curveball and spotty control. His velocity took a leap in 2023, as he was sitting 94-97 at the end of the season, and he carried that velocity into the start of 2024 before the Brewers moved him from the bullpen into Double-A Biloxi’s rotation. That’s when Smith’s fastball dipped backed into the 93-95 mph range, and even when Milwaukee returned the 24-year-old to the bullpen at the end of the year, it still hung there. None of Smith’s breaking pitches generated above-average miss or chase in 2024, and the Brewers neglected to roster him after the season; the White Sox made him the first pick in the 2024 Rule 5 Draft, and it seemed likely Smith would make their roster in a relief capacity. Instead, Chicago onboarded an awesome changeup into Smith’s repertoire, he touched 100 during spring training (though his velo is trending down), and he made Chicago’s roster as a starter.

The changeup is a real pitch. It has huge tailing action and fade, enough movement to freeze hitters even when Smith doesn’t locate it well. His slider/cutter (87-91 mph) and curveball (79-84 mph) are pleasing to the eye and have radically different shapes and velocities, but they haven’t generated the kind of miss one might assume based on their look. Smith’s inability to locate his slider just off the plate likely plays a role in this. He can land his curveball in the zone against lefties, but he doesn’t command his slider precisely enough for it to play as an effective chase pitch. This is part of why he has been projected as a reliever during his lifetime as a prospect. Smith’s changeup is a profile-changer; he has a starter’s repertoire now, and we considered slotting him next to Brewers starter Logan Henderson (another changeup monster) on the Top 100. When Smith’s fastball has averaged 94 in the past, it has played like an above-average pitch against minor league hitters. Now that it seems headed that way again (it averaged 94 in Smith’s final start before list publication), we’re less inclined to windmill slam him into that FV tier (Henderson’s fastball plays much better), but the Sox improved a player who the Brewers (who are good at dev) seemingly felt they couldn’t, which is a great sign. Smith should be part of the next good White Sox team in a no. 4/5 starter capacity.

The 23-year-old Meidroth is a fascinating player who generates wildly divergent opinions from scouts, with some considering him a potential star and others writing him up as a light-hitting utility infielder or a low-end regular, which is how he’s evaluated here. Meidroth has more pro walks than strikeouts and was a .285/.425/.414 career hitter in the minors at the time of his big league call-up a few days ago. He slashed .293/.437/.400 at Triple-A Worcester in 2024 before he was traded to Chicago as part of the Garrett Crochet deal during the offseason.

His granular contact data is absurd. The sun-soaked, dirty blonde Meidroth, who looks a bit like if Cary Elwes’ character in The Princess Bride just got home from his first semester in a frat, posted a 92% in-zone contact rate and 3.2% swinging strike rate in 2024, and has had among the best bat-to-ball metrics in pro baseball since he signed out of the University of San Diego. At a barrel-chested 5-foot-10, he is able to keep his fairly elaborate swing on time enough to spray a ton of contact toward the opposite field, much of it on the ground. Meidroth has posted groundball rates near 50% since reaching the upper levels of the minors, a big enough issue that, for reasons related to his contact quality, it detracts from his projected hit tool as well as his power. Meidroth will tomahawk the occasional high pitch with extra base power, but most of his contact is of the low-lying variety, with lots of oppo pokes and slaps. It’s a lot of fun to watch, but it’s of limited impact.

Meidroth has developed quite a bit as a defensive player in pro ball. He struggled to make accurate throws from second base in college, and it wasn’t clear that he’d be able to stay on the dirt at all. Now he looks like an interim fit at short. He has improved as an infielder and gotten reps at shortstop and third base in addition to his native second. Meidroth still produces the occasional errant throw, but his actions and range are both fine for short for now, and he plays with great effort and motor. He isn’t ideal there because of his occasional inaccuracy, and we don’t think his body and athleticism will trend well at that spot, but it’s okay for now. Jamey Carroll and Wilmer Flores have come up during discussions as comps for what Meidroth’s career will look like.

Montgomery is in free fall. Part of why it seems like such an incredible nosedive is because the prospect-writing world, including one half of this article’s byline, was too quick to notarize Montgomery’s small sample performance in 2023, which, it turns out, was faulty. That year, in a sample limited by injuries, Montgomery slashed .287/.455/.484 in 64 games at mostly Double-A Birmingham. His more granular TrackMan-generated data was as impressive as his surface-level line, if not more so. Some of that included an 85% zone contact rate, 105 mph EV90, and .408 xwOBA. That was generated across a 294 PA sample, which is theoretically large enough for this kind of data to normalize. But every year there are prospects whose data (Adael Amador was that year, too) looks way nuttier than their actual talent because injuries limit the sample, and because part of that sample occurred in a rehab environment where they faced players beneath their skill level. And while Montgomery definitely looks worse right now than he ever has, and is striking out in just shy of 50% of his plate appearances as of list publication, the fact that he appears likely to fall short of his 34th overall ranking from 2023 is at least partially, if not mostly, because he was simply over-evaluated that year.

