The AL Central farm systems should scare the White Sox

Baseball America knows their stuff when it comes to Major League Baseball. They have rankings for all sorts of different things and they are fun to analyze. Of course, things don’t always happen according to plan so they aren’t always right but they are certainly very respectable. The Chicago White Sox, however, is going to take not from some new content they put out.

They put out their rankings for the top 30 farm systems in Major League Baseball and they don’t love the Chicago White Sox right now. We know the reason for this as the White Sox have graduated almost all of their top prospects in the last few years.

Everyone knows that the White Sox are a 90+ win team right now because they flawlessly executed a rebuild. They need some tweaks here and there to make them a World Series team but the farm has taken a hit.

It is certainly a good problem to have. More than half of their top ten from a year ago have either graduated (Garrett Crochet, Andrew Vaughn, Michael Kopech, Gavin Sheets) or been traded away (Nick Madrigal).

Before that, the system was loaded with studs like Yoan Moncada, Lucas Giolito, Dylan Cease, Eloy Jimenez, and Luis Robert amongst others. With all of this turnover, the White Sox are currently ranked dead last for MLB farms. They really need to replenish it with talent and it is fair to assume that they will do a good job in doing that.

The Chicago White Sox should be in a very competitive division soon enough.

If they don’t do that, however, they might run into problems in the future. They are elite at the MLB level for now and should be for a while so they have plenty of time to build it back up. In the meantime, the rest of the AL Central is doing a good job rebuilding their teams.

According to the same ranking that has the White Sox in last, the other teams are all in the top 12. The Cleveland Guardians are ranked 12th, the Detroit Tigers are ranked 6th, and the Kansas City Royals are ranked 5th. That is a little scary as a White Sox fan.

None of those teams are elite at the MLB level like the White Sox but they might be in short order. The scariest team is the Tigers because they were an okay MLB team in 2021 with a top-six farm. The division is going to be bad once again in 2022 but it might not extend past that.

This should scare the White Sox in the sense that they need to keep their foot on the gas. This isn’t going to make them any worse of a team but if they fall off a little bit, the rest of the division will eat them alive in the future. It is about rebuilding the farm system while maintaining an elite level at the MLB. It should be very fun to see this division compete five years from now.