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Keith Law Top 20 organization writeup


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Scary writeup on Montgomery. Pitching went backwards for so many of our mid tier pitchers. Gone backwards: nastrani, Pallete, Eder, Gonzalez, Iraite, Zavala, Bush, Ramos, and Taylor. Definitely seemed more negative than positive even though the system is improving. 

  https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6104105/2025/02/04/white-sox-2025-top-20-prospects-keith-law/

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1 hour ago, PolishPrince34 said:


Scary writeup on Montgomery. Pitching went backwards for so many of our mid tier pitchers. Gone backwards: nastrani, Pallete, Eder, Gonzalez, Iraite, Zavala, Bush, Ramos, and Taylor. Definitely seemed more negative than positive even though the system is improving. 

  https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6104105/2025/02/04/white-sox-2025-top-20-prospects-keith-law/

The pitchers did great and awesome and Katz and Bannister are legends.

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3 hours ago, PolishPrince34 said:


Scary writeup on Montgomery. Pitching went backwards for so many of our mid tier pitchers. Gone backwards: nastrani, Pallete, Eder, Gonzalez, Iraite, Zavala, Bush, Ramos, and Taylor. Definitely seemed more negative than positive even though the system is improving. 

  https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6104105/2025/02/04/white-sox-2025-top-20-prospects-keith-law/

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Geesh, just read through the rest of the these guys write ups as well.  He just trashes so many guys, including some make up questions on Zavala.  He gave a Madrigal comp to Meidroth.  Declines in stuff for Nastrini, Taylor, Eder, and Iriarte.

The one guy he really seems to like more than anyone else is Sean Burke

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This is just who Keith Law is. He's a glass half empty guy, but he can usually back it up because he knows what he's doing. The Colson report sounds like what we all knew - he might have trouble sticking at short and he had a bad season where he was too passive. Law is right to question the back injury, too. Who knows how that plays long-term.

I'm hopeful due to Colson's rebound at the end of the year, but back injuries can kill careers, so I get the pessimism.

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The rest of the writeups make sense to me, too. Mason Adams sounds like a quality control pitcher. Nastrini and Iriarte lost velocity, plus Nastrini couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, so I see why they fell. Meidroth has a similar profile to Madrigal so the comp makes sense, and it was more of a "he needs to hit the ball hard so he doesn't turn into Madrigal" than a "he is Madrigal". A 3% barrel rate in AAA is terrible. He needs some more time there to see if he can make more solid contact against AAA pitching.

The Jacob Gonzalez writeup is interesting - he faced the best college pitching in the SEC and more than held his own, but can't hack it in the minors, and Law doesn't know why. If he could turn into at least a league average SS that helps dull the impact of Montgomery switching to 3rd, but that seems unlikely now. Hopefully he figures something out during the offseason, otherwise what a wasted pick.

The writeup on Zavala is rough, but it's all stuff we heard during the season - bad swing decisions and a bad attitude will tank a career quickly. Hopefully he had a wakeup call.

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53 minutes ago, almagest said:

The rest of the writeups make sense to me, too. Mason Adams sounds like a quality control pitcher. Nastrini and Iriarte lost velocity, plus Nastrini couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, so I see why they fell. Meidroth has a similar profile to Madrigal so the comp makes sense, and it was more of a "he needs to hit the ball hard so he doesn't turn into Madrigal" than a "he is Madrigal". A 3% barrel rate in AAA is terrible. He needs some more time there to see if he can make more solid contact against AAA pitching.

The Jacob Gonzalez writeup is interesting - he faced the best college pitching in the SEC and more than held his own, but can't hack it in the minors, and Law doesn't know why. If he could turn into at least a league average SS that helps dull the impact of Montgomery switching to 3rd, but that seems unlikely now. Hopefully he figures something out during the offseason, otherwise what a wasted pick.

The writeup on Zavala is rough, but it's all stuff we heard during the season - bad swing decisions and a bad attitude will tank a career quickly. Hopefully he had a wakeup call.

It just continues to amaze me that is that highly regarded guy after guy gets here, and just falls off of a cliff.

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7 minutes ago, southsider2k5 said:

It just continues to amaze me that is that highly regarded guy after guy gets here, and just falls off of a cliff.

Well at least we have a couple of Left Handed starting pitchers that we can trade in a couple of years.