Montgomery’s swing has always had a pretty big hole at the top of the zone, and that’s being exploited more than it was when he was in the mid-minors. But he’s also had trouble making consistent, flush contact, and he’s never had great-to-the-eye feel for the barrel. His cut is geared for lift in the extreme; when he runs into one, he launches it with epic pull-side power. But he isn’t moving the bat around the zone with skill, or tracking the baseball especially well. His 2024 contact rate (72%) is below the big league average, but not awful, and is more palatable when you consider his age. There have been successful big league shortstops with contact rates that low across the last decade plus, and if we leave room for him to improve as he ages, it’s reasonable to think that he can hold that mark, get to power when he’s able to make contact, and still be a productive player. The thing that’s different about the start of 2025 is how unglued he’s become against secondary pitches, which he’s missing in some cases (like changeups) more than twice as often as he did last year. As patient as the White Sox can afford to be (Montgomery still has all three option years remaining), this feels like a volatile situation.

Montgomery’s shortstop fit is also somewhat precarious. He has the arm for it, and his grace and body control help him make some plays that other slow-twitch infielders with this kind of size probably wouldn’t be able to make. But he’s also a really big young fella who is fairly slow of foot, and it wouldn’t shock us if he had to just play third base at some point. If this early 2025 swoon takes a while to dig out of, there’s a growing possibility that the third base relegation will occur before Montgomery’s bat has rebounded to the point of being big league-ready. We’re not talking about a teenage prodigy adjusting to an upper level, this is a 23-year-old playing age-appropriate baseball now, and he needs to start performing pretty soon to remain in this low-end regular FV tier.

Ramos has a few well-defined warts, but he does some things really, really well, and he’s still young enough that some of his issues might be remedied by mechanical tweaks over time. For starters, Ramos is a Gold Glove-caliber defender at the hot corner. He’s an astounding low-to-the-ground athlete whose powerful legs facilitate spectacular feats on defense. He has elite range and is capable of making strong throws from all kinds of awkward body positions. The White Sox have tried Ramos some at second base, but we think the ceiling on his third base defense is big enough that they should just let him play there and be a human highlight reel.

Ramos has one specific offensive flaw that will require adjustment to remedy, if that’s even possible. His hands load late (there’s a little wrap, and he’s still separating while the pitch is in flight), and he is too long back into the zone to compete with fastballs around his hands. He missed fastballs at a 33% clip last year (the big league average is 22%) and is going to have them ripped right past him in The Show unless he makes some kind of tweak, even if that just means targeting breaking stuff early in counts. When Ramos can sink his teeth into a down-and-in pitch, he’s incredibly dangerous, and he’ll hit some epic pull-side homers against sliders that don’t quite finish. His statistical performance against Triple-A arms last year was close to average in terms of his contact and hard-hit rate, but we’re anticipating a dip against big league arms. Ramos also struggles to stay healthy. Groin, quad, and most recently an elbow sprain (he was activated just before list publication) have kept him out for parts of the last three seasons. Here Ramos is projected as a second-division regular despite uneven offense because of his amazing defensive skill.

Even rarer than an Opening Day starting only having 19 big league innings to his name is an Opening Day starter with a career 5.05 minor league ERA, and yet there Burke was on March 27, taking the mound. Burke’s injury history greased his slide to the third round of the 2021 draft, and the bulk of his professional innings have involved him putting together a lot of bad tape while in the throes of and/or working his way back from bouts of shoulder soreness. But after about 18 months of floating under the prospect radar, Burke managed to time up the best pitching of his life to date with a late-season September 2024 call-up.

Standing 6-foot-6 with tree trunk legs he built up during Tommy John rehab at Maryland, Burke looks like the archetypal right-handed power arm and is back to working in the mid-90s with the occasional 98 or 99 during this stretch of good health. Coming on a downhill plane from his high-three-quarters slot, his fastball plays below its plus vert and velocity. But the angle adds an extra sharpness to his slider and curve, and while he prefers the former, the latter drops like it rolled off the edge of the Earth. A pure supinator since TJ, the White Sox have worked to give Burke a seam-effects changeup and a sinker to address his lack of arm-side capability; his feel for both is in the fledgling stage.

The track record for starter-level command and durability is very checkered here, and the White Sox are currently granting Burke a long window to reverse both. He’s transitioning toward a spin-heavy attack with sub-40% fastball usage, and we think it’s likelier we’ll see him land that plane as a multi-inning relief weapon.

