Everson Pereira is another White Sox post-hype project, and probably their most extreme yet

The White Sox are not hyping up outfielder Everson Pereira as a major acquisition, which is probably prudent for a 24-year-old with a career .146/.227/.215 batting line and a 38.6 percent strikeout rate through 50 games in the majors.

The team's press release made no mention of his former top-100 prospect status, as he wouldn't be the first Yankee minor leaguer whose hype outpaced results. Since Baseball America went out on a limb for the toolsy Venezuelan pre-2024, the Yankees flipped Pereira at the 2025 trade deadline for utility infielder José Caballero, before the Rays packaged him in a four-player deal with the White Sox on the league's dedicated day for 40-man roster housekeeping.

The animating purpose for both those trades is also the reason Pereira could easily wind up providing the least production of the three players the White Sox acquired on Tuesday: He is out of minor league options and will have to be placed on waivers if he doesn't make the Opening Day roster next spring.

At present, though, the White Sox's crop of outfielders on the 40-man roster makes Pereira's path to a spot look pretty attainable.

Luis Robert Jr., the most established mainstay, is still available in trade if anyone wants to match the Sox's view of his value. Andrew Benintendi has defensive workload limitations. Mike Tauchman is coming off knee surgery and the Sox haven't committed to tendering an offer for his final year of arbitration. Derek Hill is career reserve who was claimed off waivers in the final week of the season, and while Brooks Baldwin quietly hit pretty well in the second half (.253/.310/.459), he's been tagged as a super-utility player whose outfield defense could be one of the bigger flaws at this point.

All of this, alongside their dearth of near-ready outfield prospects outside of Braden Montgomery, has created a real need for the Sox to find use for the literally thousands of plate appearances their outfield corners will soak up next year, to say nothing of some league scouts who still feel Pereira can play some center if and when needed.

A veteran platoon of Tauchman and Austin Slater was a cheap way to piece together serviceable production last year, and Michael A. Taylor met expectations as a veteran fourth outfielder, but rebuilding teams like to find ways to develop future contributors even when the farm system isn't producing worthy candidates. Since prospects on the caliber of Montgomery can cost literally a Cy Young-level pitcher to acquire and the White Sox are running light on those, they have been more frequently found acquiring post-hype players; stagnated former top prospects whose development is stalled until they can find somewhere that offers sustained big league playing time.

The South Side is not an island, but has still been a home for misfit toys of recent.

Miguel Vargas, a former consensus top-50 prospect who couldn't break through as a regular on a loaded Dodgers team, is the central example White Sox officials would cite. Curtis Mead is a similar project whose trajectory is currently in a less certain place, and while both of them were more ballyhooed as prospects and more productive in big league cameos than Pereira has been, he represents a similar effort to use an unfinished roster as a means of giving opportunity to talent that other teams have run out of time for.

As much as I struggled to offer Josh a clear takeaway from Chris Getz's comments at the GM meetings on Monday's podcast, acquiring Pereira and Tanner Murray might have driven home a theme. While the White Sox have made clear on-field progress over the last two years, they are still shopping for ways to effectively use their big league roster to revive fallen prospects. The lack of fanfare for Pereira stands out because in previous incarnations of the franchise, or if he had been acquired so much as a year earlier, it's easy to see him drawing some strategically worded plaudits.

Pereira hit 23 home runs in 421 combined plate appearances across Triple-A and the majors last season, and has the plus raw power and bat speed to match. He's right-handed only, but combined with the speed and athleticism to at least moonlight in center, Pereira's physical tools are almost as rare for the organization's outfield group as Montgomery's, but weighed down by three years of watching his hit tool fail against upper-level competition.

Pereira is a career .271/.362/.519 hitter at Triple-A, but even discounting his big league results, he whiffed at a rate in the high minors that essentially no one has success with at the highest level.

Pereira's chase rates have consistently been sub-30 percent and he earns praise for the quality of his at-bats, which lends some hope that he can eventually refine his approach around the inherent swing-and-miss in his game. But his swing path is long and stiff to the point where all his hard contact comes below the belt with his hands extended, and the only guys who miss on the pitches in the zone as much as Pereira are essentially perennial All-Star power hitters or players who have already whiffed their way out of the majors.

Even a successful version of Pereira will live on the extremes of an acceptable strikeout rate, but even that would require a level of contact rate improvement that any organization would envy, just as the White Sox are trying to refashion their hitting instruction into a strength.

So while Pereira -- and also Tanner Murray, whose decidedly less boom-or-bust profile is less exciting to writing about but was similarly blocked in Tampa -- represents the type of project the White Sox should be undertaking in a season that otherwise doesn't tease the imagination, he also is saddled with significant risk of flaming out hard enough that giving him extended runway might be unpalatable.

In other words, the Sox are right to keep quiet on Pereira for now. It would only grant them more license to shout from the rooftops if this small deal actually bears fruit.