We're between Farm Fortnights, but with bridge league beginning Thursday, the White Sox have spent the last few days shuffling some players to create room for their most recent draft picks for eventual integration into the system.
Some individual transactions that stand out among the flurry of moves:
⚙️ Ryan Burrowes has been promoted from Winston-Salem to Birmingham on the strength of a sensational July, over which he's hit .325/.441/.636 with 14 walks to just 15 strikeouts of 94 plate appearances. He's hitting .261/.379/.421 on the season, and is tied for the organizational lead with 34 stolen bases in 43 attempts.
All of that is encouraging for a 21-year-old, and if he seems older, it's probably because he's been on the radar since his one season in the DSL at 17, and this is the first time his performance has popped in his four years stateside.
A move to Double-A will test how much of his improvement can be attributed to the explosive offensive environment in the South Atlantic League, but he'll be able to find playing time in Birmingham thanks to his versatility. In descending order of total innings, he's played second, short, third, left and center field this year. Winston-Salem manager Guillermo Quiroz said he likes Burrowes best on the left side of the infield, but sharing time with Caleb Bonemer, Kyle Lodise and Colby Shelton pushed him into other spots.
⚙️ Javier Mogollón is heading to Winston-Salem after spending the last 1½ seasons in Kannapolis. While he's logged a lot of time at Low-A, it's only resulted in 108 games played thanks to a hamstring issue that cut his 2025 season short after just 51 games, and 57 games this year due to a lesser leg issue.
Mogollón is hitting .257/.357/.442 over 241 plate appearances, stealing 23 bases in 28 attempts. The 31-percent strikeout rate is the big concern, because it's risen 6 percent after making big headway toward reducing it last season.
⚙️ Jurdrick Profar was released over the weekend. The 19-year-old native of Curacao and younger brother of Jurickson Profar had hit just .190/.273/.391 over 88 games at Kannapolis, and his playing time was tilting toward first base even before the White Sox selected infielders with their top three picks. He signed for $660,000 back in 2024. The White Sox also released Arxy Hernández, who never had such cachet, but ended up playing 410 games over four different levels the last six years.
Some news on the pitching side.
⚙️ Jose Urquidy joins the Charlotte rotation after coming over from Pittsburgh in a minor trade for ACL White Sox righty Felix Doroteo.
Urquidy, 31, was a legit middle-of-the-rotation starter for good Houston Astros teams in 2021 and 2022, but it's been a slog since due to shoulder issues and Tommy John surgery, which cost him half of 2023 and most of the following two seasons. He got a lot of mileage out of high, riding fastballs from a high arm slot, but its effectiveness was sapped by injuries, and it's been a struggle to find another way of living.
But there's a reason the White Sox chose to trade for him, as opposed to taking a flier on the waiver wire. Urquidy accepted an assignment to Triple-A Indianapolis after five increasingly ugly outings out of the Pittsburgh bullpen in April, and although he'd initially struggled out of the gate there was well, he flipped a switch somewhere along the way:
| Games | IP | H | HR | BB | K | ERA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First 7 | 30.2 | 37 | 6 | 5 | 32 | 5.87 |
| Last 10 | 53 | 33 | 4 | 13 | 41 | 2.38 |
Statcast doesn't show any immediately apparent reasons beyond the hot streak, nothing like the velocity jump Adrian Houser had demonstrated before the White Sox tracked him down. There are a bunch of smaller tweaks -- it looks like he's throwing his sinker and his sweeper less, and his curveball and changeup more, and the arm angle has dropped a couple of degrees, but the four-seamer is still 92, and it's still leading a kitchen-sink mix.
If nothing else, he's thrown six innings in six of those 10 games, and seven innings three times, so he gives Knights manager Chad Pinder an arm without restrictions. Hopefully I'll get to see what it looks like when Charlotte plays in Nashville this week.
⚙️ Blake Larson made his third and final appearance of the ACL White Sox season back on July 3, and he was shut down three weeks early due to a lat strain. Between Tommy John surgery last year and this year's injury, he's thrown just 4⅔ innings in the two-plus seasons since the White Sox drafted him with the 68th-overall pick they acquired from the Mariners in the Gregory Santos trade.
⚙️ James Taussig won South Atlantic League player of the week in a testament to the concept that chasing draft capital is simply a fool’s errand. The undrafted 23-year-old mountain of a corner outfielder claimed the honors by going 10-for-23 with a pair of homers and three doubles against Greensboro. He’s older than Braden Montgomery and is striking out at close to a 30 percent clip with the Dash, but has ungodly left-handed juice and is slashing .294/.388/.657 in 37 games since his midseason bump.
⚙️ Juan Carela was placed on Birmingham's injured list retroactive to July 23, which means that Mason Adams is the last of last year's six Tommy John surgery recipients to avoid a setback of any kind. Drew Thorpe is the only other one active, as Prelander Berroa was pulled from his first and only outing back on May 13, and Ky Bush has yet to pitch.
DSL White Sox 8, DSL Blue Jays Blue 7 (7 innings)
- Carlos Vielma was 0-for-3 with a walk and two strikeouts.
- Fernando Graterol singled all four times up.
- Sebastian Romero homered, singled and struck out twice.
- Felix Lebron was 1-for-3 with a double, walk and CS.
- Samuel Luis went 0-for-2 with a walk, HBP and a strikeout.
- Ronald Kelly: 0.2 IP, 3 H, 5 R, 4 ER, 2 BB, 2 K, 1 HBP.
Notes:
*Not only did the White Sox win on a walk-off walk, but it was the fourth consecutive walk. The DSL!
