PHOENIX -- Long Billy Carlson batting practice home runs aside, it would be dishonest to fly out to Arizona in mid-August and pretend to not be preoccupied with the heat.
The temperature gauge read 104 degrees on the rental car dashboard pulling up to Camelback Ranch on Wednesday morning at a quarter to 10 a.m., finding a host of White Sox bridge league participants taking batting practice at the tail end of their day.
"It's kind of like a blow dryer to my face," said 11th-round pick Matthew Boughton, in the middle of an explanation for why Arizona weather is actually preferable to the humidity of his native Texas.
"It's definitely hot, but they're adjusting well," said White Sox infield coordinator Ryan Newman, who heaped credit upon team nutritionists and trainers stalking players with fluids and electrolyte-heavy concoctions. "We have to be efficient with our work. That's the bonus of having the [pitching and hitting labs], we can do stuff inside. But once we get out on the field, that's why we have this morning schedule, so we can beat the heat as much as we can."
The conventional wisdom is late afternoon sees conditions in the Phoenix Valley shift from grueling to truly intolerable, and the bridge league schedule is tilted accordingly, with the weight room opening at 7 a.m.. It's barely past 8 a.m. when Boughton and Carlson are splitting early-work middle infield reps on a practice field, getting proselytized on pre-pitch movements and playing downhill defensively, while fourth-round pick Landon Hodge is toiling in his catcher gear and tracking down popups behind the plate on another.
There are games starting at 11 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, with 10 a.m. starts on Saturdays. But practice days are broken into a lot of 20-minute segments, with rotation between drills, lifting and meetings. One player, attempting to be friendly and accommodating, offers to knock out their interview with Sox Machine before their final weight room session of the day. This suggestion is shot down, with prejudice.
Densely packed mornings give way to leaving the facility around noon, leaving plenty of time for afternoon naps, or the four position-player prep picks bonding over dinner. For players who already had to commit to a professional-level training regimen midway through their prep years, the biggest departure from their preexisting routine is a happy one.
"I love it. No school obviously is a big benefit but just waking up and playing baseball and working out is pretty fun," said Hodge, who has long since been forced into becoming a morning person. "The meetings we have, the information we get, it feels more like a job. You're getting paid to do this, you've got to be more on top of your stuff and more fine-detailed with everything."
As much as bridge league's timing is an adaptation to the draft getting pushed to July and the ACL season wrapping up, with Newman finding more time for instruction in the relaxed format, the four prep picks are not necessarily the typical residents -- and not just because the Sox run on prep bats was a new strategic wrinkle.
A phalanx of rehabbing pitchers dot the outfield during batting practice, since shagging is inextricable from their routine, even when they're not appearing in games. There are trickle-down effects of every surge of player movement across the league, and the White Sox snatching up right-hander Ryan Schiefer after he was released by the Rays in a post-deadline roster crunch is another sort of origin story that populates Camelback Ranch in August. Venezuelan singles machine Christian González will not turn 19 until next month, and after the outfielder earned a mid-year promotion by hitting .424/.553/.606 in the Dominican Summer League, continuing to hit in Arizona is the logical endpoint of his 2025 development.
"With the four high school guys and the rest being older guys, there's kind of the dynamic of iron sharpens iron," said second-round pick Jaden Fauske. "We're pushing each other everyday. In the cages, we're shit-talking each other and in the weight room, hyping each other up. We do a great job of getting the best out of each other every day."
Especially with almost all the college draft picks gone, Carlson, Hodge, Boughton and Fauske are somewhat unique in that they're sort of building up activity after waiting through a months-long break from playing in games, rather than managing the physical costs of a mostly completed season. None of them would turn down a surprise assignment to Kannapolis at this juncture, but those rosters are full of players managing their workload at the end of a full professional season, rather than diving into their mechanics, learning new concepts and trying to bulk up.
"We're getting after it in the weight room, lifting heavy weights. I feel like it's definitely gotten me stronger in the couple of weeks I've been here," said Boughton, for whom an MLB-caliber strength program was part of the appeal of going pro. "I was just doing explosive-type movements [in high school] that doesn't really strengthen -- or maybe it does strengthen me -- but now we're doing things like focusing on squats and getting that stronger specifically."
"This is now their job. This is what they do all day long," Newman said. "It's getting their bodies used to working out every day, working out on a field every day. Nutritionally, monitoring how they're eating. Guys like Billy, right? We're trying to build that body up. This gives us a good base to do that stuff. What we want to accomplish here is a blend of everything. We want to introduce them to the organization. Mechanically -- whether it's defensively or offensively -- how we see them moving forward and introduce them to that ahead of our skill camps that happen in the fall."
Maybe the only risk is it can feel too sanitized. There are few great baseball players who aren't, at their core, fueled by a love of competition. Failure is the greatest teacher, but is perhaps another victim of the strict MLB headcount restrictions on players at domestic complexes with which the White Sox have to comply. The goal is to prepare these players for full-season ball next April, and this is all a substitute for the short-season leagues that farm directors leaguewide would welcome back.
Filling that void is the heat.
"I don't think I've ever put this much emphasis on recovery in my life," Fauske said. "Between every inning, two cups of water, a cup of Gatorade, or you're going to feel like shit. You're going to get lightheaded, you're going to start losing focus."
"I don't really feel the heat as much when I'm playing because I'm more locked in, but definitely you've got to stay hydrated because it can get on you real fast," Boughton said.
With the absence of recorded stats, or even publicly viewable games, the stated goals for these players isn't a 90 percent in-zone contact rate, but a more banal project of establishing a professional routine. Here in an environment that invites speculation on whether they will even be playing outdoor baseball 10 years from now in this part of the country, at this time of year, these newest professional White Sox players have their commitment to a routine put to a fairly strict test ... of sorts.
"You know the tests in the bathroom with the hydration? Could definitely do a better job with that. I've been consistently in the yellow recently, so I've got to fix that," Fauske admitted, with a description astute readers can probably piece together. "Being in cooler environments, you can get away with not being focused with that stuff. But here, if you're off for a day, you'll feel it. You'll go out there and you'll feel like shit. There's no way around it. It forces you to be super locked in with that."
"First thing I come here, before I eat breakfast, I'll go to the supplement room and take all my vitamins," Hodge said. "I'll get my electrolytes in for breakfast and before I go out on the field I take another thing of electrolytes."
Like his progress synchronizing his upper body move with the new leg kick added to his swing this year, Hodge's vitamin intake isn't measurable for public analysis just yet. Player development types are quick to dismiss draft year pro results as particularly meaningful, and now they can't be interpreted at all. But with their new biomechanical resources, the White Sox are supposed to be better suited to recognize what adjustments need to be made without the benefit of results to parse. With adding strength such a central project for all these hitting prospects, few environments allow the team to wield more control over their conditioning than providing their first two meals of the day at Camelback Ranch.
And with Arizona as the backdrop, just making sure the progress made here sticks requires a professional level of commitment.
"You miss a day of eating, or you miss lunch or something, you might lose like, three pounds," Fauske said. "Every day it's hot tub, cold tub, seeing the trainers, getting soft tissue work done, hydration, all this stuff. If you're not locked in with all those things, you're going to be falling behind and definitely losing some physical gains. For example, going out to the field and you're already tired because you're not taking care of yourself the day before.
"It all adds up."
