When Jonathan Cannon was called up for his major league debut early last season, this site ran a story full of quotes from the start of spring training with the 24-year-old right-hander talking up the new power curveball he had spent the offseason developing.
The only wrinkle was that Cannon spent his debut spamming the Royals with newly learned sweepers instead.
The sweeper was just part of a new, decidedly east-west oriented arsenal built out for Cannon under Brian Bannister in the spring bullpen sessions together at Camelback Ranch, predicated on harnessing seam-shift effects with his sinker and changeup. For a player whose energy for adding and tweaking pitches was part of the appeal to the White Sox on draft night, has seen his arsenal bloat to six pitches or more at times, but is also such that coaches have to keep an eye out for his tinkering, it was very on-brand.
But a day before Cannon throws off a mound for the first time since last season, he has no new pitches to share. He wants his wandering days to be over.
"It's a little bit of a relief. I feel like my whole career it's been, 'Hey you might want to think about adding this,' or 'This pitch might not be good enough.'" Cannon said. "I know exactly what I'm going to do; I'm not adding any pitching or subtracting any pitches, I'm really focusing on the pitches that I have and making them more consistent and making them a little better. Because I think my arsenal is really good as it is."
That Cannon went from scuffling in Triple-A last April to 124⅓ major league innings of nearly league average work (92 ERA+) would be commendable enough on its own. And until the signing of Martín Pérez last week, the White Sox might not have had a better candidate to be their Opening Day starter besides Cannon, who considered departed ace Garrett Crochet "one of my best friends" and worked to mirror the way he studied opposing lineups.
But Bannister regularly evokes Logan Webb when discussing Cannon's development, which doubles as an explanation for his bold projection that the 6-foot-6-inch righty will soon become one of the more reliable arms in the league, despite consistently below-average strikeout rates that call upon him to rigidly avoid walks and control the type of contact he induces. The faith is mutual; Cannon wouldn't have gone through the tumult of trying to learn how to command new pitches in-season if he didn't see big gains in his stuff. He's just spent the winter trying to parse why they regularly felt nastier and more reliably located in innings 1-3 than frame 4-6.
"Sometimes my hand got a little bit late getting up, and that kind of caused my sweeper to back up, or spike it in the left-handed batter's box," Cannon said. "A lot of it was the arm the path. If you look at the video of when I first came up, I was really low with my arm slot, and I think that was one of the reasons why I got sent down. I had really dropped my arm slot and it was causing everything to flatten out a little bit and making everything a little bit easier to hit. When I came back up my arm slot was a little bit higher, it was a little bit easier to have consistency in those pitches. It made all my pitches a little bit better, which I think is a little bit counterintuitive as a sinker baller."
But in this era of pitching, counterintuitive is often the goal. Seven years ago, a common story would be discussing a pitching prospect raising their arm slot to try to generate the most possible riding action on their four-seamer. Now, it's about generating pitch movement that hitters aren't used to seeing from certain angles. So Crochet throwing his four-seamers from a lower three-quarters sees some extra benefit from his flatter approach angle, and Cannon -- while naturally a short-strider with a lower slot -- sees his sinker play up when it comes from a higher, steeper release.
"It's just a little bit tougher to track," Cannon said. "For [hitters], that sinker is really barreling down on their hands and moving a lot more, it feels like, from that higher slot. From a lower slot, it almost goes up and then falls back down into the zone, and for whatever reason they tend to see that a little bit better. It's different for everyone, but it's finding that slot that's a little bit more challenging on the hitters. Because I'm a big believer in the hitters tell you everything you need to know. The pitch might be really good on Trackman or analytically be really good, but if it's getting hit a lot, it might not be very good."
So if Cannon throwing off a mound for the first time around a month before he's due to report to Camelback scans as later than other offseason preparation stories, it's because he's intentionally spent more time trying to build himself up physically for what's hopefully another new professional career high in innings, with an emphasis on shoulder care. He doesn't want to set more ambitious goals in January than staying healthy enough to make all his starts, but training to maintain his arm path for six innings per night, for six months out of the year, is a good example of health and effectiveness intertwining.
Pitching changes too much and too quickly, and Cannon is too curious to guarantee that this will keep him from adding something to his sinker/changeup/sweeper/four-seam/cutter mix in 2025, since Bannister has already stated that finding solutions to reduce left-handed slugging against him is a project he's considering. But with all the permutations that lie ahead for a very unsettled White Sox roster, Cannon wants to be part of establishing a port in the storm.
"Spring training is going to be very competitive," Cannon said. "Last year was obviously tough for everyone, including us. It definitely provides a lot of motivation. It comes down to putting in the work, putting ourselves in position every night to win a baseball game, and I think it comes down to everyone doing their job. For me specifically, I can only control what I do and that's going out there every fifth day putting my team in position to win a game."
