The White Sox have the league's worst offense and have been held scoreless for the last 20 innings, so to that end, Noah Schultz isn't going to help them much, unless he's suddenly learned how to play the outfield and hit right-handed.
Schultz will address the shortage of high-upside players on the major league roster, however, and not just because he stands 6 feet and 10 inches tall.
As first reported by Elijah Evans of FutureSox, Sox Machine has confirmed the White Sox will be calling up Schultz for his MLB debut on Tuesday, supplementing their 26-man roster with arguably their top pitching prospect, and inarguably their best-performing one.
Schultz, the White Sox's first-round draft pick in 2022, has pitched in three games for Charlotte, and the body of work accurately reflects the dominance. He's 3-0 with a 1.29 ERA, sure, but he's allowed just six baserunners against 19 strikeouts over 14 innings, and he's only throwing about 12 pitches per inning because he's throwing a whopping 72 percent of them for strikes.
Friday marked the point in the 2026 calendar where prospects could be called up without using an entire year of service time, but given the issues Schultz had at Charlotte in 2025 -- a surge in his walk rate and a sudden struggle retiring right-handed hitters -- there wasn't any debate about having him open the season in Triple-A to understand how much of the trouble was attributable to the patellar tendinitis, and whether he'd added enough to his sinker-slider combo to make him less reliant on the defense behind him.
The 22-year-old has answered every question to the best of his ability, and as quickly as possible.
Walk rate? Down from 13.8 percent to 4.3 percent, and with no HBPs, either.
Righties? Their OPS is down from .890 in 2025 to .319 in 32 plate appearances this year.
Pitches? He's found the ears on the cutter and reintroduced the four-seam fastball up in the zone, and he's throwing a changeup with confidence, too, even if he isn't getting enough opportunities to practice it.
Given Schultz's Statcast data showed success -- or at least a lack of damage -- with every offering, I asked Charlotte pitching coach Scott Aldred in Nashville last week whether he considered Schultz a five-pitch pitcher.
"He is," Aldred said. "If you classify the sinker and four-seamer as different pitches, then yeah, he's [got] all five."
The only question Schultz hasn't been able to address regards his workload. He set a career high with 91⅔ innings in 2024 when including his postseason start for Birmingham, but he threw only 73 innings in 2025 due to the knee issue, and he's been limited to a max of five innings a start thus far in 2026. He topped out at six innings and 93 pitches for a single start in 2025 when he was working far less efficiently, and for what it's worth, he said after his start in Nashville that he wasn't told the fifth inning was his final one, so he hasn't been emptying the tank at the approach of a predetermined finish line.
Schultz appears to be the answer to the question of which pitcher would step into the vacancy the Sox created when they optioned Shane Smith to Charlotte. Schultz won't pitch on Smith's exact day, which is Sunday, but the White Sox are covering it with Grant Taylor opening for Jonathan Cannon, who will be recalled from Charlotte. An off day on Monday follows, and if Schultz makes his MLB debut on Tuesday in Chicago against the Rays, everybody else in the rotation will next take their turns with an extra two days of rest.
