Like A 40 Degree Day & The White Sox

David Simon’s The Wire, a great american crime drama, is probably my single favorite piece of art. I’ve ingested the five season series a half dozen times. Each time I pick it up, I not only cherish the seminal scenes I’ve grown to love, but find new and interesting nuggets I missed before. As someone who has lived all of my years in a major urban metropolis, I find the show hitting home often. One scene that has grown in fame over time, voiced by Stringer Bell (played by Idris Elba) is “40 Degree Day”. The scene is below, in it’s entirety, and I’d advise you to spend 97 seconds watching it.

The 40 degree day got me thinking about the White Sox (I’m fucked up) and the 40 FV prospect….

What about the White Sox??

As previously noted, being a quite sick individual, I have given a lot of thought as to “WHAT WENT WRONG”? With the last White Sox rebuild. A fair amount of people can handwave away that the team has a bad owner, ergo the results won’t ever work and you just wait until said bad owner is no longer the owner for things to change. That’s a little too simplistic for my tastes, let alone bad owners popping up all throughout sport and sometimes it just doesn’t have much effect on a team winning or not.

As I think back through the minutiae, explanations such as having a terrible GM again don’t suffice to me, what exactly was Teflon Hahn so bad at that could’ve saved the day if he was more self aware or enlightened? DEPTH! DEPTH is as mundane a concept as the 40 degree day. We all have sighted DEPTH as an issue. Yes, some of your blue chip prospects didn’t amount to as much as you’d like (or much at all), but even when it was going pretty good, it always felt like you had to patch-all with Leury Garcia. So depth is an adequate answer. But what is depth?

Enter the 40 FV Prospects!!

Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel, prospect rankers, came up with the concept of Future Value, which is also the title of their book. The concept is simple, not only do they rate prospects, but they hang a number on that prospect that mirrors a traditional 20/80 scouting scale so as to determine their potential Future Value as big leaguers. Below are two charts that help you and I, the layman, understand what those scales mean…..Hitters first!

And now Pitchers…

My focus here is the “DEPTH” prospects ie, the 40 (degree day) FV prospects. These are your bench players, the bottom of your roster. The “fill in and help you in a pinch” crew. That is according to the rating, but we all know the rating is “in a perfect world.” In an imperfect world, these 40 rated prospects end up materially washing out with little to no effect on your roster (other than depleting it of warm bodies that could help at any point in time) or they become more than this, a regular, maybe even an occasional all-star. Let’s look back on the last era of White Sox and see how these 40 grade prospects ended up helping.

Your 2020 Mid-Season White Sox 40 Grade Prospects

Now that’s a fucking list!! The Yerminator did hit for a month in 2021 and 100% helped that team win a division. Gavin Sheets was an okay bench bat in 2021 and 2022, before the White Sox Peter Principled him out of contract. Seby Zavala was a totally fine #2 catcher. I guess they did trade Konnor Pilkington, but the rest of this list is bullflop.

Other than Matt Foster‘s cool walk out of the bullpen music, the group very much did NOT create the DEPTH a White Sox contention window team was looking for and nobody from the group became anything that resembled even a part-time regular, save for Yermin Mercedes’ Jeremy Lin month. I think MySoxSummer still believes in Micker Adolfo‘s height, at least….Wow, what a list. Now let’s take a look at the 2024 equivalent and see who we think can help the Chris Getz White Sox avoid this future fate.

The 2024 White Sox 40 FV Prospects

I plucked the following lists from both Fangraphs and ESPN where the proprietors of the ratings system now ply their respective trades.

Let’s take a look at the 40 FV’s we think can help this team turn a corner.

Grant Taylor Has A Ton of Heat!!

I had a conversation over the summer with Ian Eskridge from Future Sox and their updated top 30 rankings had Grant Taylor in the top 5. There is substantial heat behind him, even though he only pitched 16 innings in low A and another 7 2/3 innings in the Arizona Fall League. Maybe Taylor becomes the 40 FV prospect that is a game changer for the contending White Sox of the back end of this decade? Or maybe he’s Alec Hansen?

Sean Burke is Already Here and Pitched GOOD!!

Sean Burke was a former top ten prospect left for dead by most after injuries and ineffectiveness. Then he came back from injury, pitched well enough in Charlotte to be given a chance to join the big league club in September and down right dominated when he got here. Burke sported a 1.42 ERA over 19 innings, including 22 strikeouts and only 7 walks with a 2-0 record.

Pretty good for a guy sliding out of most White Sox prospect lists. The performance was so good, that Roster Resource seems to think he’s got an inside track at a rotation spot for the 2025 White Sox (not saying much, but still sayin’ somethin’). Maybe the former Maryland hurler is the lightning strike these White Sox need to lift them up.

Who You Crappin? The White Sox NEED BATS….What about Samuel Zavala?

Zavala was the third piece in the much maligned Dylan Cease trade from March of 2023. The teenager struggled at high A in 2024, not getting to the power that has been expected, but still very much controlling the strike zone as he was purported to do. Heading into his age 20 season and just a short jaunt from needing potential Rule 5 protection (after the 2025 season), he’s in a real make or break year. Maybe the wiry outfield prospect turns the corner and makes the Cease trade look a lot less feeble to the critics? Or he Blake Rutherford‘s hisself?

Who else do you think can become the type of 40 FV prospect that can break that recent mold? Prelander Berroa? George Wolkow? Only time will tell. The 40’s will be what I am watching in 2025. Which make a difference on the White Sox, which make moves up and down the prospect rankings list. One thing is certain, if our 40’s continue to be 40 degree days, we won’t have much to give a fuck about.

-BeefLoaf