Still, if you go to pretty much any leaderboard, particularly on the position player side, and sort from the top, you’re going to find it dominated by first round picks.  Mike Trout, Alex Bregman, Matt Chapman, Francisco Lindor, Manny Machado, Christian Yelich, and so on.

And, as we know in baseball, there can be quite a bit of lag time between adding an amateur talent and their arrival in the majors.  Jorge Alfaro just played his first full year in the majors and he was on seven BP 101 lists—I didn’t realize Baseball-Reference had a “Show All” expand tab for prospect list appearances, but here we are.

This all brings me to the White Sox.  Given they’re in a rebuild, their first round picks are the best way to add star talent at minimal cost, and if they’re planning on competing in 2020-2022, ideally they’d be getting big contributions from their 2015-2017 first round picks.  When you throw in that the White Sox went college with all three of those selections—Carson Fulmer, Zack Collins, and Jake Burger—you’d hope their arrivals would sync up rather nicely with that window.*

Granted, these selections weren’t at the very top of the draft, coming eighth, tenth, and eleventh overall, so the degree of difficulty is higher than say, the barrage of Top 5 picks Dayton Moore has used to poor results for years, but right now these picks aren’t looking great.  Let’s look at each of them in turn:

• Carson Fulmer: The pros and cons were clear. Fulmer’s stuff is electric and he performed well against the toughest amateur competition, pitching for Vanderbilt in the SEC while getting good marks for his makeup.  But, he did not boast ideal size, delivery, command, or a clear third pitch. The theory might have been the White Sox have succeeded with unconventional deliveries and it was a way to maybe get an impact performer out of a comparatively low draft pick.  The negatives have definitely won out to date.  After getting absolutely obliterated in multiple tries as a starter at Triple-A and the majors, he has now been converted to a reliever.  There’s still a chance he’s an impact reliever, and today’s game makes them more valuable than they’ve been in the past, but a star this is not.

You can criticize almost any team by using hindsight and look at the guys who went after and cherrypick to say, “Aha! They should have picked [Player X] instead!” Still, it is kind of amusing they didn’t even take the best high risk, high reward starting pitcher from Vanderbilt in this draft available to them.

• Zack Collins: Another “zig when everyone else is zagging” pick—very few evaluators gave Collins a chance at sticking behind the plate defensively, and there were a lot of questions about his contact skills. The White Sox figured they’d coached up rough catcher defense before, and if he could stay back there they had a chance at an All Star given his power and patience.  At the ten spot, Collins’ ideal ceiling certainly had appeal.  However, as we sit here today and like Fulmer, although hope is not lost, the negatives are outweighing the positives, as he has stalled out in Birmingham, making marginal improvements on his defense while still posting batting averages in the .230s against minor league arms.  The walks are there, and the power is still pretty good, but it’s hard to say this year was a good one for his stock.  He turns 24 before Opening Day next year, and one would hope someone with his power, eye, and advance college competition would be able to muster better contact against Double-A pitchers in his third pro season.  Catchers are weird, and he’s certainly focusing very hard on his defense, but the probability he is a second division or bench quality 1B bat is frighteningly high.
• Jake Burger: Our prospect team liked Burger quite a bit—even if they thought he was a future 1B instead of a 3B. He just had a ton of batspeed and power and if you have enough of those two things you can contribute even if you have a whole lot of other problems.  Still, everything was going to have to break perfectly for him to play 3B, and as soon as you are moving a prospect to 1B they have to be absolutely elite bats in order to be stars.  Unfortunately, any chance Burger could string together some 3B seasons in the majors before moving across the diamond were blown up in dramatic fashion, as he tore his Achilles tendon not once but twice.  There’s still time for him to get back on track, but it’s a dramatic injury and it’s unclear how much power and batspeed will remain when he returns to the field.  And, as we’ve seen in recent years, the value of 1B/DH-only bats is lower than it has been in a long time.

Ultimately, despite the pedigree and obvious major league tools these three picks possessed, they all bore a significant amount of risk, and it’s looking like the White Sox may have rolled snake eyes on all of them.  If they continue to fail in the way they have to date, they can’t say these failures were unforeseeable, like, say, Gordon Beckham forgetting how to hit. And, the cumulative effect may be that once again the White Sox have a contender with holes where they wouldn’t be if they’d had better results with their first round picks.  Maybe they can just paper over it by blitzing studs they grab at the top of the draft like Nick Madrigal and whatever Top 5 player they grab next year to the majors, but they’re tying one hand behind their back if they get minimal contributions from three selections in the Top 11 overall.

