Observations of the Farm
Some noteworthy pickings from the minor league stat sheets
The White Sox want another Nick Madrigal — this time, with batteries included
I’ve been wrong about a great number of things, both real-life and baseball related. This isn’t the place to talk about the former, but I’m usually willing to own up my mistakes in the latter. Thinking on the many hot and cold takes I’ve thrown into the ether over the last decade or so, rarely have I ever been more misguided than in my steadfast belief that Nick Madrigal had enough outlier skills not just to be a viable major-leaguer, but a good one.
Some of my reasoning still holds firm. At 5´6´´ with the shortest swing path you’ll ever see, Madrigal looked somewhat as advertised upon his initial debut, batting .317 with minuscule strikeout and whiff rates in a half-season’s worth of games between 2020-21. The problem was that everything else just wasn’t there. His purported 30-steal speed and elite keystone defense turned out to be a figment of scouts’ imaginations, as were his overall baseball instincts. He still didn’t strike out much, but he got fooled enough by MLB pitching to stop him from walking as much as he needed to. Luis Arráez is the only hitter in the world who can get away with something like that, and he still has enough pop to put out ~40 extra-base hits a year.
None of that has deterred the Sox from continuing to try to make something out of this player type, albeit without blowing a Top 5 pick on it this time around. And you know what? I don’t hate it!
Chase Meidroth does not resemble Madrigal in many ways, but in terms of bottom-line production, it’s an intuitive comparison. He almost never whiffs, leading the International League in in swinging strike rate since the start of 2024 and holding serve in his first taste of the majors. He strikes out more than Madrigal, but that’s partially because he’s selective enough to run the kind of walk rates usually reserved for sluggers who can hit a mistake a country mile. Whether it’ll play is still up for debate, but the archetype is the same: An extremely short swing geared for all-fields contact — he stands as far back in the box as anyone else on the team, and his average point of contact is deep into the plate — but with a swing-decision pattern that Madrigal could never sniff. If it does all come together, it’ll look like what we were dreaming of in the middle infield back in the halcyon days of 2021.
And if it doesn’t come together? There’s a lot more where that came from. Down in Birmingham resides the runner-up on the Southern League’s swinging strike leaderboard (5.9%) in the form of shortstop William Bergolla, who’s also already swiped eight bags in nine tries. Acquired from the Phillies last year for Tanner Banks, he’s got as much game power as I do. There’s still a non-zero chance that he’s good enough at getting on base, taking extra bases, and middle infield defense for him to be a contributor to the big league club. It’s also notable that he is putting up his production having begun 2025 as one of the youngest players in all of Double-A.
Just above him on that board, the Southern League leader with a 4.5% SwStr%? That would be Rikkuu Nishida, whom I probably don’t need to tell you about, if you’re still in the weeds here. He, too is probably not a major-leaguer, but if he is, boy is it going to be a lot of fun.
Madrigal’s career might have wound up being a rebuild-tanking nothingburger, but the spirit lives on!
I refuse to give up on Nick Nastrini, dammit
That’s way more words than I planned on the Madrigal/Meidroth school of hitting, so I’ll try to keep this one brief. In a nutshell, the bottom-line results still aren’t quite there for Nastrini, but the fantastic stuff still is there — and the data shows that he continues to make adjustments that will give him more shots at being a viable starter.
Nastrini is not the kind of pitcher who’s going to slowly work his way into solidity. He’s either going to click and be an excellent mid-rotation starter from the jump, or he’s not going to make it at all; very little in-between. That’s mostly because the part that needs to click is what remains a deep struggle: To throw his fastball over the plate consistently. But the massive walk rate that Natrini flashed in the upper minors and his first taste of the majors isn’t just a matter of poor command. It’s a matter of poor command in specific counts.