Man, what a curveball. Clipping 80 mph at 3,100 rpm from a steep angle and with plus drop, the curve is one of several big tools in McDougal’s bag that hint at big league impact even while he struggles to be an effective A-ball starter. McDougal touched 100 mph multiple times in front of James last August, exactly the sort of velocity growth the White Sox hoped for when they gave the Vegas high schooler third round money in the 2021 draft, but it plays down because its plane is, well… downward.

There’s a crossfire element to McDougal’s delivery that leads to considerable trunk tilt, which both drags his release point upward and leads to the glove-side misses that have defined his control problems and resulted in a 14% career walk rate as a pro. That delivery also serves to explain why his high-80s gyro slider currently gets more chase than his gorgeous curve. Demoted back to Low-A midway through last year, McDougal’s control issues are such that he barely gets to use his changeup, which he has solid feel for, and his delivery lacks the athleticism to foresee a big command jump. But there’s just too much arm speed and spin talent here to not be intrigued and excited about McDougal’s relief future, even if that’s the outcome. Depending on how quickly that transition occurs, it could mean a 2026 ETA for the right-hander. Otherwise, McDougal is a longer-term development project.

Bonemer was ranked 81st on the 2024 draft board but signed for late first round money ($3 million) as Chicago’s second rounder in order to eschew a Virginia commitment. He posted wildy variable performance on the showcase circuit, red hot at some events and cold at others. At best, Bonemer’s pull power was among the best and most consistent among the high school hitters in last year’s draft, but Eric had low confidence that he’d hit enough to get to it in games. Bonemer is able to generate pop in a short mechanical distance, but his barrel isn’t in the hitting zone for very long. He’s best getting extended on pitches on the outer edge, but he struggles with stuff bending in toward him. Bonemer is a “maybe” at shortstop. He’s a little stiff and is a below-average runner, but he often finds a way to make the play. He’s worth developing there, as sometimes cold weather prospects loosen up and improve as they play high-level baseball every day. For now, we have Bonemer projected as a third baseman with hit tool risk.

After the 2023 big league trade deadline, Batista was traded from the Dodgers to the Sox, along with Maximo Martinez, in exchange for international pool space that the Dodgers used to sign Korean righty Hyun-Seok Jang. While Martinez has been injured for much of the time since then, Batista has emerged as a potential near-term rotation candidate, though just before list publication he was put on the IL with an elbow strain.

Batista has had A-ball success as a starter and carried a 2.93 ERA across 110.2 innings in 2024, with a 25.5% K% and 8.6% BB% combined across both A levels. This spring, he came out humming 94-95 mph fastballs with nasty sink and tail, along with a firm upper-80s changeup and an average mid-80s slider. Batista commands his pitches with precocious regularity and checks a lot of visual scouting boxes as an athlete, both in terms of his size and ease of movement. He’s broad-shouldered and mechanically loose, generating over six-and-a-half feet of extension while working from a near sidearm slot. He appeared tee’d up to be a post-2025 40-man add and debut at some point in 2026 en route to a no. 4/5 starter role on the next good Sox team, but this elbow injury clouds his timeline at least a little bit.

Any hitting dev program worth its salt would covet a shot at Wolkow, a 6-foot-7 block of granite who posted 108.8 mph 90th-percentile exit velocities in his age-18 season and looks well on his way to developing true 80-grade power. It’s no small feat that he was a productive hitter — a .241/.342/.428 line and 126 wRC+, but a .406 BABIP — at Low-A last season despite being one of just four 18-year-olds who took over 300 PA in the Carolina League in 2024. But even with allowances for his extreme youth, Wolkow’s early professional contact rates already look disqualifying. Joey Gallo in 2017 was the last qualified big league regular who posted a sub-60% contact rate in a full season, and that was still a tick above the 57.4% Wolkow managed at Kannapolis. This spring, Wolkow has lowered his hands closer to where he fires, but much of the length in his swing is organic from his long levers. There’s still chase in his game to shave down with reps, but Wolkow’s barrel accuracy has been too poor to perform against spin even in the strike zone, on top of the anticipated and pronounced difficulties he’s had against elevated inner-half velocity.

It’s difficult to think of similarly sized full-time outfield defenders without invoking Aaron Judge, which is an issue that also crops up when trying to discuss Wolkow’s ceiling if his hit tool were to become workable. Wolkow won an organizational award for his conditioning and is capable of ripping off some 50-grade run times, but his throwing accuracy and feel for tracking fly balls are both too age appropriately-nascent to be overly confident about him sticking in right field as he continues to grow into an outlier power-hitting frame.

Every system should have a good raw power bet or two, and there’s a real Adventures of Young Paul Bunyan vibe to Wolkow’s highlights. But this is still a low-probability big leaguer with a top-of-the-scale tool.