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But you have posters worried about signing quality free agents because it will block all the highly touted prospects from playing time. I don’t see a long term solution for SS right now, which is why signing Kim to a 4-5 year contract was a no brainer. Oh well

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4 minutes ago, JUSTgottaBELIEVE said:

But you have posters worried about signing quality free agents because it will block all the highly touted prospects from playing time. I don’t see a long term solution for SS right now, which is why signing Kim to a 4-5 year contract was a no brainer. Oh well

You can continue to cry about posts from a month ago, or realize that if Colson Montgomery, and guys like him, really do bust, a 4 or 5 year contract wouldn't make a damned bit of difference to this franchise.

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1 hour ago, JUSTgottaBELIEVE said:

But you have posters worried about signing quality free agents because it will block all the highly touted prospects from playing time. I don’t see a long term solution for SS right now, which is why signing Kim to a 4-5 year contract was a no brainer. Oh well

Well it depends on the quality free agent though. I could see the motivation for signing a shortstop if they were young enough, although there's several arguments against it. Losing a 2nd round draft pick doesn't seem smart if there's a QO attached to anyone, and even if you could develop a defense-first SS, doing so internally using the available playing time would be a big boost.

Signing a SS to a 2 year deal, why? That's all he got from the Rays. You're going to have to pay a premium price to sign him, and you can sign him in 2 years if the position is still available and if he's still healthy.

Signing an expensive OF/DH/1b, why? Just no, too many guys could get moved to those slots.

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5 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

Well it depends on the quality free agent though. I could see the motivation for signing a shortstop if they were young enough, although there's several arguments against it. Losing a 2nd round draft pick doesn't seem smart if there's a QO attached to anyone, and even if you could develop a defense-first SS, doing so internally using the available playing time would be a big boost.

Signing a SS to a 2 year deal, why? That's all he got from the Rays. You're going to have to pay a premium price to sign him, and you can sign him in 2 years if the position is still available and if he's still healthy.

Signing an expensive OF/DH/1b, why? Just no, too many guys could get moved to those slots.

Cue history of White Sox second and third round draft picks...

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4 hours ago, southsider2k5 said:

Geesh, just read through the rest of the these guys write ups as well.  He just trashes so many guys, including some make up questions on Zavala.  He gave a Madrigal comp to Meidroth.  Declines in stuff for Nastrini, Taylor, Eder, and Iriarte.

The one guy he really seems to like more than anyone else is Sean Burke

Which one of these would we have not said on this board?

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3 hours ago, southsider2k5 said:

It just continues to amaze me that is that highly regarded guy after guy gets here, and just falls off of a cliff.

Yea, it's a problem they've had forever though. Since probably the mid 00s. For internal development start to finsh, you had guys like Maggs and Lee, then Rowand, then not a whole lot comes to mind until TA. Plus, some of the ones who were actually promising (like Semien & Tatis Jr) they traded. Hopefully they can figure it out, but 20 years of history does not make me incredibly hopeful.

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12 minutes ago, southsider2k5 said:

It was said by a guy who is actually paid to do this.

I actually think the board tracks pretty well, it's nice to get a random pop on things like Burke which largely must be happening out of view (or I checked out by sept).
 

We already knew this but if you like keith law evaluations I would say the Braden Montgomery one is still probably stronger than consensus. 

It sucks but at least with pitchers they can kinda pop back onto the map in a hurry, and with Colson if he does turn it around we'd be believers pretty quick and just chalk it up to the back.

Nastrini...i unno.

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30 minutes ago, bmags said:

Which one of these would we have not said on this board?

1. I didn't think of the Madrigal comp for Meidroth, since there's a big difference in OBP on there. 

2. Hearing about the "declines in stuff" is interesting from a scouting perspective since we saw some of their struggles this year and we didn't have a full context. Iriarte, for example, did all right at AA, but he was also sent back down to Birmingham, a big ballpark, so it was hard to evaluate what we saw statistically down there.

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I will preface this by saying that Law is my favorite evaluator, and I think his ranking of the Sox farm is closer to reality than Kiley's at #2.

That said, this review seems gratuitously harsh.  He's really over the top with Montgomery.  It's hard to understand how he could rank the farm as high as he has, given these individual writeups.   

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