Recently Promoted Chicago White Sox Prospect Excelling In Double-A

CHICAGO –– One White Sox prospect that has made strides in 2025 is Tanner McDougal.

The 22-year-old was recently promoted to Double-A Birmingham, the highest level of the minor leagues he's reached since beginning his professional career with the White Sox organization in 2021. The promotion has also come with an uptick in performance.

Through four starts with the Barons, the 6-foot-5, right-handed pitcher has a 1.27 ERA and a 0.93 WHIP –– both career-best numbers –– with six walks and 29 strikeouts in 21.1 innings. That earned McDougal Southern League Player of the Week honors for the week of June 30 to July 6.

His last two starts have featured a combined 11 shutout innings, and his first start in Double-A on June 18 was highlighted by a career-high 10 strikeouts. All four outings have included no more than five hits, and he walked zero batters for the first time in Double-A on Saturday.

"Tanner's been impressive this year," White Sox director of player development Paul Janish said on June 30. "The stuff is good. The couple times I've seen him in the last five or six weeks, he goes up to 100 miles an hour and there's flashes of elite stuff, and that's great. He has, six or seven outings in a row now, pitched really well and just been consistent. That's one thing I would point to. The consistency, historically, has not been what Tanner himself would tell you he wants it to be."

McDougal began this season with the High-A Winston-Salem Dash, where he posted a 3.28 ERA and a 1.47 WHIP across 13 starts. While the overall numbers in High-A were solid, McDougal wasn't as consistent, like Janish mentioned. For example, he had two shutouts –– one of which across a season-high seven innings –– but also had two outings with four earned runs and two starts where he pitched just two innings.

McDougal's improved consistency since his promotion is a sign of maturity from Janish's standpoint.

"We forget that he's a younger guy, and there's emotion, there's want-to. He wants everything to happen really quickly, the immediate results," Janish said. "The thing that sticks out is the emotional development, the maturity that we've seen this year. Interaction with staff, the ability within a game to maybe have a bad inning and right the ship have really stuck out with him. That was part of the reason why his stuff is better than [it was in] A-ball."

"But that was the thing that stuck out and [made us say], 'Hey, it's time to get him to Double-A, start pushing him, get him around Hagen [Smith], get him around some of the other guys that are having success.' Shane Murphy, Jake Palisch are pitching really well. The staff, overall, there in Birmingham has done well. Some of those were the factors in getting him up. But give Tanner a lot of credit. He's really taken to it and is embracing it."

The White Sox selected McDougal in the fifth round of the 2021 MLB Draft out of Silverado High School in Las Vegas. He's ranked No. 28 among White Sox prospects and No. 8 among the team's right-handed pitching prospects.

And with more performances like his recent ones in Double-A, he should continue to move up the charts.