Schweitzer was in the bullpen for his first two years of college but made a successful transition to the rotation as a junior, and he’s continued to pitch well in that role for two pro seasons. His innings have increased each year to the point where he worked 132 frames of 4.02 ERA ball (his FIP and xFIP were a half run lower) in 2024, most of that at Double-A Birmingham. At the start of 2025, Schweitzer is enjoying a velo bump, with his fastball sitting closer to 95 mph as he and Grant Taylor piggyback in Birmingham.

Schweitzer has some of the best arm speed in the entire org. He’s a lanky and whippy athlete who hides the ball well and creates deception with effort. It’s similar to Alex Vesia’s delivery, but Schweitzer has starter-quality command and four pitches. The best of them is indeed his fastball, and Schweitzer’s secondary stuff is pretty average, though it’s playing better than that early on in 2025, perhaps as a positive side effect of his added fastball velocity. Schweitzer’s changeup and slider tend to finish on the plate, while his curveball drops below the zone and more often stays out of trouble. He has the look of a low-variance backend starter depending on whether his early-season velo spike actually sticks and has knock-on effects for the rest of his repertoire.

Iriarte’s velocity seemingly peaked in 2023, when he was sitting 94-97 and touching 100. He hasn’t sniffed that for a while now, with his fastball velocity steadily slipping into the low-90s for the better part of the last year. His heater is averaging 93 mph in the early going of 2025, and its tailing movement makes it vulnerable to contact. As Iriarte has filled out, he has lost some of the whip and athletic explosion he showed while he was with San Diego. At peak, when he was the age of a college pitcher and was ripping upper-90s heat past Double-A hitters, Iriarte was a pretty comfortable Top 100 prospect. Now he looks more like a backend starter without a plus pitch. Iriarte’s 83 mph slider generated an average miss rate in 2024. His changeup might end up being his best pitch. Iriarte’s delivery is still pretty loose, and he has feel for both creating action on his cambio and for locating it. Barring an unexpected rebound in his arm strength, this is the stuff of a fifth starter.

Bergolla, whose father played pro ball for over a decade, was among the more advanced players in the 2022 international signing class. He was almost impossible to strike out during his DSL debut (3.6% K%!), and the Phillies skipped him over the domestic complex level the following year and sent him right to Low-A, where he walked nearly twice as often as he struck out but still slugged just .286 due to a lack of physicality. The following year, Bergolla was traded to the White Sox for lefty Tanner Banks, and he slashed an impressive .300/.359/.381 combined between the two orgs’ High-A affiliate. He’s off to a similar start at Double-A Birmingham in 2025.

Bergolla epitomizes “pesky.” He’s a smaller player with one career home run, but his compact build and minimalistic swing allow him to put a ton of balls in play. He peppers shallow left field with remarkable consistency and rarely turns on anything. This is a player with plus contact skills but a very limited offensive ceiling, and so Bergolla is likely to be a utilityman in the Cesar Izturis mold. He’s a fine shortstop defender and versatile infielder who is tracking for a post-2026 40-man add and a 2027 or 2028 debut.

Perez came to Chicago as part of the Tommy Edman/Michael Kopech multi-team swap and is a .262/.375/.452 career hitter in the minors as of list publication. Analyst types who like dead pull hitters tend to be the highest on Perez, whose swing is geared to do as much pulling as possible. He starts with a closed stance and opens his hips to pull middle-middle mistakes. Perez has a pronounced “power tip” — essentially, a bat wrap that creates big loft because of the loop his hands are forced to take to the baseball as a result of the tip. His bat speed is only fair, and Perez is a medium-framed guy with below-average pop. We’re skeptical he will continue to make contact at a slightly above-average rate with this swing as he faces better velocity; he’s seen a lot of upper-80s heaters to this point. Still, even with slightly below-average hit and power projection, there’s enough offense here for Perez to play a part-time 2B/3B role.

Albertus was part of the Tommy Edman/Erick Fedde 페디/Tommy Pham multi-team swap at the 2024 deadline, heading from the Dodgers to the White Sox. As of list publication, he has yet to play a game in a White Sox affiliate’s uniform because he was revealed to be dealing with a stress fracture in his left tibia just before the trade. It was hoped rest and rehab would remedy this, but Albertus needed surgery during the offseason and began 2025 on the IL.

Albertus tends to be a favorite of analysts more than scouts because his on-paper contact rates and control of the strike zone are his most impressive attributes, but that’s not to say he lacks old school scouting juice altogether. Albertus makes athletic use of his lower half in the box and has a top-hand-driven swing, both of which are characteristics of a good young hitter. He is also adept at moving the bat all over the zone. It’s just that Albertus is of medium build and has to swing super, duper hard to generate even below-average power, and this style of hitting may not be sustainable. If it is, Albertus will be a good utility guy. He has experience all over the infield, including shortstop, but his best long-term fit is probably third base, where he’s quite skilled. When Albertus returns, he’ll likely head to Kannapolis.

