Longtime Cal Poly head baseball coach Larry Lee has known White Sox prospect Drew Thorpe long enough to know the 23-year-old does not have a great interest in his own hype.
He would not be interested in updates on his prospect ranking, nor his strong minor league performances, and probably isn't too interested in current speculation that he's not much longer for Double-A Birmingham. But Lee saw a piece that caught his eye just for how well the typically soft-spoken right-hander represented himself and sent his notice of it to Thorpe.
He got the response he expected.
"He basically just texted me back and said 'Press clippings,'" Lee said, stifling a laugh. "He doesn't get caught up in that. He understands what his goals are."
Since Lee first laid eyes on Thorpe's changeup in a bullpen in 2019, and swiftly decided to scratch out "two-way player" and replace it with "right-handed pitcher" on his depth chart, he's grown accustomed to Thorpe's brand of quiet intensity. He could shut down Vanderbilt in his first career college start and say relatively little about it, but Lee called pitches for Thorpe from the dugout enough times to have an exclusive window into his true nature.
"We wanted to strike every hitter out," Lee said, recalling all the wipeout changes deployed at times a well-located fastball would have sufficed. "We wanted to embarrass hitters. I mean, we thought alike.
"He's a fierce competitor, but you don't see it at times. He keeps a lot of stuff within himself, but you'll see the occasional internal rage come out."
Granted, the bulk of Thorpe's college career took place after the COVID-19 outbreak, so it was fairly recent, but the intervening two years only seem to have calcified his traits by description. His physical routine is even more rigidly self-managed. His mechanics are tighter and more fastidiously repeated.
Having followed him from the High-A Hudson Valley Renegades with the Yankees to the Double-A Birmingham Barons, Sergio Santos is Lee's only rival for expertise on managing Thorpe, and didn't exactly talk up the skill set it requires.
"He's a manager's dream in the sense that there's not much to it," Santos said. "You just let him do his thing."
For Santos, viewing Thorpe's stoicism over time has revealed itself as mound presence. His demure response to success is mirrored during stretches of failure, as driven home by Thorpe's response to getting chased after two-thirds of an inning on May 12. As the only blip on a 2024 game log that otherwise suggests "maybe promote this guy," it was the sort of rollicking failure that prompts a manager to intervene, only for Thorpe's response to show it to be the exception that proves the rule.
"The next day he was in the weight room doing his thing, unfazed, unchanged," Santos said. "We just spoke about what things did you do that you can learn from for that next outing, and for the one down the road where it's kind of the same thing and you can try something different. And if you did everything right, then that's just baseball.
"Baseball is that really difficult sport where you can do everything right and still have a bad result. It was just getting him to not be so result-focused and more buying into the process. And he does that already."
That Thorpe immediately recovered for 5⅔ scoreless innings his next time out with seven strikeouts provided a quick testament to his process. And it rounds out a body of work in a prospect-heavy league (1.50 ERA in 42 innings, with a .461 OPS against him), that supports gaudier pronouncements.
"His fastball can legitimately be four pitches if he's able to hit it down and away, down and in, up and in, and up and away, and I think those are just the final stages for him, because his fastball will play in the big leagues," Santos asserted.
Thorpe has multiple breaking balls that project to be average, and Santos and Lee both laud the position player athleticism that allows him to repeat his delivery and make every pitch play up beyond its raw movement. Not coming up with the ability to blow hitters away have forced Thorpe to delve into sequencing early in his progression, but his low-90s right-handed velocity is basically the reason there were three other players in the Dylan Cease trade. And part of the White Sox high evaluation of him is the belief that there's a couple of extra ticks of heat still left to untap in Thorpe's six-foot-four frame.
How well his fastball will play is the central uncertainty in Thorpe's career. But as someone who had elite velocity but also a secondary offering that headlined his scouting report, Santos sees the ingredients to transcend the radar gun.
"It's just the way hitters swing," Santos said when asked why. "Look, everybody knows he has the changeup, right? They have game plans of sitting on it. But it's a very tough gameplan when you're sitting on a guy's best pitch and it's an elite pitch. I say that from the context of being a position player and knowing how hard it is to hit, and facing guys who were like Drew Thorpe and thinking 'I'm going to have a good day,' and you look up and you're 0-for-4 with a punchout, a couple of groundouts and a popup."
After being honored as the Prospect Pitcher of the Year by MLB Pipeline last season, Thorpe returned to work out at Cal Poly over the offseason. The rub with command and pitchability artists is that they seemed more advanced than all their peers until suddenly they aren't, and more toolsy players zoom by them when higher level competition forces them to understand sequencing at a similar level. But in this moment, Lee stood back and admired this souped-up version of the pitcher he coached just two years ago; his release points had seemingly grown even tighter, he'd somehow added another pitch, and had been exposed to more advanced information behind it all.
"You could see the progress in his repertoire and the knowledge that he's gained," Lee said. "He's got a good head on his shoulders."
Despite rotation spots turning over regularly in Chicago, dominant numbers and assurances from the Sox front office that Thorpe should get a major league look at some point this year, he remains in Birmingham for now. But even at fewer than 200 career minor league innings, the mental side of the leap to the majors that is eventually waiting for him, is the part of the equation that drives the most confidence.
"Obviously not in my hands, out of my control," Santos said. "But with all his attributes, his mindset, his mound presence and all that, there is an adjustment period, but with the way he thinks and the way he prepares, he would make any adjustments he needs to when he gets up there."
