White Sox Top Prospects Schultz & Smith Nearing MLB Call-Up

The White Sox prospects everyone in Chicago has been waiting on are getting closer to Rate Field, but the organization isn’t rushing the clock.

General manager Chris Getz has made clear that top pitching prospects Noah Schultz and Hagen Smith will get the call at some point this season. Two and a half weeks in, though, they’re still working through their reps at Triple-A Charlotte. That’s not an accident.

The math is simple. Players need 172 days of Major League service time in a 186-day season to earn a full year of team control. With roughly two and a half weeks already burned off the calendar entering this past weekend, the White Sox have locked in an extra year of control over Schultz, Smith, and the rest of the next wave. No service-time manipulation required. The calendar does the work.

Getz has some cover here anyway. Both Schultz and Smith dealt with injuries and developmental bumps last season, giving the organization a legitimate reason to ease them back. Schultz, a powerful left-hander drafted in 2022, battled a knee issue in 2025. Smith, another hard-throwing southpaw taken in the 2024 draft, has been limited to three-inning outings while the Sox stretch him out.

“After last year, battling a bit of a knee issue, [Schultz] looks like he’s back and ready to go. Multiple pitches. He’s got his cutter working, with some real velocity and command,” Getz said last week. “And Hagen has been doing well. His outings are only in three-inning [range] right now. We’re going to continue to build that.”

Early returns from Charlotte are encouraging. Right-hander Tanner McDougal has also drawn attention. And the position player side of the ledger looks promising too.

Infielder-turned-left fielder Sam Antonacci is slashing .342/.500/.526 to start the year, building on the buzz he generated earlier this spring. Second baseman William Bergolla Jr. is hitting .457/.525/.571. Those are small-sample numbers, obviously. But they’re the kind of numbers that keep fans refreshing MiLB box scores at midnight.

The White Sox aren’t the first team to thread the service-time needle carefully. Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement has long made early-season roster decisions a chess match between what fans want and what front offices calculate. The Cubs did it with Kris Bryant in 2015. The Sox are doing it now, more transparently than most.

Still, there’s a difference between a team suppressing a player’s service time cynically and a team that has a legitimate rebuild to manage. The Sox lost 121 games in 2024. A year later they were still sorting through what they had. The prospect of getting Schultz and Smith for an extra season of controllable cost while also giving them more development time isn’t manipulation so much as it is sensible asset management for a franchise trying to build something durable on the South Side.

Fans at Rate Field, which sits near 35th and Shields in Bridgeport, have been patient. Arguably too patient. The Sox front office knows that. Getz knows that. The fanbase has watched this rebuild get promised and then delayed enough times that “they’ll be up soon” carries a specific kind of credibility burden now.

The reporting on Charlotte’s early performances, first detailed by the Chicago Sun-Times, suggests Schultz in particular looks like someone who’s past the injury fog and pitching with his full arsenal again.

That’s the real news here. Not the service-time math, not the prospect rankings. Schultz has his cutter working, his velocity is back, and according to Getz, his command is there. For a team that has been building toward this moment for three years, that matters.

What comes next is a waiting game with a known end date. Sometime this spring or summer, Schultz gets on a flight from Charlotte to wherever the Sox are playing. Smith follows, probably shortly after, once his pitch count stretches into starter range. Antonacci and Bergolla are in the conversation too, depending on how the big-league roster shakes out.

The rebuild has a timetable now. Not an official one. But the pieces are visible, the talent is performing, and the calendar is moving.

For White Sox fans, that’s more than they’ve had in a while.