White Sox notes: Kyle Teel chasing a higher ceiling on both sides of the ball

PHOENIX -- The White Sox catching situation is kind of like any spring training position battle. There's no benefit for management to call the race when the guy in second place might very well still end up the eventual long-term winner, but it should be possible to handicap a favorite if you're listening to the way people with the team are talking.

It's just that it might take multiple seasons to play out.

"With Kyle [Teel], the message that I've given to him is that he might be the most athletic person at that position in the league," said bench coach Walker McKinven, who is overseeing the major league catchers this season after years of doing the same in Milwaukee. "He can put himself in unique positions. He can make unique bets on a pitch-to-pitch basis that others cannot because of athleticism."

A late-season upturn saw Teel post a perfectly average zero framing runs saved last year, whereas Edgar Quero posted the lowest shadow called strike rate in the league as a rookie. Quero is doing anything but taking his framing struggles lying down, but the distinction is less about they're performing now than the assessment that Teel's flexibility offers a higher ceiling, and more margin for error in his setups, that White Sox coaches are trying to maximize.

"[McKinven has] helped me a ton with body positions and where we're setting setups and everything," Teel said. "He's done a great job with us, and we’ll keep going.”

Similarly, it's one thing that Teel hit .288/.376/.457 after the All-Star break last season, with all eight of his major league home runs coming in the second half. But Teel's larger flashes of above-average raw power (his 113.7 mph max exit velocity last year is solidly over the 110.7 league average), encouraging plate discipline (23.6 percent chase rate), and a two-strike approach that has kept his strikeout rates below what his raw contact skill might suggest, all indicate the the stable base of an annually productive offensive catcher.

A former Sox player rolling through town last season remarking on his old team's young talent hovered on Teel and said "nice swing ... kinda skinny," and so it passes muster that the second-year catcher's claims of adding 20 pounds in the offseason was just about better preparing his body for the grind of a six-month campaign. But it's also given rise to Ryan Fuller and the rest of the Sox's hitting infrastructure envisioning a season where Teel accesses his power and repeats his mechanics with less effort.

Or as Fuller might contend, it's less about envisioning and about actually seeing Teel show improved bat speed with less movement in a biometrical scan, and witnessing Teel actively exposing his swing to the ways big league pitchers got him out last year.

"There's some swing mechanics he's worked on to be a little bit more consistent, so that he's not fouling balls off, but able to end the at-bat if he gets a mistake early in the count," Fuller said. "This guy is our Trajekt champion. He wants to see the nastiest stuff. He wants to see the fastball at the top, the breaking ball at the bottom, and he has a bat path that is now going to be able to cover all parts of the zone."

"It's such a great resource that we use, and kind of a boring answer, but the Trajekt is just phenomenal," Teel said. "Just repping that more often is huge.”

Teel departs on March 1 to join Team Italy, which will open up plenty of time for Quero, who feels he's loading in his hips quicker than last year and more competitive against fastballs. But Teel should feel pretty secure about the spot that's waiting for him upon return.

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Will Venable and the White Sox aren't making any pronouncements about the pitching staff, but the team is privately conceding this is a more difficult roster battle for a Rule 5 pick to win than last year, when Shane Smith and Mike Vasil combined for 247⅓ innings.

"We’re just taking it day by day and kind of individually want to make sure we’re building a foundation for those guys," Venable said. "When we put this thing together at the end, we’re going to have to make some tough decisions. That’s a few weeks away here now. Just want to make sure we’re supporting these guys to be comfortable in a new organization."

While Alexander Alberto has already worked a scoreless inning as one of many hard-throwers vying for a relief role, 22-year-old right-hander Jedixson Paez (who threw a simulated inning of live at-bats on Monday) is the sort of interesting starter prospect it would have been easier to see getting carried on the last two White Sox rosters.

An extreme strike-throwing (3.9 percent career professional walk rate) if undersized right-hander, Paez entered the 2025 season expecting to quickly vault out of High-A and put himself in contention for a 40-man roster spot, but a late-April calf injury knocked him out for almost four months. That limited Paez to 19⅓ innings the whole season, likely was the culprit for his release point significantly rising, and took him until the offseason to really get right.

"December, that was the the time when I started throwing bullpens and my arm felt good and nothing was bothering me," Paez said through an interpreter. "I understood [that I wasn't protected on the 40-man] because I didn't pitch most of last year. But seeing my name as one of the first picked in the Rule 5 was exciting. It's a good opportunity."

It's a good opportunity for a young pitcher to be around, training with and facing down big league hitters, and Seranthony Domínguez has taken it upon himself to be a mentoring presence. It just also presents a complicated path to a roster spot, such that Paez admits, despite starting all his life, he'd be content to find to land a major league role of any stripe. His low-90s velocity and lack of a standout weapon makes him a unique watch that takes time to appreciate; you won't see him flash a plus slider so much as he'll dot the same quadrant with three different pitch types and yield a slightly off-timed swing in response.

"I learned to do that to differentiate myself from the others," Paez said via interpreter, heaping praise on Red Sox High-A pitching coach Bob Kipper. "Because I'm not a hard-throwing pitcher and the way to distance myself from others is throwing strikes, and throwing strikes repeatedly and consistently. I'm not one of those guys who are going to throw over 95 mph. The way I compete against those guys is just throwing strikes."

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Anthony Kay's Cactus League debut on Tuesday could wind up looking different than the two productive, ground ball-heavy years in Japan that earned him a multi-year contract with the White Sox. But that will have more to do with the competition than Kay himself.

"Those guys over there [in Japan] have a lot of flat swings, so you need something that has a little bit of depth on it, and the four-seam doesn't really play as much over there, so I kind've just gripped a two-seam and started throwing it during catch play, and it started working," said Kay, who is planning to use this spring to calibrate how much he'll need to return to heavily using a traditional four-seam fastball in MLB. "It's something I have to play with in spring training, but obviously four-seams at the top of the zone play a little bit better here. Might have to rely on that a little bit more, maybe use it a little bit more with two strikes. Just something we'll be using a little bit once the games start, see how the hitters react to everything."

Kay is coming off back-to-back seasons in NPB where his strikeout rates hovered barely over 20 percent as a trade-off for a ground-ball rate that was well over 50 percent, but could strike a different balance in the US. More importantly, prior to the last two seasons, the 30-year-old Kay had only put together one prior year of logging over 100 innings, and his more proactive approach to arm maintenance is what he's really expecting to carry over best from Japan.

"Back before I was here, I wasn't really huge on going to the training room, didn't really do too much in there," Kay said. "Going over to Japan, those trainers they really care about you. They kind of force you to go in there. I was able to find a good routine with them over there and hopefully that'll lead to more success over here. I've been in [the White Sox training room] a bunch already. A lot of it is stuff outside the field, [exercises] you can do in your house when you're hanging out, just to make sure you're doing all the right things."