Some of the things White Sox prospect Sam Antonacci says will sound a little extreme at times.
"The way I look at it is if you’re in an 0-2 count and they throw a curveball at your feet and you’re getting out of the way, that shows me you don’t really want to win too much," Antonacci said, expressing gratitude toward the mindset driven home by his time at Coastal Carolina, which he feels led to his 35 hit-by-pitches and a related .433 OBP in his first full professional season.
It's more so that he says it not with rising emotion in his voice, but cool matter-of-factness. The occasion of this Zoom call with media is Antonacci's pending arrival at Arizona Fall League, and it's a curiosity how the 22-year-old's single-minded devotion to the name on the front of his jersey will mesh with the environs of a prospect showcase league. But Antonacci's manner of being seems like it will survive the change in environment.
"I’m just worried about what workout I have tomorrow or what I’m eating for dinner tonight," Antonacci said when asked if he knew a lot of other players at the AFL. "I have no idea [what position I'll play] right now. I know I’ll play wherever. Tell me to put some gear on and I’ll go back there and catch our pitchers. I don’t really care, wherever. Just happy to keep playing baseball against some of the best competition and even better weather."
The way Antonacci's work has been scattered across the diamond and his attitude about it, with the White Sox indicating his occasional days at shortstop will only grow more rare going forward, suggests someone tilting toward a utility future. That wouldn't be a bad outcome for a fifth-round pick, spent on a skills-over-athleticism former Division II player who put himself on the map while manning third base in the Sun Belt conference despite not hitting for power.
But Antonacci is more keenly aware of his humble origins, and sees his lengthy and varied resume as all a series of stops he's taken something from and left well behind.
"At the end of the day, I don’t want to be known as someone who played in the Arizona Fall League. I want to be known as an All-Star and a World Series champion," Antonacci said. "Definitely not an attainable goal when I was a little bit younger, especially coming out of high school. Not a lot of D-I interest. Once I got into JUCO ball, I started to see little success at Coastal Carolina and then come to pro ball, and I kind of realized it’s more attainable than I thought. It’s exciting because I know what I need to get to where I want to be. It’s just a matter of work and time and effort I have to put in."
"In a perfect world and a perfect lineup, you'll have [Rikuu] Nishida leading off, [William] Bergolla hitting second and then six more Sam Antonaccis," said Double-A Birmingham manager Guillermo Quiroz. "It's a guy with high baseball IQ, plays the game hard, always trying to take that extra base."
Clarity isn't available as to whether Quiroz wants six Antonaccis, or six additional ones on top of the existing one, but his interest in buying in bulk doesn't remove his concerns about the sustainability of his OBP inflation via HBP scheme.
"It's going to get tougher from here on, so you better start getting out of the way," Quiroz warned.
Antonacci hit .292/.435/.381 in his 49 games at Double-A Birmingham to close out his 2025 regular season, with yet another uptick in his rate of plunkings offsetting the power leakage that came with moving to Regions Field. Despite the success, he has a notion that his incredibly Barons-coded style of play with require evolution when he leaves Birmingham behind. Just as he credits a draft-year cameo at Kannapolis for opening his eyes to what he needed to survive in pro ball, the outsized nature of Antonacci's ambitions is usually matched by how much work he asserts is still left to do.
Listed at 6 feet even, which is more likely to be corrected downward than move in the other direction, projectability wasn't a quality attributed to Antonacci coming out of the draft. Yet he remains steadfast that adding strength, bat speed, and eventually power production are all ongoing projects that he has optimism for. At his contact and chase rates, even 10-homer power would put Antonacci in range of the starting second baseman ceiling that scouting director Mike Shirley projected for him out of the draft. Traditionally, it's hard to incorporate impact swings into such a contact-oriented approach, but Antonacci remains confident about its eventuality, even if he has mixed feelings about the initial efforts.
"Toward the end of the season, I wasn’t necessarily a fan of my results," Antonacci said. "I think I was getting a little tired toward the end and that’s something to take note on and prepare better in the offseason to know what I need to do better to last a full season. That’s mainly on me and only on me, to be honest. It’s a good learning curve, and that’s why I’m hoping I kind of laid the foundation for where I need to be."
By the end of this season, Antonacci has started getting name-checked by the likes of general manager Chris Getz and player development director Paul Janish, and not merely in the context of directing attention toward the Southern League champion Barons and away from the 102-loss White Sox.
"if we were having this call 12 months ago, right, we would all just have said, 'Interesting player. He plays hard, et cetera.'" Janish said. "But he's put himself on the map."
Even at this early juncture of his career, Antonacci's name has frequently been paired with the phrase "will have to prove it at every level." The obvious impact tools and physicality that drove decisions to put the likes of Colson Montgomery and Grant Taylor in the majors at the sight of their first sustained upper minors hot streak will never be present with Antonacci, who will constantly look like he might be at his ceiling until he chips away and forges an opening to a new level of play.
Missed time with a broken finger is ostensibly the reason Antonacci is heading to Phoenix to see if his game applies to the polar opposite of the run environment in which he just thrived. But a player who can't overwhelm his competition with his physical gifts can't afford to have stylistic limitations to where he can thrive, so while the AFL scans as an odd fit for Antonacci until he shows he can conquer it, that only sounds like threatening him with a good time.
"I don’t think by any means there’s one skill set that I have that is way better than everybody else’s," Antonacci said. "It’s just every tool set that I have, I do pretty good. I like to say I’m a five-tool player and that’s what I work on. I don’t work on hitting every day, I don’t work on running every day, I do everything every day."