Adams spent two seasons at Florida Southwestern (formerly Edison State) in Fort Myers before transferring to Jacksonville for two more seasons. In pro ball, his arm slot has come down some, creating more lateral action on Adams’ stuff. He pitched well in the upper levels of the minors in 2023 and 2024, capped by a 120.1-inning, 2.92 ERA performance combined between Birmingham and Charlotte last season. Adams’ low-90s heater has heavy sink that helped him generate a 55% groundball rate in 2024. He tends to work east and west with his sinker and a mid-80s two-planed slider that is roughly average in raw quality and has played a shade better than that thanks to Adams’ command. He can vary his breaking ball shape into a similarly speedy curveball, and while Adams’ changeup (which was his best bat-misser in college) has a little less sink now than it had at peak, it might bounce back as he gets feel for this new-ish delivery. His walk rate has hovered in the 6% area his last two healthy seasons. Adams has a very stable fifth starter skill set and could probably have debuted in 2025 had he not needed Tommy John in early April.

Dealt to the White Sox as part of the Lucas Giolito trade with the Angels, Bush had Tommy John before the 2025 season and will miss the entire year. There have been times during his prospect past when he’s looked like a potential impact starter, sitting 94-97 at peak and bending in two good breaking balls. More recently, Bush has had issues throwing strikes and his heater was in the 91-94 mph range throughout 2024. His breaking balls both have mostly vertical shape but very different velocities, with nearly 10 mph separating them on average. His best changeups have a combination of sink and tail, but often they only feature the latter. It’s a backend starter’s mix as it’s currently constituted. How much of Bush’s dip in stuff and command in 2024 was due to looming issues with his UCL? If one of those things rebounds as he comes out of TJ rehab, he’ll still be a solid member of a pitching staff in some capacity — in relief if the velo rebounds, as a starter if the command does. And there’s an outside shot that both of them do, in which case Bush would be more of a 45.

González posted a 1.84 ERA over his final 12 outings last season, which was enough for him to go from having one of the Red Sox system’s most disappointing and walk-addled campaigns to being sent to the White Sox as the fourth piece in the Garrett Crochet trade on the basis that he might still start. Despite still being just 23 with a surfeit of bat-missing options, González will begin his second option year back at Double-A, his third at that level. That assignment might have something to do with the fact that even that 12-outing run, which only covered 44 innings, saw the Venezuelan right-hander running a double-digit walk rate.

The athleticism that is supposed to eventually translate to starter-level command is evident in González’s delivery, and he lifts his lead leg so high that surely he’s grazed his own chin with his knee at some point. Despite that, his stride is still quicker than his arm stroke, and it isn’t rare to see his arm late to the firing position before a glove-side miss. There’s some trunk tilt evident here and the White Sox have a notion that a less over-the-top González will more repeatedly throw strikes, with his first start at Double-A Birmingham showed some seeds of that work. Still, scouts who saw González this spring didn’t see enough yet to move off a middle relief projection, and his time is already limited.

Oppor (pronounced as if you’re about to say “opportunity”) has among the best combinations of stuff, build, and athleticism in this system, but he lacks release consistency. He’s a well-composed 6-foot-2, will bring it at 95-96 early in starts, and flashes a plus-plus frisbee slider from a very low lefty slot. Oppor also hides the ball well, which helps him obscure his changeup. Because he struggles to command his fastball, Oppor will often pitch backwards off either of his secondaries and then elevate his fastball for whiffs. He was walk-prone in under 40 complex innings in 2024 and is off to a similar start in 2025, but Oppor is very talented and is built and moves like a lot of good big league arms. His repertoire depth is promising enough to put him in the multi-inning relief area if it turns out his control develops short of starter-quality.

Gonzalez has been a tough eval since college because he presents a non-traditional scouting look both on offense and defense, but he’s tended to perform in a relevant way or two. He was a superlative SEC performer at Ole Miss and a young-for-his-draft prospect, but Gonzalez had a concerning hole against fastballs up and away from him, and that has persisted in pro ball. It hasn’t manifested in strikeouts, in fact quite the contrary, as he has maintained strikeout rates in the mid-teens throughout his career. It has, however, limited his contact quality, and Gonzalez hit .238/.307/.343 in 2024 because he doesn’t hit the baseball all that hard. His underlying stats indicate his true talent as a hitter is a bit better than that line, even though he indeed has below-average power and might eventually have more severe issues against elevated fastballs.

Gonzalez is a mixed bag at shortstop. He has below-average range but is otherwise a fit at short. So far in 2025, he has played more second base at Double-A Birmingham in deference to William Bergolla, who is a more technically sound. Shortstop viability and defensive versatility are going to be important for Gonzalez, who likely won’t have an everyday player’s power. He has the skills of a roster’s sixth infielder.

As is often the case when a renowned prospect loses a battle with The Mendoza Line in the South Atlantic League, Zavala had a weird offensive year in 2024. High-A pitching revealed a disqualifying amount of swing-and-miss on velocity above the belt, but his extreme patience allowed the Venezuelan outfielder to post his lowest strikeout rate (22.3%) since coming stateside. There’s a blurry border between patience and passivity, and Zavala’s Juan Soto-level swing rate feels a couple steps beyond it; it’s hard to imagine his walk rates (17.8%) persisting in leagues where good four-seam command will be more plentiful. Zavala won’t turn 21 until mid-July, so it’s still early enough for some meaningful transformation even though his slight build has already produced 111 mph max exit velos. The White Sox asked the lefty swinger to get stronger in the offseason and he has heeded their call, ditching his big leg kick this spring in favor of a stroke that looks like less of a full-body effort.

Zavala won the organization’s internal award for best defensive outfielder, and it’s hard for someone to look more relaxed at the catch point than he does without being fully unconscious. His lack of burner speed makes him better suited for life as a fourth outfielder who can cover all three spots than a center fielder who earns his check with his glove, and until Zavala demonstrates his strength gains make him capable of fighting off elevated velocity, that tracks as a good outcome.

Rosado held his 94-97 mph velocity across his first year at a full-season affiliate and carved all year, striking out 31.2% of hitters and walking just 6.9% in 55.1 relief innings. The White Sox bumped him up to High-A after flipping Paul DeJong to their division rival Royals for Rosado in July, and his strikeout-to-walk ratio only improved. While his fastball doesn’t play well due to its steep downhill plane, his slider and changeup both do more than fine. He has to walk the line of not letting his reliever-grade command drag him into using his fastball more, but he has already made significant improvements and has high-whiff weapons for hitters of either handedness. Rosado is still tracking toward cracking into a big league bullpen in 2026.

A mix of eye-popping breaking stuff and poor control has resulted in Nastrini’s career prospects taking some wild swings, from being out of the rotation due to the yips at UCLA, to winning a major league job out of spring last year only for pneumonia to sidetrack his 2024, leading him to ending his age-24 season in the Triple-A bullpen. Nastrini’s mid-80s gyro slider absolutely plays even when little else is, lending confidence to the idea that it could lead a relief profile, along with a curveball that’s shape is just as good, though he uses it less. While Nastrini has hit 98 mph in the past and a regression to average velocity isn’t the sum of his issues, the four-seamer’s ride plays down due to its downhill plane. Nastrini has impressive physicality, but his athleticism has never consistently translated to command, leading to a lot of hittable fastballs thrown in poor locations and in bad counts. The spin he’s been able to kill with a new splitter this spring has been impressive, but his changeup does not work independently of his best control stretches the way his slider can.

Pitching for a rebuilding org that’s already lost a ton of depth, Nastrini likely hasn’t made his last big league start, but his best years could see him as a mercurial, slider-heavy leverage arm on a good team. Nastrini’s fastball alone will enable him to miss bats thanks to its consistent mid-90s velocity and a healthy dose of vertical break. His robust arsenal of secondaries play well off one another. He’ll call upon his heater to miss bats, confounding hitters on both sides of the plate with its rise and cut. Then he’ll further frustrate his opponents with two distinct breaking balls – a slider and a curveball with drastically different shapes and velocities – or his changeup, which mirrors his slider in a way that makes it very effective against lefties. His entire arsenal is more vertical than horizontal, with all three secondaries featuring varying degrees of drop that allow them to complement one another. But his command is still the sticking point, as the offerings he tosses out of the zone are usually big misses rather than strategically placed attempts to get chase. If he can hone that command, he could comfortably slot in towards the middle of a starting rotation, but if he can’t, he’ll still be impactful as a single-inning late-game reliever. The White Sox have the luxury of letting Nastrini try to start for as long as possible during the early stages of their rebuild. Things might be bumpy early on, but over time a guy whose stuff is this good will find a way to be an impact pitcher of some stripe.

Adler is a pretty typical fastball/breaking ball(s) middle reliever with two plus pitches and below-average control. If he departs at all from that archetype, it’s because some of his breaking balls are 70s, while some days his control is a 30. The movement of his slider and curveball can run together due to inconsistent release, but his best ones have sharp, downward break and movement that mirrors the vertical ride of his 94-96 mph fastball. His walk rate has tended to live in the 12-15% range, and Adler’s wildness (look out, righty batters) will make it difficult for managers to happily deploy him in high-leverage spots if it continues. He broke camp at Charlotte and is a likely post-2025 40-man roster addition.

