After spending the first two days of Prospect Week sifting through White Sox prospects whose futures aren't easy to chart due to limited, unflattering or nonexistent track records, let's cleanse the non-Peyton palate with a slate of prospects whose 2025 seasons were unambiguous successes. Past performances don't guarantee future results, of course, but they make the uncertainty more enjoyable to ponder.
Braden Montgomery
Given that Montgomery was drafted in the first round off a devastating broken ankle that ended his collegiate career, there were a lot of ways his 2025 season could go. Hitting .270/.360/.444 over 517 plate appearances across three levels, then following it up with a successful stint in the Arizona Fall League, feels like a 70th-percentile outcome. You'd like to see a little more home run power (just 12 in 121 games), and you'd like to see fewer than 130 strikeouts, but in terms of how he looked, moved and produced, he resembled the well-rounded right fielder that warranted the 12th-overall pick in 2024.
From here, it's hard to know whether seeing Montgomery in the context of the Birmingham lineup is more helpful for understanding his considerable set of tools, or more detrimental for properly assessing their risk-reward ratio. Among a sea of players who had to scratch and claw their way on base and then around them, Montgomery's build, bat speed and contact quality all made him look like a major leaguer on a rehab stint relative to the Barons around him. It also makes it easier to ignore the looming threat of his swing-and-miss issues, which resulted in a contact rate that came up short of 70 percent, and a strikeout rate that climbed from 23 percent in Kannapolis to 29 percent at Double-A.
The physical ability is there, the work ethic is there, and while it'd be great if he could avoid breaking bones in his lower extremities at the tail end of seasons, he's otherwise been able to post, so he's only fighting a one-front war. Theoretically, those can be won. -- JM
Caleb Bonemer
Bonemer’s production in 2025 was like Bonemer himself: sturdy.
Outside of one midsummer lull, an acceptable outage considering the 19-year-old Michigander played more baseball than ever in hotter weather than he’s used to, Bonemer’s production was rock solid for a guy who hadn’t played a recorded game until opening the season in Kannapolis. He hit .281/.400/.458 with 10 homers and 27 stolen bases over 96 games, then tossed in a multi-homer game while rounding out the last two weeks in Winston-Salem. For his efforts, he was named Carolina League MVP, the first minor league MVP for a White Sox prospect in 12 years. The last one was Marcus Semien.
Nothing about Bonemer’s game is throwing red flags at this point. The strikeout rate is acceptable, especially since it’s accompanied by encouraging contact rates (he generally doesn’t whiff on strikes). He’s not a shortstop long-term, and he’s not somebody who’s going to threaten 30 steals, but he’s ranging and running while he can. You’d like to see a little more power, and the simplicity of his swing doesn’t necessarily seem geared up to deliver a surplus of it, but then again, he yet to play a game as a 20-year-old. There’s a chance one of these vulnerabilities will flare up on him as he faces tougher competition, but given that this is all new to him, he could just as well tighten up his game and close some gaps. -- JM
Tanner McDougal
For organizations that have a longer history of hitting on prep pitching prospects, McDougal’s progression probably reads as pretty typical. He blew out his elbow soon after the draft, which they pretty much all do at some point these days. He spent some time in the low minors struggling to throw strikes, but now he’s right on time, reaching and succeeding in Double-A in his age-22 season and providing the team with an easy 40-man roster protection decision. That he seemingly got very good all at once, striking out 136 hitters in 113 ⅓ innings, is the benefit of targeting big guys who throw really hard and spin the ball really well, and trusting the rest will get figured out along the way.
While McDougal never spent much time getting mentioned for top-10 lists before this past season, even in sitting high-90s and piling up whiffs with two distinct and above-average breaking balls, he’s just doing the stuff he had flashed previously more frequently than ever. Even the part where he ended the year spiking into the triple-digits and breathing fire in a playoff start in Birmingham mirrored how he ended the previous year in Kannapolis. There’s been a slider grip change, some adjustments to his delivery posture and someone with a kinesiology degree can maybe explain all the stuff that McDougal did during his time training at Cressey Sports Performance that makes him more consistent. But he’s always had big stuff and it just took some time to get it on track.
At SoxFest, McDougal discussed how it’s hard for him to turn over a changeup the way he used to prior to TJ, both making him sound like a candidate for a seam effects version of the pitch from Brian Bannister, and giving shape to a hurdle he faces for getting lefties out enough to stay as a starter. But that he’s getting top-100 consideration around the industry even with unsettled questions about his role speaks to the brute power that’s been unlocked here. -- JF
Christian Oppor
It’s something that he’s trotted out more often in explaining why he thinks Noah Schultz and Hagen Smith deserve patience, but Brian Bannister repeatedly reminds that statistically, hard-throwing left-handers tend to have higher ceilings, have more durable value and have more success than any other pitcher type. Well, Oppor is a left-hander who can throw 100 mph, so he’s probably going to be pretty good. Sure enough, he just struck out 116 over 87 ⅔ innings across two levels of A-ball.
Oppor throws a rather funky 100 mph. He has a short stride so the effective velocity is actually a touch lower. You should watch the way his front foot lands in his delivery because it’s unusual, as he keeps it pointed toward the dugout on the first base side and cross fires around his front leg, and it’s more of a two-seam shape, but his weirdness seems to be helping more than it’s hurting. It’s crucial to remember that fastball velocity is not just important for those pitches in and of themselves, but how sped up hitters are while trying to process Oppor’s nasty straight change and sweeping slider, both of which piled up miss rates that made it look like A-ball hitters were worried about being on time for 100 mph.
