Seemingly, there is little anyone could offer about 2023 first-round pick Jacob Gonzalez's initial two and half seasons of professional baseball that he has not already thought himself. In turn, there's no offensive tweak that he hasn't at least considered.
"I've struggled the past two years, and now I've gotta prove to myself and to the White Sox that I'm better than what I have been," Gonzalez said. "I was already struggling. So I was trying to, like, experiment pretty much. I mean, it couldn't get worse."
For a former 15th-overall pick in Triple-A, Gonzalez didn't get a lot of offseason mentions by White Sox executives discussing possible major league options. Caleb Bonemer and Billy Carlson get brought up as future infield mainstays more often. Sam Antonacci was moved to left field to fast-track his ascension to Chicago.
Gonzalez was asked to pick up a first base mitt, so that Chad Pinder could fill him in anywhere on the Charlotte infield.
The downshift in his status was understandable, since Gonzalez's first two full offensive seasons in pro ball -- albeit across different levels and venues -- provided a similarly uninviting picture of a player too polished to get the bat knocked out of his hands, but not explosive enough to help at the highest level.
- 2024: .238/.307/.343 in 572 PA
- 2025: .232/.307/.345 in 539 PA
He will turn 24 soon, is essentially repeating the level at Charlotte and certainly taking advantage of the offensive environment, since eight of Gonzalez's nine home runs have been at Truist Field, with a healthy handful coming in at double-digit exit velocities. But his nine home runs is also already a professional single-season high, and that track record is why Gonzalez's .293/.411/.578 start through 31 games at Triple-A is immediately notable.
He's never been this hot in pro ball and after myriad tweaks, has certainly never sounded this comfortable with his swing, and not for lack of searching.
"When we were having these conversations [with the coaching staff], I was trying to make an emphasis on, I want to feel comfortable, and do what we're trying to do as well," Gonzalez said. "I don't want to do something that's not comfortable, because I've been doing that the past two years and that's not fun, hitting uncomfortable.
"So, we got to this point. I'm very upright compared to how I used to hit. I start with most of my weight in my back leg, which you can't really tell because I'm standing so tall. But most of my weight is back there, and I just stride closed. It allows me to get into my back hip as I'm striding, and I just go from there."
As farm director Paul Janish noted, Gonzalez has also lowered his hands in his setup, which can be credited for altering his swing path toward a career-high 46 percent fly-ball rate. Gonzalez still spreads out to more of a crouch with two strikes, and even a 19.6 percent strikeout rate is a level of swing-and-miss that he only begrudgingly accepts as part of a trade-off.
But Gonzalez felt that his first move in his swing tended to be striding forward and sinking down aggressively, and was curious about hitters who dealt with the same issues. Together with hitting director Ryan Fuller, he looked at Matt Carpenter and Paul Goldschmidt as examples of hitters with similar inclinations, and now has a relaxed, Carpenter-style upright stance.
Some of his alterations came while working with his father Jess during the offseason, and other elements have been added on since spring began. As someone who for years has been cycling through different stances, loading mechanisms and leg kicks to stop himself from spinning off to the first-base side, it's the idea of using his stride to keep his front shoulder closed that Gonzalez hits upon repeatedly as the key that unlocked everything else. Here again he looked for examples, looking at JJ Wetherholt and Alek Thomas as examples of hitters who got their bodies into positions he felt were right for him.
"I just want to be mostly loaded before I go, and then go from 80 percent to 100, rather than go from zero to 100," Gonzalez said. "Making the emphasis to striding closed really sparked something with my direction. This whole offseason I was able to not really worry about direction or anything and just work on what I wanted to work on, which was driving the ball to left-center better. My back elbow, getting it slotted directly rather than swinging with just hands and hitting the ball to left field, I'm able to get some more behind it."
"He's got pop," said farm director Paul Janish. "It's not like he can't hit the ball out, really to all parts of the park, and with two strikes, you battle. He's in as good of a spot as I've seen him and we talk about development timelines not being the same for everybody, and I think he's probably a good example of that. He's at the Triple-A level. He's one step away, waiting for the right situation to present itself."
The White Sox aren't supercharging that progression yet, as Janish shot down the idea of Gonzalez getting outfield reps at this time. As much as Truist Field's park factors lend a skeptical eye to his surface-level results, Gonzalez also feels his bat speed has crept up a bit under the team's training program for it, and maybe escaping Regions Field was as much of a blessing as his cozier new confines.
"In the last two years I've I struggled with being in Birmingham," Gonzalez said. "Because if I didn't pull the ball in the air, nothing good was going to happen, because it was just going to be an out, which is probably a bad mindset."
So maybe taking more than a month to get comfortable with a new approach to driving the baseball won't be the worst thing for Gonzalez. The White Sox have to make a decision about protecting him on the 40-man roster by the end of the year, so there's some built-in motivation to see what they have. But Gonzalez said that has never crossed his mind during his sojourn through various swing adjustments. In fact, he's trying to embrace that any amount of time and struggle is worth it, if it ends in the right place.
"I needed to struggle, to know that stuff was wrong," Gonzalez said. "And I'm just gonna keep working so that this keeps working."
