Over the course of Prospect Week, we'll be writing up dozens of White Sox prospects to establish expectations for the 2024 season without the pressure of ranking them, and we're starting with the players whose 2023 seasons included chunks of missed time, which happens to include the White Sox's consensus No. 1 prospect. He and a few others were able to recover and put themselves back on track. Others have their work cut out for them.
PERTINENT: Prospect Week arrives after some lean White Sox prospect years
Colson Montgomery: Back, oblique
With what the White Sox fan base has been through with prospect injuries, it would be easy to give in doom and gloom when their 21-year-old top prospect missed half a season with oblique and back issues. To Colson Kade Montgomery’s credit, he ended 2023 with the main question being not if he was cursed, but if he was merely a very good prospect with plus lefty power and an elite batting eye, or the type of future superstar to lead this woebegone franchise out of its current doldrums. If that’s even possible.
But what the injury robbed from us is a more meaningful look at the central question in Montgomery’s profile. The White Sox have the motivation and window to give Montgomery a Tim Anderson-sized leash to stick at short. But some scouts see an overall lack of quickness in his operation to conclude that sticking at third will be enough of a battle for him. Continuing the theme, Montgomery summoned his inner Khris Davis and batted exactly .244 at both Birmingham and in the AFL last season, driving some evaluations that his power and patience will have to counteract some vulnerability in the top half of the zone traditional of left-handers with loft in their swing.
In both cases, Montgomery played half a season after a pair of nagging injuries and will not turn 22 until the end of this month. He could easily be a productive big leaguer who addresses much of what this offense lacked if these are harbingers of significant issues. Or he could be a monster if they’re temporary maladies.
Bryan Ramos: Groin
A groin injury delayed the start of Ramos’ minor league season until late May, but he still managed to maintain his steady climb despite the shorter runway:
- 2021: .761 OPS, all with Kannapolis
- 2022: .792 OPS, mostly with Winston-Salem
- 2023: .807 OPS, just about entirely with Birmingham
He was limited to 81 games during the regular season, but he followed it up with a decent showing over a full Arizona Fall League workload, so the Sox managed to get him to 100 games played for a third consecutive year. Oh, and he’s still got a month before he turns 22.
He does just about everything well enough, or nothing poorly. He won’t steal bases, but you wouldn’t call him slow. He swings hard, but he also draws his share of walks. He’s turning into a good third baseman, and maybe could be stretched to play second. If you’re looking for anything that might resemble a fatal flaw, he had an unprecedented divide in his splits between righties (.677 OPS) and lefties (1.218 OPS), so perhaps upper-level righties can widen the plate on him in a way lefties can’t. But he had reverse splits the previous year, so perhaps these are small samples screaming over each other in the marketplace of ideas.
Noah Schultz: Shoulder
With how much Randy Johnson gets evoked as a physical comparable to Schultz, making mention of Yoshinobu Yamamoto only feels slightly more reckless. The Dodgers’ $325 million investment is testimony that we live in an age where teams are able to confidently assess how pitches will play at the highest level with less demonstration of proof of concept than ever. When even skeptical scouts acknowledge Schultz could tout an elite slider behind a unique low slot sinker, there is more heft behind that assessment than ever.
Despite living in this age, Schultz’s lack of track record gives evaluators pause. His White Sox origin story involves other teams dropping off the trail in his draft year as mononucleosis erased most of his senior season. Even if you hold scouts tagging Schultz’s 6-foot-9 frame as rife with injury risk in only slightly higher regard than phrenology, past injuries serving as a predictor for future injuries is on firm ground, and a forearm strain and a shoulder impingement in his first professional season is an inauspicious beginning.
That said, the 27 innings Schultz was on the mound in 2023 left little room for quibbling (38 strikeouts, six walks, scored upon in one of 10 starts). I had a scout text me about how distinct the release points were for Schultz’s sinker and slider in his first professional outing. While the implication was that he will need to tighten that at the higher levels, the upshot is that Schultz’s stuff was too thoroughly nuking hitters two years older than him for such details to matter yet. If he can get his workload beyond Norge Vera levels, a future Sox rotation fronted by Schultz becomes a realistic consideration.
Norge Vera: Back
Speaking of Norge Vera levels, Actual Norge Vera lowered what qualifies as Norge Vera levels in 2023, throwing just a combined 15 innings over 10 appearances between rehab appearances in the ACL and walk-laden efforts for the Winston-Salem Dash. A back injury kept him out of action from mid-April through late July, but he showed no signs of life before or after his absence.
Once capable of showing a power arsenal (at least in short bursts), his fastball languishes in the low 90s, with a slider in the low 80s and not much control of either. It’s been a year and a half since the Sox have seen a version of Vera that’s even close to the top of his game, and now it looks as though he’s trapped underneath it.
Sean Burke: Shoulder
A collegiate run tattered with injury history precipitated Burke’s slide to the third round in 2021 despite bat-missing stuff and impressive athleticism out of a statuesque (six-foot-six) starter’s frame. And as Burke finished his first pro season in Triple-A, the White Sox looked on their way to completing an end-around the industry and delivering a fast-moving and sorely needed potential mid-rotation arm to their pitching depth.
The other shoe dropped last spring, as shoulder stiffness delayed Burke’s arrival to Charlotte. The Knights home park is no place to be sitting low-90s with degraded command, leaving Burke with ugly final numbers when more shoulder issues ended his season two months later. Minor league numbers can be unreliable, but Burke possessing a near 28 percent strikeout rate but a 5.18 ERA in 161⅔ innings tell a pretty complete story for how the 24-year-old’s top form looks viable, but has been seen inconsistently.
Jake Eder: Tommy John surgery recovery
Had Eder returned from Tommy John surgery rehab and a foot fracture merely walking the park, few would have batted an eye. His strike-throwing history was fairly limited before TJ and command is usually the straggler element of the rehab process.
That he returned largely sitting in the low-90s, while Jake Burger seemingly figured out how to stop striking out during his flight to Miami really raised the alarm. Sox coaches were swamped with corrections in Eder’s leg drive upon arrival, enough so to shut him down for maintenance after five disastrous starts at Birmingham (15 walks, 22 earned runs in 17⅓ innings). Some scouts liked him a bit better at the AFL months later, but the results remained putrid (15 walks and 12 earned runs in 17⅔ innings) and the “good stuff, not enough strikes” profile provides a hill to climb toward starting even if a full offseason of work returns Eder’s zip.
He’s a 6-foot-4-inch lefty with a low three-quarter slot and an elite slider, so he could be worth the wait. But it’s a lot easier to imagine Cristian Mena clearing the developmental hurdles necessary to debut in 2024, except now Mena isn't around anymore.
Peyton Pallette: Tommy John surgery recovery
Speaking of UCL repairs, Palette’s wiped out his junior season at Arkansas, and the White Sox drafted him in the second round (62nd overall) when his pre-surgery projections potentially put him in the first half of the first round.
The good news is that Pallette made every start asked of him, resulting in a career-high 72 innings over 22 outings for Kannapolis. He just wrestled with the command issues consistent with Tommy John surgery recovery, with 41 walks and nine hit batters against 78 strikeouts, which isn’t terribly impressive for an SEC Friday night starter facing Low-A competition. He occasionally flashed the fastball-curve combination that drew Walker Buehler comparisons in the draft, but he talked about searching for his release point even into August, so perhaps a full, healthy offseason will allow him to find it.
Dominic Fletcher: Finger
Fletcher's broken finger didn't disrupt his season as much as it truncated his season. His 2023 was cut short in late August when his bunt attempt had a meet-cute with an up-and-in fastball. Although he missed out on potentially playing a role in the Diamondbacks' National League championship run, he experienced some MLB success over his first two cups of coffee, and had another fine year at Triple-A Reno (.294/.388/.485) around the call-ups, so he accomplished at least some of what he'd set out to do. While he couldn't break through the Arizona outfield logjam, he'll get ample opportunities to carve out a role for himself as the kind of righty-mashing right fielder the White Sox sorely need.
The question is whether the broken finger will have any lingering effects going into 2024. Fletcher said he was good to go by the time his stint on the 60-day IL expired during the World Series. But it's a sensitive topic, as White Sox fans just witnessed Andrew Benintendi taking months to admit his season-ending hamate injury from 2022 had sapped his power during his debut season with the White Sox. At 5-foot-6, Fletcher needs all of his available pop to avoid being saddled with the dreaded 'tweener label, although his defense at least provides a standalone reason for the White Sox to start him in the event of any struggles.
Ky Bush: Lat
Bush wasted no time establishing himself as a prospect of note after the Angels drafted him out of St. Mary's College of California in the second round of the 2021 draft, because he posted a 3.67 ERA over 103 innings at Double-A Rocket City in his first full season.
He couldn't build on it, however, because a strained lat during the spring delayed the start of his regular season until June, and he never recaptured the magic afterward. He see-sawed between decent outings and ugly ones with the Trash Pandas before the Angels traded him to the White Sox with Edgar Quero for Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo López. He struggled even more in Birmingham as the White Sox made tweaks to his delivery, including where he stood on the rubber. The hope is that his final outing -- five innings of shutout, one-hit ball against Chattanooga -- is the culmination of all that work, and a healthy spring will allow him to continue it.