George was a draft-eligible sophomore who spent his freshman season at Texas (where he barely pitched) before transferring to Alabama (where he also barely pitched). It was on Cape Cod, after the college season but before the draft, where George’s mid-90s velocity and plus, upper-80s slider became more visible, and the White Sox gave him an over-slot bonus on Day Three of the draft (just shy of $200,000).

George is a human aircraft carrier at a strapping 6-foot-6, and at his best, he’ll sit 98 and touch 102. His slider is comfortably plus on pure stuff, and only plays down when George’s command abandons him, which has been common in his limited innings. There’s a shot George ends up being able to work higher-leverage innings if he can polish his control, but that part of his game detracts too much from his effectiveness to call it a likelihood at this time. He was still a pretty good pick where the Sox got him and is one of the more exciting arms in the system.

Pallette should get a small mention in Grant Taylor’s Top 100 buzz, as he was the template the White Sox drew from when using a second round pick on a famous college arm who lost their draft year to TJ rehab. Pallette has already undergone the move to the bullpen that Taylor is trying to stave off, and he’s taken to it like a duck to water. His mentality, mechanics and explosiveness off the mound all work better in short bursts, with opponents hitting .136/.219/.182 against him in 2024 after he moved to relief.

The undersized righty can access 96-97 mph velocity, but he does so from a high release point that gives his four-seamer a downhill plane, which makes us skeptical of how much he can lean on the pitch at the upper levels even though it has played thus far. The steep slot he gets on his mid-80s changeup inspires none of the same doubt. Pallette’s 3,000 rpm curveball still has gorgeous shape, but it pops out of his hand in a way that doesn’t tunnel with his heater, and its pedestrian chase rates and the righty’s reverse splits lay the issue bare. Right-handers with Pallette’s changeup feel often gravitate toward over-the-top breaking balls, but it’s easy to imagine the bender he uses out of a major league ‘pen taking on a modified form. Until then, Pallette is tracking like a middle-leverage arm who should debut this year.

Armed with an above-average slider that has appealing depth, Keener arrived from Wake Forest in 2023 needing a jump in his fastball quality and changeup consistency to stick to a starter projection, and he has made strides in the latter area. Injury limited Keener to 69.1 innings in 2024, mostly at Low-A Kannapolis; he struck out 82 and only allowed a single homer but walked 36 against mostly less-experienced competition. After being a swingman in college, Keener’s velocity sat in the low-90s in rotation work with unremarkable shape.

But with good arm action and late fade, his changeup now pairs with his slider to give Keener two secondaries with a 40% miss rate or higher, and the command he showed of his cambio out of a lower slot at instructs pleased Sox pitching dev. That’s enough to support a big league relief projection, but he’s still a fastball tweak away from more.

Larson was at Southeast Polk in Iowa for two years before he transferred to IMG so he’d be easier to scout; it took just shy of $1.4 million to sign him away from a TCU commitment. He’s a projectable low-slot lefty with erratic command of a 93-95 mph fastball. His slider flashes plus and has slurve shape, a death-to-lefties type of breaking ball. At the time he was drafted, he lacked any modicum of feel for his upper-80s changeup, and Larson needs to polish his feel for release pretty substantially, but he has a plus frame, above-average arm strength, and great breaking ball potential. Those are the typical traits of a low-seven-figures dev project. He had Tommy John in February and will see his first pro action in 2026.

Veras doesn’t get a lot of publicity for someone who hit .310/.389/.474 as a 21-year-old in Double-A over the last two months of 2024. Granted, because of 12 games at Project Birmingham in 2022, it was Veras’ third season in Double-A, and the way he has filled out and tumbled down the defensive spectrum has been as precocious as his offensive production. He’s relatively new to the outfield and clearly improved in year two, but he’s a big body with below-average foot speed who has DH’d quite often as a pro.

Veras has a long swing that produces all-fields pop but can be beaten by elevated velocity, yet the largest hindrance to his profile clicking as a corner-bound power bench bat has always been his chase. He doesn’t crush velocity on the inner-third quite as well as his 2025 pitch chart would make you think; Veras’ reputation for chasing off the outer edge precedes him at this point and is why his at-bat quality has never forced a fast track. Veras has had notable reverse splits throughout his career and has made incremental but meaningful strides when it comes to the swing and groundball tendencies that have kept him from actualizing all his raw power, so we like him as a multi-year bench bat, especially if his defense matures to the point of him being playable in both outfield corners.