Nastrini’s first-pitch strike rate in the majors last year was an absolutely brutal 52%, which ranked 204th out of the 207 starters who faced 150+ hitters in 2024. He was constantly working in hitters’ counts, which made it far easier for them to lay off his breaking balls. His slider/curveball combo is as good as any, and in terms of shape, they look like they’ve gotten even better this year. The curveball has added more depth and side-to-side movement, and Nastrini’s slider has gotten even more movement-neutral and cutter-like, which stops the two pitches from blending together too much. That’s a good thing — but it won’t matter if he’s always working in counts where hitters feel comfortable leaving the bat on their shoulder the whole way.
There are early signs that progress is being made. Nastrini’s first-pitch strike rate with Charlotte is up a full eight points from where it was last year, and although the bottom-line results are still ugly, he may have turned a corner in his last start, when he fired six shutout innings with just two walks and a season-high 61% strike rate. I need to see a lot more, but baby steps are still steps, and I’m hanging on the back of this bandwagon until the wheels fall off.
Moves to the bullpen could speed up MLB timeline for some
The odds of 2022 second round pick Peyton Pallette making it as a starter were always a long shot, thanks to his rawness and injury history. Now, thanks to his age, the nastiness of his breaking ball, and the velo bump you usually see when a starter moves to the bullpen, a quick path to the majors for Pallette as a reliever seems like far from a pipe dream.
Pallette’s ERA in Birmingham is a ghastly 8.31 as of this writing, but that number is skewed by a brutal two-game blowup of six earned runs in fewer than three innings of work. Remove that two-day stretch and tack on his 11-game relief stint with the Barons last year, and you get a sparkling 1.67 ERA with a 31:8 strikeout-to-walk ratio over 27 innings. What I’m saying is, Pallette is about to be 24 years old and three years removed from the Tommy John surgery that caused him to fall to the second round to begin with. Ignore what the ERA looks like right now, because he’s entering what should be his physical prime and has already shown he can mow down Double-A hitters. He’ll be a strong candidate to move to Charlotte with a few more solid outings, and given the current state of the big league staff, it won’t take too many solid outings there to put him in position to jump to the Rate Field bullpen by the end of the year.
Keeping things in Birmingham, I had hoped that Wikelman González could (like Nastrini) magically find some strike-throwing juice this spring. Man is his stuff electric, enough so to play at the top of a rotation if he had any idea where it was going.
Unfortunately, González still doesn’t seem to have much idea where it’s going. He’s already punched out 18 hitters in just 12 1⁄3 innings, good for a 31% strikeout rate (MLB average hovers around 22%). He’s also already walked 10 hitters in that time, a 17% rate that’s simply unplayable in the majors, and even in the upper minors. When the ceiling is that high, I’m all in favor of giving a kid as much time as humanly possible to figure things out, because on the 5% chance that everything does actually click, you’re talking about having a true frontline starter on your hands.
That being said, this is González’s third run at Double-A, and while he’s a year younger than Pallette, it’s rare for a player to get more than three tries at meeting the goals their team has set out for them at a particular level — even when they’ve got raw talent like González. In fact, when they have that level of raw talent, sometimes you don’t even want to give them more than a couple chances. At a certain point, a 40% chance that such a pitcher can be a lockdown reliever is just a better bet to take than the aforementioned 5% that they can be an All-Star starter.
Even as much harder as it is to find the latter than the former, sometimes it’s better to not look a gift horse in the mouth — and if it’s clear that González just can’t develop starter-level control, that might be what they’re doing. Between Hagen Smith and Grant Taylor, the Barons staff already has a critical mass of arms who could be Cy Young contenders if they can stop walking everyone and their mother. That being the case, I suspect we’ll see González make the transition to relief sooner rather than later. Several old-for-the-level starters have performed well at Winston-Salem in the early going, and it seems likely that one or multiple of Tanner McDougal, Lucas Gordon, or Jake Bockenstedt pushes for a spot in Birmingham at some point this spring. Whenever that happens, González could join Pallette on the fast track to a chance at the big league bullpen late in the campaign — results pending.