White Sox Minor Keys: Aug. 11, 2022
Baseball America conducted its post-draft re-rack of the farm systems for all 30 teams, and Bill Mitchell updated the White Sox’s system.
There’s a considerable amount of shift in the system considering 1) Jake Burger is the only graduation of note, and 2) no new White Sox draft pick cracks the top five. That said, Oscar Colás wasn’t official when the initial list was published, which explains his absence.
| Preseason | Rank | Midseason |
|---|---|---|
| Colson Montgomery | 1 | Colson Montgomery |
| Yoelqui Céspedes | 2 | Oscar Colás |
| Norge Vera | 3 | Bryan Ramos |
| Wes Kath | 4 | Norge Vera |
| José Rodríguez | 5 | José Rodríguez |
| Andrew Dalquist | 6 | Sean Burke |
| Jake Burger | 7 | Peyton Pallette |
| Jared Kelley | 8 | Jonathan Cannon |
| Sean Burke | 9 | Noah Schultz |
| Matthew Thompson | 10 | Yoelqui Céspedes |
If you’re curious about what an incumbent-only list looks like, Lenyn Sosa, Romy González and Yolbert Sánchez would fill out the remainder of the top 10 if you removed Pallette, Cannon and Schultz.
I appreciate the conservative placement of Schultz, as he barely pitched this past spring due to mono, especially compared to the major-conference work of Pallette and Cannon, although Tommy John surgery means that Pallette’s junior year was shot.
Davis Martin made the biggest jump, going from off the board to No. 15. Had he started the year on the list, I wonder if he would’ve finished higher, anchoring effect and all that. Ramos also moved up from No. 11 to No. 3.
As for prospects taking tumbles, Wes Kath fell from fourth to 21st, while Drew Dalquist dropped from sixth to 22nd. Neither was in my preseason top 10, and aside from Romy González’s year in sickness and poor health, I’m pretty pleased with my hit rate.
Charlotte 3, Lehigh Valley 2
- Romy Gonzalez went 0-for-5 with two strikeouts.
- Yolbert Sánchez and Jake Burger both were 2-for-4 with a strikeout.
- Jason Bilous: 4 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 3 BB, 5 K, 1 HR, 34 of 70 pitches for strikes.
Pensacola 5, Birmingham 4
- José Rodríguez went 2-for-5.
- Oscar Colás was 1-for-3 with a three-run homer, an HBP and a strikeout.
- Yoelqui Céspedes went 2-for-4 with a two doubles and a strikeout.
- Caleb Freeman’s return to Double-A: 1 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 0 K
Highlights:
*Colás’ eighth at Birmingham, and 15th in 78 games.
Winston-Salem 8, Bowling Green 7
- Bryan Ramos came a double short of the cycle by going 3-for-4 with a walk. He also stole a base.
- Luis Mieses went 2-for-4 with a strikeout.
- Drew Dalquist: 4.2 IP, 6 H, 7 R, 7 ER, 4 BB, 6 K, 3 HR, 49 of 84 pitches for strikes.
Highlights:
*Ramos’ 18th homer:
Salem 10, Kannapolis 1
- Wilfred Veras went 1-for-4.
- DJ Gladney, 2-for-4.
ACL Padres 4, ACL White Sox 0 (7 innings)
- Brooks Baldwin went 1-for-2 with two walks.
- Luis Pineda, 1-for-3 with a K.
- Dario Borrero was 2-for-3.
- Manuel Veloz: 4 IP, 6 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 4 BB, 3 K, 1 HR
DSL White Sox 6, DSL Blue Jays 3
- Ryan Burrowes went 0-for-3 with a walk and two strikeouts.
- Erick Hernandez, 0-for-3 with a walk and a strikeout.
- Loidel Chapelli, 2-for-3.
- Carlos Jimenez was 0-for-3 with a K.
Author
Norge Vera has yet to appear for Winston-Salem. What’s going on there?
No news or unreliable news — name your poison….
Sosa not in the top 10 after what he did in AA seems shocking to me…
Mena and Chapelli would be the other guys I could see surging up the list.
Call up Colas and give us something to root for besides Tony resigning.
Viva Colas! I mean he’s absolutely killing it, call him the F up while he’s scorching. Cuban players are not as heavily scouted as American players, he might be better than he was projected. It sure looks that way.
He and Montgomery being left handed is like the only beacon of light this team has going forward. Oscar will be 24 in a month, get him up now. At least the man can field and probably run hard.
It’s a very good thing for all of our mental health that the Sox system has performed well this season.
Somehow hadn’t realized just how awful our system was until seeing those lists side by side.
Reminds me of the terribleness we had in the early part of the last decade.
Dropping Dalquist, Kelley, and Thompson in favor of Pallette, Cannon, and Schultz has a very “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic feel to it.” Like, “we know some of these pitching prospects have to emerge so we’ll just keep rotating them until one of them makes us look like a genius.”
Great way to put it.
I’m not sure if you meant BA is trying to look like geniuses, but this is standard for a bad farm system. The shine is off many of the players they have developed. Teams rarely go “off the board” for their early picks. Pallete, Cannon, and Schultz were rated by most public analysts as ~2nd round picks, so slot in around that area of the rankings.
My comment was mostly tongue in cheek and I understand BA’s thinking – the incumbents didn’t live up to expectations so we’ll go with the consensus opinion about the new guys and slot them in.
The kernel of truth that my comment is based on though, is that there’s really no reason to believe the new guys are going to project any better than the incumbents. The incumbents are all younger than average at their level, had disrupted starts to their career (Covid), and have shown flashes of brilliance that (if replicable) can be a foundation from which they build. None of the new guys have thrown a single professional pitch and two of them are still recovering from issues that completely disrupted their most recent season.
From a probabilistic perspective, the new guys may have higher ceilings (and possibly even higher median outcomes) but the standard deviation of potential results is (or should be) so high that it makes forecasting their potential a proverbial spin of the roulette wheel. The incumbents best-case scenarios are far from realized, but we’ve at least shaved off the worst-case outcome of “career-ending injury within the first couple of years of professional ball” such that I’d feel more comfortable about them at least making the big league roster at some point over guys who have just been signed.