Brian Bannister has a funny, two-foot-driving way of talking about Grant Taylor. Every time he gasses him up, he has to pump the brakes, and vice versa.
Last September in a preview of Taylor's Arizona Fall League assignment on these pages, Bannister said:
"He's electric," said Brian Bannister. "It's big, outlier extension [in his delivery]. He was getting at least seven and a half feet of extension. So when you see a lat injury for a pitcher who is way out there, it makes sense."
And in the days leading up to Taylor's promotion to the White Sox bullpen, he appeared on 670 The Score and dropped a mixed comp on Matt Spiegel and Laurence Holmes:
"The interesting thing about Grant is, when you look at how he pitches and his characteristics, he's very similar to a Tyler Glasnow, he's very similar to a[n Emmanuel] Clase, to a Kenley Jansen...
"When you look at the guys in this category, how they're most effective, the types of injuries they tend to have, how they're used the best, Grant releases the ball about 7½ feet in front of the rubber. He's out there releasing it where Kenley, Glasnow, all those guys release it. And you've seen the guys that have pitched in a starting role with those types of features, and they tend to be very injury-prone, and we've already gone through that with Grant a little bit."
Bannister then went on to close out his assessment by once again saying "He's electric," adding "it's one of the best arms I've ever seen."
Bannister didn't close the door to Taylor returning to the rotation, just like Chris Getz has passed on similar opportunities, but it mostly seems like a rhetorical requirement at this point. Even Taylor himself dropped a “we’ll see” when asked Tuesday if he still views himself as a starter, and when Getz likens Taylor's situation to Garrett Crochet, there's a part that goes unsaid: Crochet only returned to starting because relief didn't work for him.
Had Crochet settled into life as a lights-out reliever, be it an automatic closer or a multi-inning weapon, there probably would have been little motivation to plug him into the rotation because he would've already amassed enough value to trade him for a prospect or two. Instead, Crochet got injured as a reliever and then looked uncomfortable in short stints after returning from Tommy John surgery. While Crochet didn't appear particularly suited for the demands of starting when the White Sox announced their intentions to stretch him out in January 2024, there was also little reason to leave that territory unexplored, because the status quo didn’t have much to offer.
Should Taylor thrive in the White Sox bullpen -- and throwing 101.5 mph on his first pitch en route to a scoreless inning without his usual command of his secondaries is an auspicious start -- it's hard to imagine the White Sox shifting him back. Unlike Crochet, they've already given Taylor a look as a starter. In fact, they've given him two. The first ended in injury that cost him a year of development, and the second didn't inspire enough confidence to stick to it, at least in comparison to the more realizable relief projection.
Assuming Taylor is a reliever going forward, it's notable that the White Sox's second-round strategy of drafting projected SEC Friday night starters while they're rehabbing from Tommy John surgery resulted in the same outcome (moving to the bullpen), and on nearly the same timeline (their second full season).
Moreover, they took different routes to arrive at this point. Peyton Pallette, whom the White Sox selected out of Arkansas in the second round in 2022, returned from Tommy John surgery to throw a full, healthy season under the White Sox's strictly prescribed, carefully managed workload in 2023. Then he opened the 2024 season as a normal starter, but after three months of middling results, the White Sox shifted him to the bullpen, saying that his stuff was better suited to bouncing back after shorter, max-effort stints, rather than maintaining its effectiveness over five innings or more.
Taylor, taken out of LSU in the second round the following year, never faltered as a starter, at least in terms of opponents telling him he couldn't hack it, but missing the last four months of the regular season after just 16 innings is its own kind of failure.
That Pallette and Taylor are now in bullpens doesn't mean the strategy should be discarded. You can't rule out coincidence when n=2, and then you have to account for second-round evaluations being much harder to nail in general, and especially for the White Sox. It's easy to look at Pallette being selected one pick ahead of just-promoted Brewers flame-thrower Jacob Misiorowski and think the White Sox made a mistake. But even if you set aside the disparity in signing bonuses that probably would have made Misiorowski an impossibility, Taylor's trajectory is superior to pretty much all of his second-round cohorts in the 2023 class, even as a reliever.
They're just illustrating the reasons for the discounts. In Taylor's case, he had a much smaller margin of error for getting the best outcome. He came to the White Sox having missed a season, and second missed season put him behind the 8-ball. In Pallette's case, the White Sox had less information to work with. Perhaps some of his shortcomings might have been exposed during the junior season that he missed, or maybe he came back from TJ a slightly diminished pitcher. Drew Thorpe, taken one pick ahead of Pallette and signed for $300,000 less, might've come into professional baseball with a lower ceiling, but being fully operational allowed him to reach it faster. (He'll just have to contend with the ramifications of UCL repair when he returns next season.)
Given that we're a month away from the 2025 MLB draft, this is all worth keeping in mind, but more for enlightenment than alarm. Pallette and Taylor are not cautionary tales right now. They're just tales, with the potential of being good ones. There isn't anything inherently wrong with inadvertently developing a quality reliever in the second round, especially when discussing a team that previously had a habit of settling for known relievers in the first.