The story of these three prospects is hardly over. This time next year we could be talking about Fulmer as a relief ace, Collins as the catcher of the future, and Jake Burger as a pure cleanup hitter, but if you think of each prospect as a range of possible outcomes with various probabilities assigned to those outcomes, the negative outcomes are currently gobbling up a whole lot more of the pie chart.

*The White Sox had a compensatory pick and got an extra first rounder to select Zack Burdi in 2016.  I don’t believe it changes the above analysis.  As a pure reliever, Burdi was always going to be a member of the supporting cast rather than a sizable piece of the “Core.”  The White Sox are better at it than most, but Ian Hamilton, Ryan Burr, Caleb Frare, and even potentially Tyler Johnson and others down in the minors look like late inning relievers and they did not cost the 26th overall pick.

Lead Image Credit: Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

Hansen has alluded to a crisis of confidence, a sort of feedback loop wherein he struggled with his command, which meant Oklahoma downgraded his role on the pitching staff, which meant Hansen doubted himself further, rinse and repeat.  The lost season meant the former 1-1 candidate fell to the White Sox at pick number 49 instead, as the White Sox were banking on their pitching development, and that perhaps rival organizations were overvaluing recent performance.

Since the goal was to rebuild Hansen’s mechanics—even setting the disaster season aside, the guy was a 6’7” amateur pitcher anyway—as well as his confidence, the organization started him all the way down at Rookie Ball and let him annihilate it for 43 innings before promoting him to Low-A to conclude 2016.

The stuff was certainly there, and he was throwing it over the plate enough to obliterate less experienced hitters, but in an abundance of caution, the White Sox started Hansen in Low-A Kannapolis again in 2017, and did not promote him to Winston-Salem until he had thrown over 70 more innings of 4.00 K:BB ball there. He continued to post similar impressive rate stats to go along with his imposing size and stuff—you can read more about how he does what he does in this excellent writeup from our prospect team’s Jarrett Seidler–in High-A, but even so, the White Sox let him throw another 58 innings before finally getting him to Double-A at the very end of August, and basically the end of the minor league season.

Because there’s so little time left, the promotion serves largely as a reward for good performance and hard work more so than any extensive look he’ll get at the higher level–it’s likely he’ll only get one more start.  Even so, in his first Double-A appearance on Monday, he looked pretty incredible out of the gate.  Indeed, through five shutout innings, Hansen had struck out 8.  Then he lost it, failing to record an out in the 6^th and walking in a run before being pulled.

And that’s fine—pitchers sometimes lose their control in the 6^th inning, and even mega aces like Chris Sale have games where they get shelled.  Granted, with Hansen instances of him losing it can be a bit scarier given his junior year at Oklahoma, but the more data piles up, the more that season is looking like an outlier.

As it stands, Hansen has thrown 136 innings this year, and has posted a K:BB of  182:51 with an ERA of 2.78 across three levels.  He’s positioned to start next season in Double-A, landed himself on our midseason Top 50 prospects list, and if all goes well, should earn a September call-up in 2018 and potentially challenge for the rotation as soon as 2019.

The White Sox look to have cannily scooped up a lot of value with this pick, based on patience, and confidence that their pitching development staff could get the most out of an immensely talented amateur. So far so good.

Lead Image Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

As editor emeritus James Fegan pointed out on Twitter, Jennings has held hitters to a .146/.224/.270 line since June 1.  Jennings doesn’t offer classic LOOGY platoon splits or anything, but can be used for more than one inning and does a very good job of limiting home runs.  As a result he has been generally effective as a low-leverage option despite his poor K:BB numbers, and the White Sox definitely came out ahead in acquiring him for Andre Rienzo.

Tampa Bay sits only one game out of the Wild Card and two games back of Boston for the AL East lead, so a soft buy for a reliever on a modest salary makes sense.

As for Gillaspie, here are the pros:

• Former first round pick;
• Baseball America’s #74 overall prospect heading into 2017, and #69 overall prospect on their May 11, 2017 Top 100 update;
• Hit .286/.387/.482 across Double-A and Triple-A in 2016;
• Switch hitter;
• He’s a big dude;
• Conor’s brother!

That’s pretty much it for the good news. Gillaspie has had a down ’17 in his second look at Triple-A, turns 25 after this season and comes to the White Sox on the DL with a broken toe.  He can only play first base, even before his recent struggles he projected only as a 55 hit / 55 power ceiling guy, and our evaluators have questioned his swing, his contact skills, and his power.  If everything goes right, Gillaspie could look like a league average first baseman, but the Baseball America ranking looks like a bit of an outlier at this point.

