White Sox Still Overlooking Their Most Productive Pitching Prospect

White Sox Still Overlooking Their Most Productive Pitching Prospect

As much as the baseball world likes to talk about prospect rankings and which minor league players are the future stars of the game, so much of those rankings are based on projections rather than actual data.

Prospects with loud tools who are young receive more favorable grades, and they get most of the attention from fans and media who closely follow the next generation of MLB stars. Sometimes they are also afforded more opportunities. MLB teams love to take a shot on upside or pedigree, and the leash on a highly graded prospect with loud tools tends to be much longer.

But of course, that ignores the one thing that actually matters most, which is results.

Projections and tools can lie. It is all just someone’s subjective opinion anyway. And I suppose numbers can lie too, but over a longer span of time, results become hard to ignore. A player is only as good as the evidence says they are.

And it is for that very reason that I believe the Chicago White Sox are currently doing a disservice to one of their best pitching prospects in the organization.

Left-hander Shane Murphy was a 14th round pick by the White Sox in the 2022 MLB Draft out of Chandler Gilbert Community College. Over the last few seasons, he has been not just the most productive arm in the White Sox minor league system, but maybe in minor league baseball as a whole.

Despite the results and the production, despite Murphy doing everything you could ask of him, he still remains stuck in Double A Birmingham at 25 years old.

In 2025, Murphy threw 110.2 innings for the Birmingham Barons. He posted a 1.38 ERA and a 0.83 WHIP. It was one of the best seasons by a starting pitcher in the Southern League. At the end of the year, Murphy received a brief promotion to Triple A Charlotte, where he had a 2.45 ERA in three starts.

As mentioned earlier, Murphy is not a player with overwhelming tools. Not a single one of his pitches is graded as even average on the 20 to 80 scale. But he has elite control, consistently hits his spots, throws strikes, and understands the art of pitching.

Murphy’s fastball sits right around 90 mph and rarely touches 94. But he is a tremendous competitor who induces plenty of soft contact thanks to precise location and the way he studies scouting reports and reads opposing swings to exploit weaknesses. In my opinion, that is the beauty of pitching. Sometimes there is a pitcher with extreme gifts and overpowering stuff. Other times, it is a pitcher who wins a chess match in the batter’s box with nothing exceptional in his arsenal, but an exceptional mind for the game and the ability to execute. Both types of pitchers can be just as effective in the area that matters most, production.

Murphy is the No. 27 ranked prospect in the White Sox organization according to MLB Pipeline. But it is fair to wonder why he is being held back given how well he has pitched.

In three starts to open the 2026 season, Murphy is 1-0 with a 2.12 ERA. It should come as no surprise that he is continuing to dominate at the Double A level, yet there he remains.

We just saw left hander Noah Schultz get called up from Triple A to make his MLB debut and join the White Sox starting rotation. That was a perfect opportunity to promote Murphy to Triple A Charlotte and replace Schultz as a lefty in the Knights rotation. Yet he is still with the Barons.

For a White Sox team that will need more help on the pitching front before the end of 2026, Murphy is absolutely a viable option. He deserves a chance to prove it not just in Triple A, but in Major League Baseball as well.

Baseball is a complicated game today, with analytics and projections at the forefront of decision making for front offices. There is a lot of merit to that. But at some point, results also have to matter, and production deserves to be rewarded. As long as the White Sox keep Shane Murphy in Double-A, they are doing a disservice to both him and the organization.