Sitting upper 90s with a pair of hard, diving breaking balls, Tanner McDougal has long looked the part of a meaningful prospect. But in putting together a minor league season of a 3.26 ERA, with 136 strikeouts in 113 ⅓ combined innings and ending his campaign as the rotation anchor for the Southern League champion Barons, the 22-year-old made himself an “automatic” selection for 40-man roster protection by White Sox GM Chris Getz’s description.
Since senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister–who has a whole theory about how barrel-chested righties like McDougal can hide the ball behind their torsos in their delivery–was talking about adding the former fifth round pick to the 40-man back in September, McDougal had reason to suspect this news was coming, but was still “antsy” waiting for the official call. Even if cracking the 40-man roster felt like a “long-tem goal” to McDougal at the start of 2025, he’s already pivoted toward the next checkpoint ahead of his first spring invite to major league camp.
"At this point I'm just trying to do anything I can to help the big league team out; whether that's out of the bullpen, whether that's as a starter, whatever they need, I'm willing to do,” McDougal said. “Obviously of course I want to be a starter, that's just me. That's the ego, is I want to be a starter because I truly believe I'm a starter. But again, whatever it takes to get up there and put that jersey on and get after it in games, that's what I'm willing to do."
After spending the past offseason training at Cressey Sports Performance–he’s already returned this offseason–McDougal’s big six-foot-five frame has been repeating his delivery even better than his full season numbers indicate. Seven scoreless innings of postseason work for the Barons playoff run dropped his Double-A walk rate to 7.5 percent in 55 ⅔ innings. A self-admitted adrenaline junkie who loved rollercoasters as a kid, McDougal is racking up as much of a minor league postseason reputation as one can ever build (16 IP, 1.69 ERA, 26 K), and talks about pitching in high-leverage moments in the kinda cool, kinda scary way that reminds how pro athletes are of a different breed.
“You learn a lot from playing playoff baseball,” McDougal said. “You learn your limits, your teammates' limits.”
That mentality, along with his always dynamic stuff suggests McDougal could shine in relief if that’s the shape his major league debut takes. But his inning workload has been on an upward trajectory since he missed all of 2022 due to Tommy John surgery, and how many big stuff, unproven command types the Sox can turn into proven starters out of the likes of McDougal, Hagen Smith and Christian Oppor could say a lot about their future contention ceiling.
It’s just that now that McDougal and the White Sox have engineered such a turnaround from the professional nadir of getting demoted to Low-A in 2024, it’s easier to submit himself with confidence to whatever the team has in mind.
“The infrastructure is great,” McDougal said.”It's come a long way from where it was when I got into the organization in 2021 to now. I think Brian Bannister has done a great job of kind of getting hands-on with a lot of our guys and really bolstering not only our pitching prospects but our pitching staff on the big league side. I think it's truly starting to show with what we're being able to produce as pitchers, both in the minor leagues and the big leagues."
Duncan Davitt received fewer hints that the White Sox intended to add him to the 40-man roster. His first clue came on Saturday, three days before the deadline, when his Rule 5 status might not exactly have been front of mind.
"I knew that there was like obviously a chance," Davitt told Sox Machine over the phone on Wednesday. "And then actually at my wedding, my agent was there, and he was like, 'Hey, just wanted you to know, I talked to the White Sox, and this is like, if things really move right in the way that we need them to, then there's a decent chance.'"
(To be clear, this conversation happened during the reception.)
Davitt came to the Sox as part of the three-player package the Tampa Bay Rays sent to Chicago for Adrian Houser at the previous deadline that concerned him back in July. He said he had to wait out the possibility of another trade, which Getz alluded to during his Zoom session with reporters on Wednesday, before he could rest easy on Tuesday.
He boasted some traditional hallmarks of a 40-man roster addition, as he's coming off a 152-inning season at the upper levels, with flashes of success over 13 starts at Triple-A. That said, he also wore a 5.40 ERA between his 68⅓ innings between Durham and Charlotte, and he succeeds with a broad five-pitch arsenal, rather than a two-pitch combination classically geared for leverage situations.
Davitt has been working out in Iowa while contributing high school sports coverage -- and a column about his 40-man roster news -- to the Indianola Independent Advocate, the community newspaper his parents own. He and his wife will be moving to Wilmington, N.C. at the end of the month. While Getz said that Davitt can work in relief, he's preparing as a starter on two fronts.
"Right now, a lot of [my offseason] is based on getting stronger," Davitt said. "About halfway through the year, I saw a little bit of a decline in velocity. I don't know if it's super-uncommon, but figuring out why did that velocity dip occur, and how do we kind of get out ahead of it next year, is probably No. 1 for me. When velocity dips down to the low-90s range, stuff becomes a lot less effective for me."
Once he gets back on a mound, No. 2 on the list is an improved changeup. Davitt is a natural supinator who can toggle between a cutter, sweeper and curveball over the course of a start, but an offspeed pitch has proven elusive, and initial efforts to adopt a seam-effects version over the last two months didn't take.
"The changeup I was throwing was this monstrosity of a grip," Davitt said. "I basically threw the ball off the last three fingers; the pinky, ring finger and middle finger, trying to basically take my index finger completely off the ball. [...]
"We're gonna mess around with some some seam-shifted changeups, might touch on the kick change a little bit, see if we can't find something with that. Just see if we can't leverage a little bit more of the movement biases that I have to get a little bit better movement, whether it's either a little bit more depth, maybe more fade, or killing some velocity. Any one of those three improves the changeup, and so anywhere we can find a couple inches or a couple miles an hour is what we're going to try and do."
While the White Sox didn't deal Davitt at the 40-man deadline, the trade they did make brought over a familiar face from the Rays organization in Tanner Murray.
"He's probably one of my favorite people that I've met in pro ball," Davitt said of Murray. Even when he's kind of down, he's still aggressively positive, and he's just been a super awesome guy throughout my process, just as a person.
"But then on top of that, I've always felt like, man, this guy's really good. I don't know how he's not on more people's radars. I think this guy's a big leaguer. ... He's always seemed to be a kind of a sleeper guy where he does everything well, and he's just gonna be solid for you pretty much from the jump."
