To my knowledge, Tim Elko has never appeared on the White Sox top-30 prospect list on MLB.com, or elsewhere. FanGraphs never had cause to drop a Future Value on him. Baseball America hasn't written a new report on him since he was drafted.
Even for an organization normally inclined to hard-sell potential pieces of the future, Elko was never touted as more than a good use of a 10th-round pick in 2022 than a future power bat in Chicago. The fifth-year senior signed for a $35,000 bonus, with the simple premise of providing a tough-minded, proven collegiate performer to their minor league clubhouses, hopefully raising the level of his teammates and bopping more than a few long home runs to entertain the fans in attendance.
And so he did for a while, until he kept rising to the point of being on the doorstep of the majors and still not looking outclassed.
"Showed up day one, and you would have thought he was there for two months the way he fit in with guys," said Justin Jirschele of Elko's arrival in Triple-A. "A natural-born leader and a tireless worker as well, on both sides of the baseball."
It's to Elko's credit that he's turned himself from a nice story into a serious one. A high-makeup, low-minors masher with obvious limitations just merits a kind acknowledgement of a job well done. A hitter who arrives in Triple-A and promptly reaches base safely in each of his first 16 games while the major league offense above him endures historic struggles merits real parsing.
There's a statue of Elko in Oxford, and his story of playing with Ole Miss through an ACL tear in 2021, or captaining the title-winning team the following year, is one of a player truly giving all to his college program. Yet this is the level at which he always wanted to be evaluated.
"Everybody throughout this organization wants to be in big leagues," Elko said. "I'm just trying to enjoy what I'm doing here, getting better every single day. And when I get my chance, I get my chance, and I want to make the best of it."
At 25 in Triple-A, Elko is eight months younger than Andrew Vaughn, who will hit his second year of arbitration this winter. Such is life for senior signings, who start battling the clock from the moment they're drafted. Specific to Elko, however, his injury history is such an outsized part of his collegiate lore, inviting a question that we're just now getting around to exploring: "What if the guy who performed heroically while injured stopped being so hampered by his injuries?"
Which isn't to say he hasn't made concessions. After being an option at all four corners defensively at times with Ole Miss, Elko has been first-base only in the Sox org. While that has drastically narrowed his path to the majors, he's a big 6-foot-4-inch target who has clearly excelled at first, with Southern League managers voting him the best defensive first basemen in the league when he was at Double-A Birmingham in the first half of this season.
"He’s a really good defensive first baseman, which I think gets lost a little bit because he hits homers," said farm director Paul Janish. "He’s a component of the clubhouse that is hard to quantify, a glue guy, if that’s what you want to call it."
And while Elko ran disastrous strikeout-to-walk ratios in his pro debut, running walk rates above 8 percent across both levels of A-ball last season was subtly as intriguing as his 28 home runs in 131 games. Now riding a career-best 9 percent walk rate through 34 games in Triple-A, Elko talks about the developmental gains he's made almost exclusively in terms of swing decisions, and it's not hard to imagine that a power-hitting prospect is more easily able to shut down his motion on the great volume of chase pitches he sees with a healthy lower half.
"I think I've adjusted my approach a little bit, especially this year I'm just working on making sure I'm swinging pitches in the zone and taking the ones that are out of it," Elko said.
"He's always hit the ball hard, he's hit the ball all over the yard," said Charlotte Knights hitting coach Cameron Seitzer. "He does understand the strike zone, but a big difference for me and for him is just allowing him enough time [in his swing] to make the decisions. So really staying on the fastball, staying with that game plan. Those are some of the things that are allowing him to lay off the offspeed, because if he's early for that heater, then he's able to shut down and recognize the spin and shape of pitches."
The improvement in Elko chase rates are real, as Trackman numbers have him within percentage points of league average, even as his strikeout rate has ballooned back over 30 percent in Triple-A. From a man who struck out 41 times to three walks in his first taste of pro ball in 2022, that's player development. But the emphasis on swing decisions comes because Elko must be letter-perfect in that area to counter more intractable issues.
Scouts' doubts of Elko's hit tool are backed up by an 72 percent in-zone contact rate in Triple-A, which is right smack in the middle of Joey Gallo territory. That level of naturally occurring swing-and-miss in a hitting profile is the sort of thing that require top-of-the-scale power with plus swung decisions to overcome, and even there, the resulting production is for more of a good time than a long time.
Plenty of people will attest to the majesty of being in the building when Elko truly gets into one, and I watched him fight off singles to right field too many times in person to doubt his willingness to adjust. But the way Triple-A pitchers have held him to one homer in his last 18 games, with 32 punchouts in the same timeframe suggest he's still too vulnerable to promise an near-term boost to the Sox offense. At .262/.329/.440, Elko has slid back to a league-average line at Charlotte, and Bryan Ramos is having a hard enough time getting at-bats after a month of looking like a world-beater there.
To be clear, all pulse-having humans should still have a rooting interest in Elko finding his way to the majors at some point. Sports provide the refreshing illusion that there is some meritocracy in this world, and every step of Elko's professional journey has come through bashing the baseball, and working to get better at bashing the baseball when others thought he'd already plateaued.
The White Sox don't provide much, but a video of Elko getting the call while his entire Triple-A clubhouse invariably goes nuts would soothe the masses for 10 minutes or so. It's just that, at the moment, the flaws are such that what comes after those 10 minutes won't be enough to keep the celebration going. But Elko has had a way forging ahead, even when others might have settled for the happy ending.
