Barons notes: Gabe Davis gets started in Double-A, where Anthony DePino is raking

Gabe Davis has enjoyed a relatively smooth start to his professional career, masking the doubts that crept in during his turbulent, injury-altered junior season at Oklahoma State.

As Davis told James in a story that ran the day Davis was promoted to Double-A from Winston-Salem, the 6-foot-9-inch righty felt a little shorted at OSU, and upon being drafted by the White Sox in the fifth round of last year's draft, hoped he could figure out a routine that could keep his shoulder in full working order. When he suffered a flare-up early in the spring, the White Sox figured out a reworked arm care program that appears to have stuck. He surpassed his junior season innings total before the end of May, and while the Sox are limiting him to four innings per start for the time being, there are no natural indicators of caution.

Barons pitching coach John Kovalik said he's "in somewhat of observation mode" as Davis takes his initial turns in the Barons rotation, but he hasn't seen any evidence of unusual hardships.

"First of all, that's very common with guys coming from college no matter what program they come from," Kovalik said before Davis' start in Knoxville on Friday. "The demands of and rigors of pro ball are just completely different. It's a much longer season, we expect a lot more out of them as far as just volume, intensity on a week-to week basis. I haven't really had to make many adjustments. They did a really good job, a really nice job with him down in Winston as far as educating him and laying out those processes."

Davis then proceeded to reach that four-inning limit against the Smokies, although he took some lumps along the way (4 IP, 4 H, 4 R, 4 ER, 1 BB, 7 K). His fastball sat 96 and touched 98 multiple times on the stadium gun, and if when he could locate either of his breaking balls, he ended plate appearances in a hurry. But sometimes the feel for his secondaries disappeared and he'd have to throw challenge fastballs to get back into the count, and the top of the order occasionally rose to said challenges.

Smokies catcher Owen Ayers, who is slugging .621 over 46 games this season, did all the run-scoring damage. First, he delivered an RBI ground-rule double in the second, although it was initially called a homer because the third-base umpire was the only one who thought it reached the Birmingham bullpen on the fly. Two innings later, Ayers left the yard for real on a 3-1 fastball out to right, putting the other three runs on Davis' tab.

The rest of the Smokies lineup went 2-for-13 with a walk and seven strikeouts against Davis, but the sequence of the successful at-bats put a mark on his ERA, and Ayers being left-handed widened his platoon splits as well:

• vs. RHB: .217/.258/.313
• vs. LHB: .280/.357/.440

The sample size is too small for deriving conclusions, and with the Knoxville lineup only featuring three lefties, Davis didn't get much of an opportunity to throw his developing changeup. He was able to use it on an 0-2 count against Cameron Sisneros, and he locked him up at the bottom of the zone for his final pitch and out of the evening.

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While Double-A hitters are providing an appropriate challenge for Davis, Double-A pitchers haven't fazed Anthony DePino, whose low-handed production from Winston-Salem has transferred smoothly to the next level.

"It feels good," DePino said. "I've had conversations with hitting coaches and just kind of realizing obviously it's another step, right? Like, you want to be able to compete at the next level, but in my head, it's just like you gotta dominate every level to get up to the big leagues."

DePino had a nine-game hitting streak halted on Saturday, but he's reached base in 20 consecutive games, and 22 of 23 with Birmingham overall. If there's any sign of concession as he negotiates the new level, he's hitting for a little less power, except then he went and lashed an opposite-field homer at Covenant Health Park on Friday.

"Not too many people can go opposite field like he did," said Danny Santin, the White Sox assistant hitting coordinator who was in Knoxville during the series. "It's a combination of being strong, and just really working on his path and cleaning up his swing path."

"[The] guy's got stupid, stupid pop," Birmingham hitting coach Aaron Hill said. "He's had three balls already hit over 113, 114 mph. He's a great hitter, a great player, from my area in Connecticut, always shout out to Connecticut."

(We'll get to that in a moment.)

The production invites the good kinds of questions about what lies ahead for DePino over the rest of 2026, but Santin cautioned against dismissing the value Double-A reps provide, regardless of his success thus far.

"DePino is a good hitter, and he's going to continue to hit, and he's got a knack for hitting the ball hard and making good decisions," Santin said. "But here in Double-A, we're all professionals. We're facing good arms. It's a challenge, and he's handling it well."

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Speaking of Aaron Hill, he was a late addition to the White Sox player development staff. Fellow Aaron Bray was originally slated to oversee Birmingham's hitters, but the Sox reassigned him to Charlotte when Cameron Seitzer decided to retire from baseball and enter the world of wealth management. That opened the vacancy with the Barons, and that's when the 31-year-old Connecticut native entered the picture.

"I was actually getting ready to head down to Mexico to go play," Hill said. "A good buddy of mine is the hitting director Ryan Fuller, and he reached out to me at the end of January is saying there's an opening. He asked if I wanted it. It kind of took me a couple hours to think about it, and I was like, 'You know what, let's do it.'"

While Hill and Fuller both attended the University of Connecticut, their connection predates college.

