Wrangling the individuals of the White Sox farm system into a top-10 list used to be a fairly straightforward enterprise. As recently as last spring, you could put Michael Kopech, Andrew Vaughn, Nick Madrigal and Garrett Crochet in any order and be four-tenths on the way to credibility.
With no sure MLB contributors remaining, there's certainly more of a wild-west feel to the exercise. To me, any list that has Colson Montgomery and Norge Vera on the podium has pretty much crossed off the only givens, and even then, their affiliated experience is limited to rookie ball.
As for the others of note, Yoelqui Céspedes has equal factions of dreamers and doubters. The former was satisfied by his regular-season performance, the latter validated by his poor showing in the Arizona Fall League. Jose Rodriguez had the most impressive pound-for-pound performance, but he lacks one dynamite tool, and might stand out more here due to the lack of competition in the system. None of the prep arms selected in the past few drafts distinguished himself, and the most intriguing position players after Céspedes and Rodriguez all have a troubling combination of choppy track records at advanced ages.
I'm anticipating a lack of consensus, which is typically a bad thing, since the prospects who generate widespread agreement are usually the ones who can headline seismic trades. The Sox don't appear to have such a needle-mover in the bunch.
Yet there's also a benefit in the White Sox system being untethered from any semblance of unanimity, in that the discussion is wide open. In past years, the debate was mostly limited to whether Keith Law was too pessimistic about Madrigal's big-picture impact on a team. (The fact that the White Sox traded him for a reliever suggests Rick Hahn might've agreed with him.)
This time around, a case for any decent prospect over another shouldn't generate immediate backlash. I can't foresee any major list having Montgomery fourth, but if one did, I wouldn't immediately suspect ignorance. Freed from the pressure to present a certain order, now's the chance to make strong cases for independent hunches.
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Baseball America took the first crack at publishing an order to White Sox prospects this offseason when it released its top-10 list this morning. There are a few elements that surprised me, after which I realized that I should reduce my capacity for surprise. More information is needed about every prospect, so let's focus in on anything that might inform.
The list, as presented by Bill Mitchell:
- Colson Montgomery
- Yoelqui Céspedes
- Norge Vera
- Wes Kath
- Jose Rodriguez
- Andrew Dalquist
- Jake Burger
- Jared Kelley
- Sean Burke
- Matthew Thompson
The initial smell test is passed, in that Montgomery, Vera and Rodriguez all reside in the top five. Céspedes is polarizing -- his write-up doesn't mention his AFL performance -- and some draft guides liked Kath over Montgomery last summer, so the top five checks out.
After that, it's time to make cases. Burger gets the last position-player entry because his 2017 first-round draft report translated into a successful 15-game cup of coffee with the White Sox in 2021 despite everything that happened in between, which is more than anybody else has going.
As for the pitchers, I'm surprised to see Thompson behind Dalquist and Kelley despite Thompson having the most convincing finish to his 2021 season. The determining factor here seems to be consistency of top-end velocity, which has hampered Thompson's stock dating back to his senior year of high school. Kelley's issues with shoulder fatigue trouble me more, but I appreciate contrary positions when any of them could turn out to be correct ... or all of them could turn out to be irrelevant.
BA isn't yet revealing its full top-30 lists, so it's temporarily punting on Romy González, whose case fascinates me the most. It's weird that a well-rounded 20-20 season at shortstop isn't good enough to leap ahead of three A-ball pitchers with underwhelming assessments. I have a feeling that the back half of this list won't be mirrored by the next top 10 we see. The question is whether any list looks like any one that came before.
