Wrangling 2026 White Sox Prospects: When injuries interfered

After spending Thursday of Prospect Week looking at White Sox prospects who couldn't have been asked to do more with their 2025 seasons, we now turn our attention to players whose ambitions were delayed by physical issues.

Noah Schultz: Patellar tendinitis

Once it was revealed that Schultz had been pitching through knee troubles with his plant leg, his inconsistency in Birmingham became a lot easier to understand. It previous didn’t make sense that he couldn’t carve up the Southern League, given that he had no problem overwhelming Double-A hitters for four innings a start in 2024, and lesser lefties like Shane Murphy, Jake Palisch and Tyler Schweitzer were running sub-2.00 ERAs this time around. His walk rate more doubled overnight, and righties started hammering more of the strikes he did throw. 

How much comfort such an explanation provides depends on the viewing angle. On one hand, it’s a more satisfactory explanation than the leading pre-disclosure theory that Schultz lost the feel for his very good slider in pursuit of adding a cutter before it was absolutely necessary for success. On the other, he’s now been hampered by injury in two of what were supposed to be three professional seasons, which lends credence to the idea that pitching is a thing most people should avoid doing, but especially those who are 82 inches tall.

Schultz was still able to go to the mound 17 times for 73 innings, so it wasn’t a lost year in terms of workload and experience. It just didn’t give anybody any inclination about what’s going to be the third pitch that enhances the sinker-slider base. Is it going to be the cutter? The changeup? I liked the four-seamer he used up in the zone at the end of the 2024 season, but the parties involved didn’t seem as enamored with it. — JM

Mason Adams: Tommy John surgery

Eighteen different pitchers started a game for the White Sox in 2025, or nine pitchers if you discount openers. Either way, Adams would’ve likely been in line for some major league action had he been able to pick up where he left off in 2024, when he threw 120 innings of sub-3.00 ERA ball for Birmingham and Charlotte that reinforced his breakout season across three levels in 2023. He was active in spring training — perhaps too active. He departed his fourth outing with what was called a right elbow flexor strain, and fears were ultimately confirmed when he underwent Tommy John surgery at the start of April.

At the risk of being a Pierce Downer, complete recoveries from Tommy John surgeries can’t be assumed, and that preface feels necessary because Adams kinda needs to come back with everything he had. He works with a 91-93 mph fastball, so he’d be ill-advised to lose even a tick, especially since the addition of a sinker and a harder slider powered his emergence. And while his changeup isn’t a remarkable pitch on his own, he still needs the feel for it to complete his kitchen sink approach. He was invited to major league camp despite being only 10 months removed from the procedure, and it’d be great if it reflected an ahead-of-schedule recovery, rather than something more perfunctory. – JM

Ky Bush: Tommy John surgery

Bush was ahead of Adams in line for depth starts, and then he was ahead of him in line for Tommy John surgery, going under the knife shortly after camp opened. Unlike Adams, Bush was already on the 40-man roster and saw some major league action, so he was able to check off a couple of career milestones before the interruption. But given that Bush looked run down during his unsuccessful cup of coffee before he was shut down at the end of 2024 with a triceps strain, it would’ve been helpful to understand how his freshest stuff fared against major league hitters. That determination will have to wait. – JM

Javier Mogollón: Hamstring

In retrospect, falling passionately in love with a pint-sized infield prospect who played like every inning like it was the bus crash scene in The Fugitive was bound to end in something like his full-season debut being waylaid by repeated hamstring strains. That he was limited to 51 games at Kannapolis, possibly from struggles to mediate his effort level, is a tragedy on multiple fronts. Firstly because it limited the time he got to spend as Caleb Bonemer’s double play partner, and every top prospect should have a li'l sidekick, in my professional opinion. And because there were some real gains in Mogollon’s approach and contact skills from the wild and unrefined ACL version of his game the year before, and he only has a middling .220/.347/.387 line in Low-A to show for it. – JF

Aldrin Batista: Elbow stress fracture

The White Sox haven’t produced a homegrown Dominican starting pitcher of consequence in my lifetime and … Batista can’t break that drought because he was acquired from the Dodgers for IFA pool room money. 

