After his latest flourish with Low-A Kannapolis, 20-year-old lefty Christian Oppor has struck out 34 of the 86 hitters he’s faced on the year. Walks were an issue that popped up for him in the sweltering heat of the complex last summer, but Oppor has yielded just seven while compiling a 2.42 ERA over 22⅓ innings in 2025.
But Oppor is also at a stage of his development where his velocity blooming into the 92-97 mph band through April, before repeatedly popping at 98 mph on Wednesday, might be more noteworthy than his results.
"Any lefty that's throwing mid-90s and really putting in good work has a chance in my book to be a good big leaguer," said White Sox senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister. "I've had the David Prices of the world, the Eduardo Rodriguez, I've had the pronator lefties that throw mid-90s. I'm just a big fan of power lefties in general. I think they have an edge over all their righty counterparts in just being successful out there."
As a Wisconsin native, Oppor pitched for the White Sox Area Codes team in high school and spent multiple years on the team's radar well before they signed him for a $555,000 bonus out of the fifth round in 2023 after a year of junior college. Six-foot-two and slenderly built, Oppor was viewed as a projection bet who has clearly transitioned to actually throwing hard, rather than just looking like he might one day in the future.
He spent the winter back at home, training at Total Athlete Performance in Madison and focusing on a combination of heavy weightlifting with fast-twitch mobility work. That his program had helped him transition from maxing out at 95 mph to 98 mph was something Oppor had little way of knowing until he arrived at spring training.
"I didn't have a single radar gun on me the whole offseason," Oppor said. "Velo-wise, I had zero idea of where I was at, which might have helped. It helped me get more determination to throw harder and get stronger because I didn't know where I was at."
Oppor also drilled down on the offseason assignment the White Sox gave him to dip into his back leg deeper and more consistently at the outset of his delivery. The end result looks like a level of left-handed power that would make Oppor relevant even if he weren't threatening a 40 percent strikeout rate.
"For me it's really the change in his work ethic, his commitment to the craft, his ability to throw hard," Bannister said. "It's about his physicality. He's a little leaner, but he's taken a big step forward. The coaches are raving about him. The strength and medical side has just been talking nonstop about the work he's put in and how much more he's matured year over year. They say he's the first one out on the field, he's the first one to put his work in everyday. He's definitely on the fast-riser chart for me."
Oppor doesn't cite much of a mindset change, but every prospect sounds happier at a full-season affiliate rather than toiling in the complex league, and he's certainly no exception. He didn't know his offseason improvements would be enough to put him in the Kannapolis rotation until the end of spring, so there was no choice but to keep pushing.
"Nobody really wants to be there," Oppor said of the ACL. "I just love the game of baseball, and every day that went past in AZ, I just wanted to get out more and more. It helped me fuel the fire to get out of there."
When he spoke to Sox Machine last June, Oppor attributed his walk issues at the time to being in the very early stages of figuring out how his stuff works. A natural pronator, the 2024 season found him regularly exposed to the movement metrics on his pitches for the first time and becoming familiar with his baselines. He's becoming attuned to it enough to throw strikes and obviously his pure velocity being too hard for Low-A hitters to handle increases the margin for error, but the process is still in the initial stages.
"It sinks sometimes, it'll rise and run, it's kind of all over the place right now and we're just calling it a straight fastball," Oppor said of his fastball shape. "It just plays a different shapes. It's panning out for how it is and where we're at right now. We're still trying to solidify a kind of a certain shape to be able to manipulate different pitches. As of right now, it's coming out of my hand and if I can keep putting velocity behind it, it hopefully keeps working."
Oppor's pronation inclinations have made his slider development complicated. He's currently using a two-seam grip and thinking about ripping through the pitch as much as he can, but the offering is still topping out in the low-80s and probably takes on a different look at maturation. There are no such issues with his changeup, which he has a natural feel for and was producing called strikes or whiffs (CSW) at a rate north of 45 percent in the opening month of this season.
"Just being able to have the same arm speed is one of the biggest things," Oppor said. "If you can throw a lot of your pitches with the same arm speed, I think every pitch can be really good.
"Right now [my stuff] is the best I've had pretty much my whole life. I've played off my fastball and it's just been working for me. I've never had to worry that much about my offspeed. Right now it's progressed a lot, and with how it's working right now, the results are coming through."
The results are a big confidence boost after spending the end of 2023 and all of 2024 in the ACL, where it was harder to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Oppor somewhat surprised himself to see double-digit strikeouts in his first start in A-ball. After covering just 38 innings over 12 appearances last summer, Oppor could theoretically blast past that total by the end of the month with good health and continued effectiveness.
But a bigger innings load doesn't seem that daunting right now. He's in a nice spot in his young career where it feels like the game is coming easier to him, even while the competition is getting harder.
"I'm just trying to get through innings right now, but if the strikeouts come with it, then I guess they'll come with it," Oppor said. "With the rhythm [I'm in], it's not actually that much of a grind right now to get through those five innings knowing I can actually throw more strikes and get hitters out, rather than just walking in, throwing a bunch of pitches, getting like three innings. Being able to get my rhythm down, it's a lot more fun. It's a better time being able to get through a lot more innings and helping the team out."
