White Sox pitching prospect Ky Bush got a no decision on Sunday, yielding four runs in five innings as the Birmingham Barons relied on the Tennessee Smokies losing to clinch a playoff spot by just a half a game.
But that'd be no reason for the 24-year-old to have anything less than an ample portion of champagne in the celebration, as the outing raised his ERA all the way to 2.14.
"Ky Bush has had a great year," said Double-A Birmingham manager Sergio Santos. "Kind of dominant."
With Drew Thorpe in the majors and Noah Schultz making a case to be the top-ranked pitching prospects in the game, Bush does not easily grab first mention in talk about the dominant Barons rotation. With Sox officials slowly starting to claim victory in restoring Jake Eder to past heights, Bush is not even the sole or highest-ceiling resurgent prospect in the group.
Bush's 25.5 percent strikeout rate and 9.5 percent walk rate are usually the first go-to figures to assess his quality beyond his surface-level numbers. But the tall left-hander has allowed just 48 hits this season in 75 2/3 innings.
It's the exact same figure he allowed in 34 fewer innings at Birmingham after coming over in a trade last season. That's when he was slowed by a lat injury in spring, never regained his full velocity, and got traded by the Angels organization that drafted him as part of a short-sighted last ditch effort to compete with Shohei Ohtani. That performance, which Bush never felt represented his ability, both allowed his old team to find him expendable and could easily inform his new one not to expect much.
He's enjoyed setting the record straight.
"Absolutely," Bush said. "Last year was not something obviously you want to happen but at the same time, you’re also thankful it happened and good to go through early in my career. Injuries happen, trades happen, baseball happens. Cool to experience that, take what happened last year and take it to the offseason and put it into this season so far."
What Bush took into the offseason was three-fold. First was an extended opportunity to rest and build his arm and shoulder area back to full strength. Second was to shorten his arm action. He's not only six-foot-six but a broad-shouldered 250 pounds, and the White Sox wanted him to fashion something more repeatable, after the control that sent him to the Futures Game in 2022 had abandoned him the following year. And third, Bush wanted to ride longer on his back leg in his delivery, to restore his fastball to the 93-95 mph range and become something hitters have to gear up for at the top of the strike zone--empowering him to pair tumbling off-speed pitches off of it.
"I’d say being repeatable, and delivery and then just overall health," Bush said for what's been the difference this season. "The arm is feeling a lot better than last year. I feel like sometimes in the middle of outings last year my arm would be just kind of like hanging a little bit, kind of fighting through it. But just shortening that path has synched everything up to where the arm and body are moving a lot better."
"It just looks like a guy that's not spraying the ball and has a little more connection between his arm and his torso and just pounding the zone," said senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister. "He can spin the ball, throw multiple shapes, just another lefty with velo, which you love to see. He just looks like a confident guy on the mound and I think his numbers are reflective of that."
He concedes that "obviously it didn’t work that great," but last season's injury woes gave Bush a view to not being able to overpower the opposition; a level or two earlier than the typical high-level pitching prospect has to grapple with it for real. It drove home that his fastball location sets up his slider more than anything else, and that the command and velocity separation of his changeup carries more weight than overcooking it for more armside fade. He had to locate with the nonexistent margin for error that major league opposition often demands.
The combination of the four-pitch mix that the White Sox could only hope might be restored last season, with more knowledge of how and why it works than the typical Southern League arm, invites some to start projecting the second-oldest member of the Birmingham rotation to the next logical step. Maybe once he gets his new cutter not to blend or distort the feel with his slider, that is.
"If he throws that in the mix, I'm telling you that he's a 10-year major leaguer," said Barons pitching coach John Ely. "He's able to beat with the fastball at the top, he's able to locate at the bottom and he's able to tunnel all of his pitches off of that."
Adding a cutter as a bridge between the fastball and slider is something the White Sox have added to hard-throwing lefty pitchers up to Garrett Crochet in the majors, down to Schultz open this season in High-A. But perhaps the bigger thing they have offered is a long runway. Bannister repeatedly touts the ceiling of big, hard-throwing left-handers that stick in the rotation, even if and when it takes years to find consistency.
For Bush, it seems like it only took a year's time and a healthy offseason for openly anticipating his arrival to Chicago to feel realistic.
"Pretty cool to see Drew [Thorpe]," Bush said. "He was my roommate. To see a guy I was living with being up in the show, it shows it doesn’t have to necessarily be Double-A, Triple-A and the show. If they think you’re ready, then they call your name. Everybody at Birmingham, saw Duke [Ellis] and [Bryan] Ramos went straight from Double-A to the show. If they feel like you’re ready you don’t have to go to Triple-A."