That’s not to say this was a “bad” trade for the White Sox.  Gillaspie likely represents a competent major league bench bat, and if that doesn’t sound like much, remember that the most recent White Sox playoff “contender” was hoping to get bailed out of their DH black hole by Jerry Sands and Justin Morneau.  It’s a low ceiling without a whole lot of fallback options if he doesn’t hit, but he’s close to the majors and not without pedigree.

The White Sox have called up Aaron Bummer to take Jennings’ place in the bullpen.  At a glance, one could describe this as simply calling up a lefty reliever from Triple-A to replace the loss of a lefty reliever from the major league bullpen.  However, it does raise a bit of an eyebrow, as Bummer started this year in High-A, started last year in rookie ball, and had only thrown five innings in Charlotte.

A 19th round draft pick in 2014, Bummer missed 2015 with Tommy John surgery.  The organization is clearly high on the 6’3″ lefty who throws in the mid-90s, touching 98-99, and singled him out as someone to watch before the year for the High-A squad.  Bummer has missed bats at every level, and has seemed to improve with each promotion.

It’s the type of profile where one simply has to trust the organization’s pitching development and ability to find diamonds in the rough. If they think a hard-throwing lefty can succeed in a relief role, I hesitate to contradict them, and he has as much of a chance to succeed as anybody else who’s still left in the current White Sox bullpen.

Lead Image Credit: Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports

The additions of Lucas Giolito and Yoan Moncada have been talked about in great detail both here and elsewhere. The depth added by Reynaldo Lopez, Michael Kopech, Dane Dunning, and Luis Alexander Basabe are crucial as well — after all, it isn’t always the headline prospects in a trade that wind up being the most valuable.* Recent draft picks Collins, Hansen, and Carson Fulmer help fill out the rest of the team’s Top 10.

*Michael Brantley was the Player To Be Named Later in a blockbuster trade that yielded Brantley and basically nothing else for Cleveland.

However, as is mentioned in the article, the White Sox have a prospect depth problem. Recent draft picks Alex Call and Jameson Fisher along with players who have resided in the system longer like Jordan Stephens, Trey Michalczweski, and Tyler Danish could certainly help in that area, but each one of those players would have to elevate their current profiles with a strong 2017 season. Even with breakout seasons from those players, the system is still weaker 11-30 than many other organizations — even those ranked behind the White Sox overall.

A huge reason for the White Sox lack of depth is trades made in recent years in an attempt to patch the holes of a win-now team that hasn’t been over .500 since 2012. Trayce Thompson, Marcus Semien, and even Fernando Tatis Jr. have all left the system in recent years. None of those three will blow you away (although Keith Law has Tatis Jr. in his Top 50), but each would have provided insurance for a suffering White Sox system in places it desperately needed it. And given that even top prospects require some good fortune, the more players you can acquire that have a shot at being a major leaguer one day, the more likely you are to get lucky and find a regular outside of the usual places.

Rather than dwell in the past, however, we can look forward and see what the White Sox can do to further their rebuild with the highest chance of success. The first thing they, and any team, must do is draft well. The White Sox were notoriously poor at this for a number of years, but have improved in recent years. Determining how much better they have done will take a couple more years to decide, but the most recent draft was certainly encouraging. A key factor in the 2016 draft being an improvement was the high volume of draft picks, especially at the front end of the draft. For once they were on the receiving end of a compensatory pick, rather than giving them to other teams.  Also, when you lose a lot of games you pick at the front of each round and get a bigger bonus pool.

The best way for the White Sox to lose a lot of games this season is to complete the fire sale and trade Jose Quintana, Todd Frazier, David Robertson, Melky Cabrera, Brett Lawrie, and Nate Jones. Losing those veterans would almost certainly push them closer to a top draft pick. It would also provide quality prospects, and depth players, in return. Quintana should yield a return similar to the Chris Sale and Adam Eaton trades — perhaps on a smaller scale. Frazier, Robertson, and Jones would all bring back, at the very least, players to put some meat on the bones where the White Sox are lacking in the farm system.

It’s amazing news that the White Sox farm system is ranked sixth in all of baseball.  The fact that most outlets do Top 10s masks the fact that the White Sox coincidentally have a huge drop-off after prospect No. 10, and even with Moncada and Collins in tow, there is still a troubling lack of position players of the future.  If they can focus on that area in the next 12 months, they’ll see themselves rise even higher on organizational rankings, which should eventually translate to the ultimate goal — winning at the major league level.

Lead Photo Credit: Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports