If minor league wins matter, Birmingham looks like White Sox’s best source

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Watching the Birmingham Barons open their season against the Chattanooga Lookouts at Regions Field, you'd have no way of knowing that everything above them in the White Sox system was on fire.

While the big-league club stumbled through a four-game sweep at the hands of the Royals at Kauffman Stadium, the Barons took all three games from the Lookouts, and in a pretty straightforward fashion. At the same time Norfolk Tides brained the Charlotte Knights pitching staff for 71 runs over six games, B-Ham limited 'Nooga to four runs over three games, and two of those runs were unearned.

The 2024 Barons made a welcome first impression while running their record to 3-0. The roster doesn't have Norfolk-grade star power, but it's pleasantly complementary. The lineup features a blend of speed guys, power guys and patience guys, with enough players checking two boxes. The starting rotation features five arms worth watching, and while the relief corps doesn't stand out on paper, most minor-league bullpens look like pitching purgatory on Opening Day.

With no real roster conundrums to consider, the only questions are typical existential fare:

1. How long can they keep it up?
2. How long will they stay together?

The first question can only be answered by time. Without an ascendant blue-chip, no-doubt prospect or three anchoring the roster, this team could run hot and cold. Plus, the Chattanooga roster isn't as imposing as previous editions, when well-regarded prospects like Elly De La Cruz, Matt McLain and Noelvi Marte roamed the infield. Then again, they just hung up eight runs in a game started by Chase Petty, a Reds prospect the White Sox reportedly asked for in Dylan Cease negotiations. Take what you will from that, but the Barons are usually the ones getting blasted, so it's notable whenever they're the ones running up the score.

As for the second question, it's a matter of priorities.

While running through the Barons lineup with hitting coach Nicky Delmonico to get his read about the state of Birmingham's position players at the start of the 2024 season, I asked him about Bryan Ramos. Ramos performed reasonably well at Double-A last year, to the point that opening the season in Triple-A wouldn't have raised a host of objections.

Was Ramos' return to Double-A a matter of unfinished development? Being on the wrong end of an infield numbers game?

"It's just getting ABs," Delmonico started, but then he said, "I think being with this group right now is kind of special.

"We've got a good group. I think getting used to that chemistry and that winning baseball is big, and they just want him to be a part of that."

I concurred that the roster did look well constructed and positioned to win some games -- provided vacuums at the levels above didn't result in players being promoted from Birmingham out of necessity.

"We've got a good squad here. Like we did [Friday] and [Saturday], we played defense well, we ran the bases hard. We've got speed, we've got power, we can pitch, our bullpen's been great," Delmonico said. "And two, these guys are meshing better than anybody."

That wasn't the first time I'd heard that. The day before, pitching coach John Ely said the stable one-through-five rotation feeds off each other, then extended that sentiment to the whole team.

"I don't know if you've walked through the clubhouse," Ely told me, "but the boys are buzzing."

Buzzing. Meshing. How about a third verb?

"Everybody's just clicking," Delmonico continued, "and I hope-- I want everybody to move up, but I hope that for right now, they can kind of let this group play together and learn how to win. I think that would be very beneficial for this organization."

Winning in the minor leagues is something this White Sox organization hasn't done much of since graduating the players from the last rebuild. They finished with the the lowest winning percentage in all of Minor League Baseball during the 2023 season at .435, but if you remove the short-season teams, that number drops 10 points.

The Kannapolis Cannon Ballers were the only full-season affiliate to finish the season over .500, and the higher up the chain, the worse the returns. The Winston-Salem Dash came in at 60-66, the Birmingham Barons sagged to 51-87, and the Charlotte Knights made a run at 100 losses with a gruesome 18-56 second half, but dodged a greater ignominy at 53-96.

It marked the third straight year the White Sox finished in the bottom three:

• 2022: .431, third-worst
• 2021: .400, third-worst

And while minor-league teams prioritize development over winning -- you're not going to see a manager running strict platoons or using a closer three straight days -- the general levels of talent and baseball competence seem to prevail over the course of the season, which is evident when you see which organizations have the best and worst records:

Theoretically, you could goose up your system's winning percentage by suppressing prospects or otherwise signing overqualified players for organizational roles, but that's obviously not what the Rays and Dodgers are doing. It's also not coincidence that the teams with the worst records in Major League Baseball also registered the lowest winning percentages in baseball the last two seasons.

Barons manager (and former White Sox closer) Sergio Santos has only been a minor-league manager for two years, but he's already experienced more minor-league success than the White Sox system over that period. He managed the Florida Complex League Yankees to a short-season championship in 2022, then followed it up with South Atlantic League Finals appearance with the Hudson Valley Renegades last year.

"Winning's important. We want these guys to learn how to win, so when they get to the big leagues they know it, they feel it, they're confident," Santos said. "First and foremost is player development, but I'm a big believer in that if you do player development the right way, wins will be a byproduct of that."

It's only three games, but besides winning all of them by a combined score of 25-4, the Barons won all the categories. They hit five homers without allowing one. They drew twice as many walks as they yielded. They stole seven bases to the Lookouts' one, and they committed one error to Chattanooga's three. If we're not just looking at the world's most flattering small sample and this team is truly meshing, clicking and buzzing, this is what it would look like.

With the rest of the system struggling at the start, a breakup of the Birmingham roster is only a matter of time, regardless of how much the individuals are thriving. Drew Thorpe's Birmingham debut was his sixth start at Double-A, and he's now 5-0 with a 1.27 ERA and 52 strikeouts to 25 baserunners over 35⅓ innings. Ramos is one of the few Barons off to a quiet start, but assuming he rights the ship like he always does, he doesn't have much left to prove. A normal timetable could have them up to Charlotte within weeks, so if they're helping hoist a Southern League championship banner at the end of the year, that's not great for them.

That said, in order to have a shot at the Southern League championship, a team only needs to win one half, which carries into mid-June. That still seems too long to keep Thorpe and Ramos down, but it's a more realistic target for the project as a whole.

Edgar Quero might be a better example of how the White Sox want to proceed here. If Quero's production hits a next level sooner than later, the White Sox still might see more value in further developing his game-calling and pitcher management for a team in contention, especially when the dimensions of Regions Field could provide a more accurate gauge of his power.

When Quero homered to right field on his 21st birthday Saturday, he said after the game, "I know I hit the ball pretty hard and pretty good, but it was more a line drive, and here it's so hard to hit a homer because the field's so big, so I was thinking, 'Go ball, go ball...'." That's not a sentiment you hear at Triple-A, where any ball hit in the direction of Mint Street has a chance to find seats. Between the hitting environment and competitive environment, the White Sox might see more value in letting him call games and manage pitchers in games that have stakes, rather than shoving him upwards to catch the few strikes that actually get to his mitt in Charlotte.

Here's where we admit that we shouldn't be discussing midseason promotions and Southern League championship target dates in April, because it's both wildly premature and a seemingly poor set of priorities. But while the White Sox and Knights were attempting to avoid four- and six-game sweeps on Sunday afternoon, the Barons bullpen was playing a pickup soccer game in center field. That same Barons bullpen later pitched five shutout innings to seal a sweep of their own. Compared to the baseball the rest of the organization put on display the first two weeks of the regular season, Birmingham looks like a paradise not to be disturbed.

Classic White Sox nihilism dictates that even if the Barons are to be believed -- and that's not yet a given -- it's only a matter of time until the dominoes that collapsed around Chicago and Charlotte will topple to and through Birmingham, no matter what kind of firewall the front office tries to establish. Nevertheless, if it just to turns out that Birmingham's roster manages to capture some Magic City magic, it's worth watching the lengths the White Sox might go to prolong it.