Usually when we’re talking about one-tooled Lilliputian second basemen in this space, their bat-to-ball ability is the cornerstone of their profile. But in the case of Mogollon, it’s shockingly his power. He takes a pretty healthy rip for a 5-foot-8 guy, and he posted a ridiculous hard-hit rate for a teenager his size in the 2024 ACL, at a nearly league-leading 49%. Sadly, his bat-to-ball ability is lacking. It takes Mogollon considerable time to get his body going to swing that hard and he’s often late to the contact point. He struck out 38% of the time last year and had a sub-60% contact rate. Those aren’t indicators of long-term viability, but Mogollon is enough of a marvel at his size to retain some sleeper FV clout in the event that he can maybe learn to play a couple of other non-second base positions and cut his strikeouts as he gets stronger.

Jacobs began his college career at Gateway Community College in Arizona before he transferred to North Dakota State for his junior season. He’s a fairly wild relief prospect with plus arm strength and a vertical-riding fastball that features 16-20 inches of vertical break, depending on the pitch. Some of Jacobs’ curveballs are really nasty. Not only do they feature plus depth, but they also have a little bit of arm-side bend to them, which could make them a weapon against lefties if Jacobs ever learns to harness his control. At 6-foot-9, and with a small school background, it’s reasonable that he hasn’t been able to do that just yet. He has up/down relief projection.

White Sox rotation mates Sean Burke and Shane Smith were both on the 2017 Yankees Area Codes team, and neither would dispute for a second that Mike Vasil was the best pitcher on that roster. He was touching 95-96 mph that summer and trending toward being a late first/comp round pick before he suffered an untimely injury as a senior and only pitched a little bit before the draft, sitting his usual 92-95 mph. He ended up at Virginia, where he regressed, and he was sitting 91 throughout his draft year. Like a lot of pitchers who leave Virginia, Vasil had a rebound in pro ball and was back to sitting 92-95 for a couple of seasons before his velocity trended down again in 2024, when he was knocked around at Triple-A Syracuse. Vasil has a deep coffer of below-average pitches, though his curveball played better toward the end of last season. When the Rays put their Rule 5 pick on waivers at the end of spring, the White Sox snapped Vasil up, eyeing an expansion of his use of a mid-80s changeup that he has shown good feel for locating. At peak, it looked like he’d compete for a rotation spot on a good team, but right now, he looks more like a spot starter/swingman.

A former top 100 prospect in the Rangers system, White’s fastball velocity has been on a steady decline for the last couple of seasons, and at the start of 2025, he’s averaging 91.7 mph throughout his first couple of turns at Triple-A Charlotte. That’s a far cry from his peak, but the good news is that even though his stuff has slipped, White’s craftsmanship and seven-pitch repertoire should allow him to play a competent up/down role. He’ll mix breaking ball shapes anywhere between 75-90 mph, from curveballs to cutters, giving White the toolkit to compete against hitters of either handedness, and each of his breakers has at least average movement. He also has a power changeup in the upper 80s, which is more variable in quality, though that pitch is generating plus miss early in 2025. He’s a little more starter-y than a lot of the other 40-man arms in Charlotte and is perhaps first in the pecking order of opportunity for 2025 spot starts.

Jones is among the most fun to watch players in the minors. He’s a top-of-the-scale athlete who plays spectacular (albeit inconsistent) defense at several positions, and he has incredible speed and above-average raw power. Now 27, Jones still hasn’t made progress in a few key areas, namely his infield hands and arm accuracy, and his contact hitting. Jones swings pretty hard and can tag a fastball, but he’s helpless against secondary stuff; this is the kind of guy who’d hit .180 or so with regular reps.

At a certain point it was feasible that the switch-hitting Jones would make meaningful progress in this area, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, it’s via his speed and defense that Jones remains relevant. Though he struggled with flubs and underthrows, Jones was developed solely at shortstop for his first four years in the Rays system and wasn’t given run in center field until 2023. Traded to Colorado for Joe Rock that offseason, he was then exposed to a mix of CF/SS/2B and sometimes plays all three, boasting highlight-reel acrobatics like your friendly neighborhood Spiderman. Too often, though, Jones is mistake-prone on the infield, and his throwing is much, much better from the outfield, where his relative inexperience still sometimes shows. He’s below average at short and has played just 10 games at second, but Jones is such an unbelievable athlete that we’re betting he becomes a very special defensive center fielder in his late 20s. He still has value as a late-game runner and defender.

Most of Chicago’s high-profile international signings come out of Cuba, and Cruz, who signed for $2 million in January, is the most recent. He’s a projectable third baseman with below-average bat speed at present. A slick third base defender and advanced on-field decision maker, Cruz’s arm strength is a little light for the hot corner right now, but it should be fine as he matures. How much that also applies to his power and strength with the bat in his hands will dictate whether he can be a threat on offense. He’s a deep projection infield prospect waiting to get underway in the 2025 DSL.