"I actually met Fuller when I was in high school," Hill recalled. "He was just done with UConn. He was at a training facility that I was training at. I met him back in 2012, and I used to hit with him in the offseason, 2018, 2019. He was my hitting guy, and then we remained in contact. I always used to send him videos, like, 'Hey, what do you got for me?' The guy's a master, a genius for hitting.'"

Hill also credited new hitting coordinator Sherman Johnson and assistant coordinator Santin with making the jump from playing to coaching at Double-A easier than he anticipated, but it helped that he came to the White Sox with an inherent understanding of the organizational tenets.

"One of the things I asked [Fuller] when he told me about this job, I said, 'Hey man, do I need to get Driveline certified or Rapsodo, Trackman [certified]?'", Hill said. "And he's like, 'Listen man, you're Fuller Hitting certified. You know what we do and how we hit around here. You're going to be fine.'"

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While five other Birmingham pitchers combined to give up 23 runs against Pensacola at Rickwood Field on May 27, Carson Jacobs managed to escaped unscathed, allowing just one hit while striking out three over two scoreless innings. Two outings later, he was similarly effective against Knoxville, posting two more zeroes and striking out five of the seven batters he faced on Thursday.

These in-person looks don't jibe with his season line. Recent success has merely lowered his ERA to 6.00, with 11 walks against 19 strikeouts over 15 innings.

That said, the undrafted free agent out of North Dakota State has been capable of dominant flashes despite persistently high walk rates, starting with him being a 6-foot-7-inch righty with a 95 mph fastball and two versions of a slider.

He fanned 85 hitters over 57⅓ innings in 2025, which was one K behind Peyton Pallette for the lead among White Sox relief prospects, and his Trackman data grades his slider as one of the most effective swing-and-miss pitches in the system. The Sox sent him to the Arizona Fall League after the season, and while he walked 11 batters over six innings in the desert, it's the sort of assignment that has signaled organizational interest in the arm before. Tyler Davis is the most recent example of an under-the-radar reliever making his MLB debut after pitching for the White Sox in the AFL, with Fraser Ellard and Declan Cronin providing additional recent examples.

There's some evidence that Jacobs is gaining traction. After opening the season with 10 walks over his first nine innings, he's issued just one free pass over his last six. The Rickwood game kicked off that stretch.

"He's gone through a couple delivery adjustments, and just overall, those take some time, and I expect inconsistencies in the game," Kovalik said of Jacobs. "But with the way that he's worked and with the quality of his practice, I think we're going to start to see, and I think we have started to see, more of that consistency start to creep in."

"As an org, our biggest thing with him is just zone control and working the count, and getting the count in his favor as much as possible, with the messaging of if he gets dinged for a hit or two, that's totally fine. We can work with that. Just continue to attack the zone relentlessly, and I think the practice and the delivery components that he has been focusing on, are directly correlated to his ability to do that with a hitter in the box under the lights."

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Christian Oppor was sent to Arizona before the Barons opened their series against Pensacola two weeks, and given the recency and severity of his struggles -- Oppor walked 36 batters and plunked six others over 24 ⅔ innings -- Barons coaches were more inclined to speak in generalities about the reset, but the mechanical issues pitching coordinator Matt Zaleski outlined to James are still the best place to start.

"That's exactly what it was -- just getting him back into some of the same positions that he was in last year, and just removing the pressure and the need to go out every fifth day and turn a lineup over, I think it's going to be what's best for him at this point," Kovalik said.

Barons manager Pat Leyland helmed Winston-Salem last year, so he had a first-hand look at Oppor's peak prospect form over the final weeks of the 2025 season.

"I just see a kid out there that's still learning how to use his body, still getting comfortable being repeatable and yeah, just struggling with mechanics, and that can lead to a lot of ugly misses at times for a guy who's kind of searching to find how his body works and moves most efficiently and most productively," Leyland said.

"That's the pitching department's area, but I'm just pulling for the kid. I know he's out there in Arizona right now, I know he's going to work hard, and I have absolutely no doubt that he will be back and be very productive, hopefully in the near future."

Oppor made his first two Arizona appearances since those conversations, and based on the line -- 4 IP, 0 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 8 BB, 7 K, 1 HBP -- plenty of work remains.

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Pat Leyland has been managing a White Sox affiliate since 2022, when he took the position at Kannapolis. He spent two years with the Cannon Ballers, followed by a promotion to Winston-Salem for 2025, and now up to Birmingham this season.

That means he's reached the point of his managerial career where players he directly oversaw at the start of their professional careers are now making impacts at the major league level.

"It means the world to me," Leyland said. "Our whole organization is just thrilled about all these guys that get to go up, but just for me personally, guys that I've had at multiple stops -- [Rikuu] Nishida, God, I've had for a long time -- to see those guys get to the big leagues and what that means to them and their families, and just to think that you had a very small piece of that, and maybe just helped him a little bit along the way, that's why we do it."

Leyland, the son of freshly minted Hall of Fame manager Jim Leyland, is also overseeing the nascent stages of another prospect, albeit one who is on a much longer developmental timeline. We're talking about a baby boy who has been put on a course to stress-test the powers of nominative determinism.

"His legal name is James Skipper, and we're calling him Skip," the new dad said.