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White Sox Prospects

‘Semi-productive’ in college, Mason Adams super productive in White Sox system

White Sox pitching prospect Mason Adams

Mason Adams (Jim Margalus / Sox Machine)

In a stacked Birmingham rotation, Mason Adams doesn't stand out. At 6 feet, he's the shortest of the six starters who have propelled the Barons to the top of the Southern League standings. Signing for $75,000 in the 13th round of the 2022 draft, he commanded the smallest bonus among his domestically drafted rotationmates, with Jairo Iriarte signing for the same amount out of Venezuela.

Yet despite the lowest profile, Adams has staked his claim as the steadiest of the starters. He's pitched at least five innings in all 11 outings this year, which comprises 10 starts and a five-inning piggyback appearance in the wake of Noah Schultz last Saturday. He's also provided plenty of quality for the quantity, with a 2.12 ERA with 65 strikeouts against 10 strikeouts over 63⅔ innings.

It's a second leap for Adams in as many full professional seasons. He already surprised with a breakout performance in 2023, during which which he posted a 3.14 ERA over 109 innings across three levels.

Few could say they saw it coming.

Adams wasn't exactly a nobody at Jacksonville University, but while he drew enough attention to receive an entry in Baseball America's draft database in 2022, the report stopped well short of glowing:

A semi-productive starter at Jacksonville, Adams’ strikeout-to-walk ratio (108-to-31) and fielding independent pitching numbers were better than his 4.80 ERA. Adams is a strike-throwing righthander with feel for pitching and average secondaries (low-80s slider, mid-80s changeup) that help make up for a fringe-average 91-93 mph fastball. He’s a senior sign candidate as a money saver.

The White Sox saw enough in Adams to draft him, but they didn't immediately prioritize him. Adams opened the 2023 season as a long man/bulk boy who handled the middle innings after Tanner McDougal's weekly 60-pitch starts, and it wasn't until about this time last year that he started drawing starts of his own.

In the defense of those making the initial reads, Adams needed some time to develop two pitches that expanded his possibilities.

The first was his primary fastball. Adams came into professional baseball exclusively throwing four-seamers, but the White Sox's A-ball pitching coaches got him to buy into his sinker.

"Middle of my first full season, I mixed the sinker in a little bit more. I saw good results with it, felt like I could pitch with it," Adams told me on Sunday, a day after his five-inning relief appearance against the Tennessee Smokies.

"Our pitching coach down in Low-A last year (Blake Hickman), he was helping me with the sinker a little bit. And then [John] Ely, when I got to Winston last year, he was also pretty big on it."

His slider is the other pitch that renders the aforementioned summary of his arsenal outdated. It went from a low-80s offering that blended with his curveball to a distinct breaking ball with some power.

"We kind of just gave him a better path to use it with, and put a grip in his hand that made sense," Ely said. "Something that he could really pull through, and just the cueing was probably a little bit different.

"He's not trying to manipulate it. He's just throwing it from the same hand position as his fastball and realizing, 'Oh, hell, it's going to catch seams a different way and it's going to move the way I want it to. OK, now I can let it eat.'"

Armed with a sinker that keeps more than half of batted balls on the ground, and a breaking ball that reduces the total number of batted balls, Adams now has five-pitch arsenal, and throws strikes well enough with all of them to open up all sorts of sequencing possibilities, whether because everything's working or because he knows what's not.

"You can't really sit on anything in any count, because he throws anything in any count, and he's able to throw it all for strikes," Ely said. "You can just see it, if something's not there that day? His temperament is what does that for us, because it's, 'All right, well, I guess I'll just go to this today.' It seems to work."

The numbers seem to back up that notion, as Adams has a career 2.86 ERA and 194 strikeouts over 176⅓ professional innings. So what's the catch?

While his walk rate is the best on the Barons, he also leads the team with eight hit batters, which both Adams and Ely said is the result of "overcooking" potential putaway sliders to left-handed batters. He also faces the same doubts that every righty without standout velocity encounters: Will his ability to execute hold up and/or stand out against the toughest competition? Because he isn't somebody who can rely on getting swinging strikes in the zone, he'll need counts on his side more than most.

Unless Adams discovers how to gain 2-3 ticks on his fastball -- and given the progress he's made in other areas, never say never -- he'll have to keep performing, and delaying a reckoning until people finally give up on the inevitability of one. The upside is that a "money saver" Day 3 signing already has plenty of experience beating odds. If Adams hasn't already won over some doubters, it's only because he hadn't been considered enough to doubt in the first place.

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