For the 2022 season, the Chicago White Sox has been known to have a bad farm system. It wasn’t that long ago that they were one of the best in the league but a lot of those prospects have graduated to Major League Baseball.
Andrew Vaughn, Luis Robert, Eloy Jimenez, and Dylan Cease are just a few of the many players that made the White Sox farm so good a few years ago but now they are all very good Major League players. That has lowered the farm system’s ranking.
MLB Pipeline came out on Tuesday and announced a new ranking that is really good news for Chicago White Sox. They jumped them up from 30th in the league to 26th. They are now ahead of the Los Angeles Angels, Houston Astros, San Diego Padres, and Atlanta Braves.
The number one team in all of baseball is the Baltimore Orioles. The Los Angeles Dodgers sit at number two despite being the best team in the league which shows just how good they are at using their resources.
In third is the highest-rated AL Central team in the Cleveland Guardians. They are going to be trouble for a long time because they are pretty good at the MLB level and have this great farm system. The rest of the division are all next to each other at 21, 22, and 23 so that is good news.
Here we go.
— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) August 23, 2022
Updated farm system rankings.
Complete breakdown: https://t.co/nk4oHHtHYS pic.twitter.com/nyWGcHkAPU
The Chicago White Sox got a nice little MLB Pipeline farm system rank boost.
How did the White Sox get a boost? Well, some of the other teams’ systems got worse. The San Diego Padres traded a haul for Juan Soto. The Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros were both in the World Series in 2021 and made some moves to stay in contention. As for the Angels, they are just bad at developing prospects.
The White Sox also improved. Colson Montgomery has grown into a top-100 prospect over the year. He is clearly someone that is going to be an impactful player in the Major Leagues. The White Sox are just hoping that he can become a star.
Oscar Colas isn’t that far behind him. He should be a top-100 guy soon enough as well. Both of them have been outstanding this season and should be MLB players by the end of the 2023 season or the beginning of the 2024 season.
It also came out that they are going to be teammates for a while in AA. “Project Birmingham” is the new idea the White Sox came up with that will have all of their best prospects that aren’t in AAA come together in AA to grow and develop as a team.
That will also insure that they are all Fall League eligible after their 2022 season is done. It is a good thing that all of them will grow together as teammates so that they can ascend in the organization if they are good enough.
The success that came from the Alternate Site in 2020 also had some influence on this. There is no doubt that the White Sox ranking will continue to go up as a result of these good players combined with a great development strategy. This was a great bit of news about the White Sox farm.