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I really hate to keep beating the same drum, but I’m going to continue to be on the record as believing that the make-or-break aspect of the next would-be competitive era of White Sox baseball — the aspect that Rick Hahn and friends utterly failed at from 2017-19 — is going to be whether they can find at least a couple All-Stars or solid starters out of the scrap heap. In other words, unexpected help that picks up the slack when all of the prospects aren’t magically good at the same time the moment they hit the big leagues — a concept that Rick Hahn always seemed a little bit challenged by.
As I’ve blabbed about a million times before, the Cubs don’t win in 2016 without Jake Arrieta. In Houston José Altuve was barely a Top 100 prospect, Dallas Keuchel never came close to sniffing a prospect list, and Marwin González was a critical cog in their championship roster. The Orioles may have blown their shot, but they wouldn’t have even had one if they hadn’t gotten more than 500 extra-base hits from the previously-anonymous Anthony Santander and Cedric Mullins over a five-year stretch.
Things look more promising for the Sox this time around. When the decision was made to tear down the core that brought home the 2021 AL Central crown, nobody knew that Shane Smith was going to be in the plans as a Top 3 starter, and I can’t think of another Sox prospect who’s ever rebounded from “seems like a bust” to “possibly a superstar” like Colson Montgomery.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be identifying and breaking down five players on the Sox roster who could potentially be those unexpected building blocks — and what it means for the team if it ever comes to fruition.
Let’s get straight to the point here. I want you to look at an assortment of hand-picked stats from three young Sox players, measured from July 3-onward last year.
Player A, as you’ve probably gathered from the massive slugging number and perhaps conspicuous cutoff date, is Colson Montgomery. Player B probably isn’t hard to pin down as Kyle Teel, who’s probably second to Montgomery in terms of excitement generated for future Sox teams, and whose numbers are particularly exciting for a solid receiver behind the plate.
Player C, though? That’s Brooks Baldwin, who was called back up to the majors on July 1 last season and proceeded to hold his own with the best of the Sox young talent the rest of the way (albeit with a bit less playing time). It’s not an exaggeration to say that he came as close to matching Montgomery’s absurd second-half output as anybody else on the Sox, especially when you look at the batted-ball metrics.
Interesting! Very Interesting!
Let’s turn this into a quick deep-ish dive on what exactly happened between his initial demotion in May and final recall to Chicago in July. I found a real short answer: He figured out how to hit fastballs in the air instead of on the ground.
In fact, I wrote this entire article before I realized video existed of the kid going oppo-taco on a Spencer Strider fastball. The same Spencer Strider whose entire shtick is, hey, you can’t hit me because I consistently throw a four-seamer up in the zone faster than you can blink.
Baldwin’s bat speed isn’t elite, but it’s not unplayable either. Even when he’s struggled, he’s made solid contact, posting above-average exit velocities at every measured level. When he came back from Charlotte at the beginning of July, all of that hard contact suddenly started going places where it could do actual damage. His overall fly ball percentage jumped from 30% to 48% after that call-up!
I’m pretty embarrassed I didn’t notice it before. It didn’t take a lot more diving to locate the specific place of improvement, either.
The game is largely moving away from traditional fastballs, but pitchers are always going to have to throw them. The key for Baldwin is to avoid getting himself out on breaking stuff. There are a solid number of solid big-leaguers who make a living off of hammering fastballs. It’s plenty conceivable that Baldwin could become one of them.
The flip side is that Baldwin’s tendency to chase is still worrisome. Even after he started being awesome against heaters (I specifically love how he took his average launch angle against sinkers from a virtually flat one degree all the way up to 16, solidly in line drive territory) he still offered at pitches out of the zone at a rate near the bottom of the league. Damage against fastballs doesn’t matter if pitchers can spam breaking balls and offspeed pitches and get away with it most of the time.
Still, there’s still a much wider range of outcomes with Baldwin than many of us are giving him credit for. Defensive metrics have panned his work pretty much across the board, but he’s plenty fleet of foot, ranking in the 82nd percentile for Baseball Savant’s sprint speed metric. It also thinks he has a solid enough arm, one that will play all across the diamond even if it’s nothing special. Contrasted with someone like Lenyn Sosa, whose lack of lateral speed and overall athleticism put a hard cap on his defensive ceiling, Baldwin still has room for improvement. This is not the guy who has the tools of a negative defender.
Now, to zoom out of the nitty-gritty. Let’s assume July-August-September Baldwin is what we actually get this season. Pencil in a 120 wRC+ switch hitter who isn’t better-than-average at any position, but can give any of your regulars a breather on any given day. He’s going to walk and strike out at rates around league average, and he’s got enough speed to do some damage on the basepaths. Project it out over 500-odd trips to the plate, and you get a guy who might push 20-20 without even locking down a regular position.
In what world were the 2026 White Sox supposed to have a guy like that that we didn’t already know about?
Did I just accidentally describe peak Ben Zobrist when trying to come up with a comp for Brooks Baldwin? Maybe I did! So sue me. This is the thought experiment right here, guys. Does anyone expect every single one of the farm system’s ranked prospects to hit their ceilings any more than they did the last time? I’m sure one of these years, we’ll finally witness long-awaited glory from a rotation topped by Jon Rauch, Matt Ginter, and Dan Wright.
If the 2027 or 2028 White Sox are going to be competitive, it’s not going to be because of Teel, Edgar Quero, the Montgomerys, and Roch Cholowsky.
(Pause for dramatic effect)
That’s a lie! Of course it’s going to be because of them. A better way of putting that might be to say that if the 2027 or 2028 Sox want a shot at being 100-win juggernaut instead of a 92-win question mark or 84-win flop, it’s not going be because the top prospects clicked; it’s going to be because someone like Brooks Baldwin turned into a poor-but-not-necessarily-crazy-poor man’s Ben Zobrist, and nobody saw it coming. Nobody but us, of course.
It could just as easily be that Baldwin reverts to the 60 wRC+ hitter he was for the first 80-odd games of his big league career. It’s almost famously common knowledge by now that September stats have, broadly speaking, no real correlation with performance the following season. But hey, tell that to Lenyn Sosa in September 2024.
If Baldwin does anything in 2026 akin to how Sosa followed up on that scorching-hot September, there’s no telling how the calculus on this team’s roster might be changed seven months from now.