The White Sox are an impossible 3-24 in games where Brooks Baldwin plays.
That's obviously not his fault, but it undercuts the central note of praise of being "a winning player" that followed Baldwin throughout his meteoric rise through the minors. Such is the White Sox season that his most notable moment of on-field awareness is when he rationally deduced that no sane third base coach would have sent Cody Bellinger home when he already had the ball in his hands, and was caught trying to throw out the trailer at second without ever checking if the decisive run was jogging home.
Luckily, Baldwin is coming along in the more traditionally accepted manner for a prospect to earn their keep: He's quietly starting to climb out of an early hole offensively.
Baldwin is hitting .245/.298/.396 in 16 games in August, while mixing between two up-the-middle spots on the infield. This premise was on more solid ground before an 0-for-3 Tuesday night, but in the hellworld that is 2024 offense in Major League Basball, this is a stretch of near-league-average production. In the area below hell that this year's White Sox offense resides in, Baldwin basically has looked like prime Ray Durham.
After a sub-.500 OPS during July, when he joined the team after the All-Star break and the White Sox proceeded to lose every game until they were almost a week into August, it might even resemble a young player acclimating to a new level of play. Even the best versions of Baldwin didn't walk a ton in the minors, and true to form, his upturn has involved feeling decisive enough to do a lot more swinging across the board.
"He plays the game at 100 mph," said Colson Montgomery, an outspoken Baldwin enthusiast. "That's what you want in a guy; he's not afraid to make mistakes."
Asked for a one-paragraph summary of the offensive breakout that jumped off about halfway through last season in A-ball, Baldwin offered that fewer moving parts in his swing allows him to see the ball better. After all, a 15-point month-to-month uptick in swing rate on pitches in the strike zone is its own form of plate discipline.
"To me it's always been a big thing: If you can cut down on movement, your eyes don't move as much," Baldwin said. "You're able to see things a little slower, and you're able to pick up spin on pitches and see everything better."
Having his sophomore season at UNC-Wilmington cut short by COVID meant that Baldwin received an extra year of eligibility, so he had more leverage than the normal third-day pick when the Giants took him in the 15th round of the 2021 draft. He returned to school and won Colonial Athletic Association Player of the Year honors, yet the 24-year-old says that in the time since the Sox took in the 12th round of the 2022 draft and now, "everything is almost completely different lower half-wise" in his swing.
The collection of side-angle video of CAA action from two years ago is not robust, but if you scroll around long enough you start to see his point.
"I was really spread out and not a whole lot of lower half movement," Baldwin recalled of his college swing. "Now it's kind of more upright and a little more power-oriented where I can drive the baseball more frequently."
If you want to dive deeper into searching for college video of Baldwin, and find yourself in the depths of YouTube where it's clearly someone recording their television set with their breathing audible throughout, there are portions of his UNC-Wilmington days where he was just letting the bat sit on his shoulder until the pitcher's first movement, and his hand load began anew from there. From there to now, it's easy to see why he feels there's a lot less going on to get his hands ready to launch, and more mental energy can be devoted to just responding to what he's seeing.
Now he's making a smaller drawdown movement of his hands, and timed it up with a small leg lift to load himself into his back hip, rather rocking his hips back out of a super-wide base. It's a more drastic version of the adjustment a fitter Edgar Quero has made while posting career-best offensive numbers in the upper minors.
"It's been a lot easier for me to get loaded and get into my back side easier, and not have to move so far forward so I can impact the ball better" Baldwin said. "The start, the rhythm, your load, everything, if you're able to keep everything underneath and you're able to move forward without losing everything in your legs, then you're able to see pitches better."
This is more of a story of how Baldwin became good as a pro, rather than what he figured out after the first couple of weeks, which seems to be a combination of adjusting to an influx of elevated velocity and straightening out his direction. He can really spin around on his back foot to drive pitches on the inner half, but was overdoing it in the early going and closing himself off to the outer half of the plate.
With where he tries to set his target, this was a temporary affliction.
"I'm trying to hit the ball through the center field wall, right back at the pitcher through his forehead is my terminology," Baldwin said.
Imagine these sorts of fantasies about impaling people and things being delivered by a fresh-faced young man completely devoid of facial hair, with a friendly North Carolina drawl, and you've got the general experience of being a beat writer covering an MLB team.
But hitting from both sides of the plate and with reps at every defensive position besides catcher in his professional history, Baldwin has an oil-slick smooth path to major league viability as long as his bat can show a pulse. Hell, Zach Remillard has a .322 career slugging percentage and pretty much no one on the White Sox beat has ruled out seeing him again in Chicago at some point.
But what potentially separates Baldwin from an organization seemingly lousy with utility types is that despite being able to pass for being 15, it would be a pretty tall 15-year-old with exceptionally long arms and legs. If a change in stance and load aimed at driving the baseball pays more dividends, there's no rule that one of the high draft picks the White Sox spent on toolsy infielders has to be who ends up staking claim to their many currently open positions on the dirt.
"I don't really think of myself as a power hitter, but I've always had long levers and been able to drive pitches in the gap pretty well," said Baldwin, reiterating a line-drive focus. "If you if happen to clip one and get it up in the air and it goes out of the park, well, good things happen."
