New White Sox reliever Cam Booser's mere presence in the majors is a compelling comeback story.
He has considerably more knowledge of and enthusiasm for the village of Rosemont than the average ballplayer, because the Chicago Dogs were his first baseball job after spending four years away from the game due to various major injuries (Tommy John surgery, labrum tear, etc.) and "some mistakes when I was younger."
"Without a test, there is no testimony," Booser said.
The Red Sox honored Booser with the Tony Conigliaro Award for the 2024 season in recognition of his triumph over adversity to make his major league debut shortly before his 32nd birthday. He was just at the center of a heartwarming viral moment as his sister hunted down a trading card memorializing his MLB debut; a video made charming by Booser immediately clocking it as an attempt to make a heartwarming viral moment.
There's just the small catch that all this culmination of a heartwarming journey came with the Red Sox. If Booser's story sounds like a sequel to The Rookie, the credits are rolling before he gets traded to Chicago to clear a 40-man roster crunch.
With the White Sox, Booser being a viable major league reliever is not an underdog story, but the premise for why they shipped out a promising teenage DSL arm for him, opportunistically trying to capitalize on the spillage from a more ambitious Red Sox offseason.
"It all happened pretty quick and then after it happened, it was just a little bit of an initial shock," Booster said of his reaction to the trade. "Now that I've had a couple days now it's just excited for the new opportunity."
Despite a 3.38 ERA over 42⅔ major league innings last year with roughly matching peripheral numbers (3.49 xERA, 3.80 FIP), Booser is still at the point where a shot at an Opening Day roster spot out of spring camp is an exciting novelty. As grateful as he is to them as an organization, the Red Sox also optioned Booser to Triple-A four different times last season and the White Sox are his fourth MLB organization. A rebuilding team offers Booser more potential stability than he's ever previously enjoyed, and he expresses too much open gratitude for having a jersey at all to have his momentum stalled by a new one.
Booser has a prior relationship with assistant general manager Josh Barfield from his time in the Diamondbacks farm system and has already spoken with pitching coaching Ethan Katz, but said all of his conversations, including with general manager Chris Getz, have been of the introductory variety. So it remains to be seen how the White Sox will guide him from a left-hander who cracked the majors to someone who can handle medium-leverage work on a regular basis, but there are some initial indications that the primary solution is just handing him the ball on a regularly basis.
The main breakthrough in Booser's game has been trimming his walk rate from disqualifyingly high to consistently under 10 percent. And his proficiency landing his pitches in the zone and his above-average swing-and-miss rate inside of it suggest asking him to repeat an 8.7 percent walk rate doesn't scan as too much. Even with a month-long IL stint for elbow inflammation last year, Booser's main explanation for improvement is finally being healthy for long enough to get better.
"As I've gotten older, I've really taken it upon myself to hone in on my diet, hone in on my recovery, my sleep and do everything from a weight room standpoint to try to prepare me for the season," said Booser, who noticed a lot more strike-throwing consistency when he could "feel my mechanics throughout an entire season and feel my body throughout the entire season."
As a lefty with a viable sweeper and a four-seamer that's a touch above-average for velocity and inverted vertical break, Booser has long held the potential for a limited role retiring left-handers. A broader future for Booser rides on his high-80s cutter, initially conceived as a bridge offering between his fastball slider, that now has become the pitch he's most comfortable with, can most reliably place in the strike zone and aided him posting near-neutral platoon splits last season.
Booser first started working on the offering when he was with the Dogs when his cue was simply taking his four-seam grip and trying to throw it with the side of his hand. But he said access to Edgertronic video of his grips, and data readouts of what arm angle it comes out of and where in the zone it plays best has led to a lot of evolution. Speaking of data, Statcast is pretty unambiguous that the pitch didn't perform as well as it deserved, with the batting average (.325) and slugging (.450) against it both sitting 100 points higher than the expected numbers based on the contact quality it allowed.
Banking on Booser getting better results from the early count weak contact his cutter generates depends at least some on the White Sox finally playing a better brand of defense than the sum of their current roster parts would suggest. It also depends at least some on Booser's game continuing to mature even though he's old enough that the people he most closely associates with the White Sox are Paul Konerko and A.J. Pierzynski.
If that seems too skeptical than over 40 innings of above-average major league results deserves, it's because the last few years of White Sox baseball would inspire anyone to keep their head on a swivel for the bad outcome sneaking up from behind. But on a side of town where nothing has gone right for a while, Booser could be less demanding than some of their other salvage projects, because all he needs is something the Sox already have.
"Any time that I have a uniform and an opportunity to help a club win, I'm excited," Booser said. "The fact that they wanted me and they traded for me, I'm excited and I'm ready to go into camp and do anything I can to try to earn a big league spot."