The relief risk that gets slapped onto McDougal can mostly just be copied for Oppor. Both are more about overwhelming opposing hitters than dotting the corners at this point, and Oppor (11.5 percent last year) has yet to produce good walk rates yet. It’s anecdotal, but when I first pulled up video of Oppor’s delivery to my FanGraphs colleague Eric Longenhagen while making the case that the left-hander deserved a top-100 grade, he watched a few pitches before exclaiming “this delivery looks athletic as f---.”
Between that and being a left-hander who throws 100 mph, it seems like he’ll be all right. -- JF
Sam Antonacci
Talk to anybody in the White Sox system about Antonacci, and all you’ll get are raves. Perhaps that’s because they’re a little afraid of him. Antonacci would kill or be killed to get on base, and he won’t ask for clarification before grabbing a helmet. He played in three different contexts over the course of the 2025 season, and his OBP kept climbing, starting in Winston-Salem (.425) before advancing to Birmingham (.435) to the Arizona Fall League (.505). He cleared 600 plate appearances in total, and only stopped playing because the schedule ended.
It’s fair to wonder how far he can take it, especially since his defense at multiple positions is merely serviceable. While the home run total (five over 519 PAs) was probably slightly suppressed by the oppressive environment at Regions Field, it’d be a triumph if he ever hit 10, because his flat, short swing defaults to “pesky.” He got plunked a whopping 35 times over 116 games, and that number should come down against better pitching. He stole 48 bases in 58 attempts, but more out of sheer determination than foot speed. A lot of his minor league success comes from finding a crack in the opposition and throwing himself into it. When there are fewer deficiencies to exploit, can he be patient enough to wait for the opportunities? Even better, can he create more of the damage himself?
Phrase these as open questions rather than doubts because he’s wired to overachieve. His most realistic path to major league contributions is a platoon with Chase Meidroth so red-assed that it’d make a baboon do a double-take. -- JM
Shane Murphy
Murphy’s 1.66 ERA was the second-lowest in Minor League Baseball, behind only Jonah Tong’s 1.43 ERA for Double-A Binghamton and Triple-A Syracuse in the Mets system. Most of Murphy’s work came with Birmingham, where he posted a 1.38 ERA over 20 starts and served as an unexpectedly relevant point of comparison for Hagen Smith. For instance, Smith only completed five innings on four occasions over the course of the entire 2025 season, while Murphy sailed through five in each of his last 17 starts for the Barons. Another one: Smith walked more batters in his first four games (16) than Murphy issued in 20 (15). Basically, Murphy used a favorable pitching environment to spend the entire season daring Southern League hitters to get him in trouble, because he wasn’t going to do it himself. They never could.
Of course, Murphy made it look unusually simple. It’s not just that he can throw strikes, but he can throw strikes while adding two more pitches that also routinely find the zone. A sinker and a revamped cutter broadened his arsenal to a half-dozen offerings, so he’s able to access all quadrants with sequences that Double-A hitters don’t often see. Given that his fastball hovers around 90, he needs to have every trick at his disposal. He ended the season with seven walks over 14 ⅔ innings in Charlotte, which foreshadows the limitations of mere strike-throwing at higher levels. That he went unprotected and unselected in the Rule 5 draft reinforces the doubts that future success will be so easily attained. Still, when it came to 2025, he could only achieve the task at hand, and he aced it. -- JM
Luis Reyes
Back in 2023, Reyes was a rare $700,000 foray into pitching from the Dominican Republic from the last international scouting regime, and also somehow, the highest-dollar signing of that year’s White Sox class. The encouraging addition from an untapped market had a caveat: Reyes pitched for a travel team as an amateur that played against stateside competition in Florida, giving the Sox rare access to a type of talent they usually struggled to draw. For Reyes to complete a healthy 87-inning campaign in A-ball as a 19-year-old this past year, with peripherals a half-run better than his 4.34 ERA due to his reliability in throwing strikes (9.6 percent walk rate) is already a level of IFA pitching success the Sox have scarcely enjoyed, as humble as that may seem.
If the manner in which the Sox frittered away fellow teenaged Dominican prospect right-hander Yhoiker Fajardo is the wound that just won’t heal for you, Reyes at least seems cut from a similar cloth. Both have quickly developed enough lower-body strength to repeat their delivery to a precocious degree, allowing them to effectively cover up how much they’re already pitching around a vulnerable fastball in A-ball. Reyes sits 91-94 mph and has touched 96, and maybe there’s a little projection left given how young he is, but neither his four-seamer nor his more commonly used two-seamer misses bats. The command he’d need to develop to make a back-end starter profile is a steep hill to climb, but his performance has earned him the right to keep trying, and speaks well to his future ability to throw his slider for enough strikes to be effective in relief. -- JF
Grant Umberger
Anybody who’s seen “Bull Durham” or is aware of Jordan Danks understands that a minor league record can often be a backhanded compliment, but given that Umberger was an undrafted free agent out of Toledo who couldn’t count on any fixed role for any minor league affiliate, he’s free to regard the Kannapolis single-season strikeout record as a real feather in his cap.
He opened the season in extended spring training and didn’t get a chance to start games for the Cannon Ballers until mid-May. When he fanned out 11 Columbia Fireflies over six shutout innings in his third start on May 22, that more or less cemented his place in the Kannapolis rotation. He finished the year with a 2.56 ERA and 113 strikeouts against 118 baserunners over 102 innings, and made his final start of the year in Winston-Salem.
Between being tall, left-handed, old for the level and unheralded, Umberger is something of a poor man’s Murphy, who himself is only rich in spirit. The comparison only goes so far, though. Umberger is closer to average velocity, and between that and his slider, he limited left-handed batters to just two extra-base hits over 138 plate appearances all season. There’s a potential relief path open to him if and when he stops making his manager’s job an easy one on the days he starts. -- JM