But it would still be novel for the Sox to matriculate an arm lacking obvious star traits up through every level of affiliated ball and into their rotation all the same, especially after the dominant player development engine in the sport had already cut bait. And after a scintillating five-start cameo in High-A (1.04 in 26 innings, 29-to-6 strikeout-to-walk ratio) to close 2024, Batista was wowing scouts last spring with his 95 mph low-slot sinking fastball and his command of it. Instead of building upon that momentum, Batista fractured his elbow in his first game of the season, missed four and a half months, and never looked in sync again; be it in rehab outings, the Dash bullpen or winter ball. He should have a clean slate of health entering 2026 and will get a bump up to Double-A Birmingham for his troubles, but that’s only because the Sox need to make a 40-man protection decision on him this coming November and might move him to the pen sooner as a result. – JF

Blake Larson: Tommy John surgery

They all have scars on their elbows now, or are going to eventually. It’s both an existential crisis for the game, and a big ol’ nothingburger in terms of Larson’s individual development that he blew out his UCL before spring last year, lest you feel the Cannon Ballers were 60 innings from a lanky teenager away from Carolina League supremacy. High school video of Larson quickly looks like someone way too skinny to maintain mechanical consistency while throwing in the mid-90s, and a sort of funky, chock-full-of-moving-parts delivery that no one will miss if it has to get rebuilt from the ground up alongside a year in a pro strength program. Presuming the unique low slot angle and mid-90s heat return in working order, this is still a nice development arm who, with the way Gregory Santos has pulled the goalie in Seattle, has a real chance to deliver the White Sox a trade victory simply by scoring an empty netter. – JF

Nick McLain: Back

A third-round pick in the 2024 draft, McLain was taken right around the time awesome college players with hazy pro projections start coming off the board. He was a .327/.435/.658 hitter at Arizona State, but mostly played right field with the Sun Devils and isn’t much bigger than his brother Matt, who has had his own injury troubles with the Reds. That lends his profile a ‘tweener feel, and based off a tiny pro sample, McLain will really need his power to show up because he has the in-zone whiffs of a slugger. But it truly is a sample too tiny to be relevant, because McLain has played 13 professional games due to protracted back issues, which is far more disquieting both for in the short and long term than anything he’s actually gotten to do on the field. – JF

Casey Saucke: Tommy John surgery

Hitting prospects losing an entire season to TJ, which usually has to be coupled with the disastrous timing of an elbow injury in spring to eat the entire season of a position player, bring to mind Micker Adolfo and Corey Zangari. Both were flawed sluggers who needed every developmental rep they could get their hands on, and once fate took a whole season from them, it was hard to imagine either of them ever making up the deficit. Saucke, a college teammate of Kyle Teel at Virginia, isn’t quite cut from the same cloth in terms of his hurdles to being a useful corner outfielder. But he entered pro ball with a reputation for chasing, and was waving out of the strike zone at Lenyn Sosa levels after being vaulted from the ACC to High-A in his draft year. It’s kind of hard to stand in on a Trajekt machine with an elbow brace on, but 2026 will show whether Saucke found some ways to work on his game or was frozen in place by injury. – JF

Juan Carela: Tommy John surgery

Carela was a fringy choice for 40-man roster protection after the 2024 season, as he’d barely reached Double-A as a starter, but perhaps his workload as a starter and the effectiveness of his slider against righties made him a potential selection for typical Rule 5 long relief work. Either way, he didn’t spend much time on it. He was optioned from major league camp in early March, underwent Tommy John surgery later in the month, and then was released in early April to regain the 40-man spot. The gambit worked for the White Sox, who were able to re-sign him for a minor league deal within 10 days. He’ll be in a similar boat as Batista, except he’s more than a year older, so there might be even more incentive to put him in relief, rather than work him all the way back when his starting potential is shakier.. – JM

Alexander Albertus: Left leg

Miguel Vargas recovered from his visible despair to establish himself as a viable major leaguer while Erick Fedde traveled in the other direction and Michael Kopech can't get his knee right, so that particular White Sox deadline deal has saved a lot of face. Good thing, because the White Sox acquired Albertus in the package despite being sidelined with a stress reaction in his left tibia, and a full season later, he still hasn’t played a full game in the White Sox organization. There were signs that it was more complicated than it seemed …

… but the medical mystery deepened with how he was deployed in 2025. Albertus finally appeared in a game in early June. In fact, he played in eight ACL White Sox games, and he played third base in all of them, rather than the customary DH appearances for rehabbing players. However, he never played in back-to-back games, nor did he play a complete game. Despite this ostensibly gentle return to baseball activity, Albertus returned to the shelf after two and a half weeks, and spent the rest of the season there.

The missed time changes the framing a lot. He was 19 years old and figuring out Low-A when the White Sox acquired him; now he’s 21 and hasn’t yet succeeded in A-ball. At least Jeral Perez is still humming along, exactly as advertised. We’ll get to him on Saturday. – JM

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