White Sox fans are still waiting for the Dylan Cease trade to pay off, and the return hasn’t come close yet. What makes that sting worse is that the centerpiece of that deal is still in the organization, and Drew Thorpe has been biding his time for another shot with the big club since getting hurt in 2024.
Thorpe missed all of 2025 after Tommy John surgery, then worked his way through a rehab season in 2026 with solid results in the minors. In 10 starts across four levels, he went 2-0 with a 2.85 ERA, struck out 38, and walked 13 over 41 innings. Both of those wins came at Triple-A Charlotte, but even with that progress, he never got the call to Chicago.
That was notable because the White Sox were scraping for innings from their rotation late in the year. Thorpe at least gave them something to think about, especially when you look back at what he did in his lone MLB season in 2024.
He wasn’t dominant, but on a team that lost a modern-era record 121 games, few pitchers were. Thorpe finished with a 0.1 bWAR, a 3-3 record, 25 strikeouts, and 21 walks. His ERA sat at 5.48, though that number was dragged up by two rough outings at the end.
Before that late collapse, there was enough there to keep the Sox interested. Outside of a seven-run second start, he didn’t allow more than two runs in any of the other six starts in his first seven. He also put together five straight outings of at least six innings, the kind of length Chicago could have used badly down the stretch in 2026.
Then came the final two starts, when he gave up 14 runs and it became clear something was off. He missed the last two months of the season after that, and those outings left his ERA looking much worse than the earlier stretch suggested.
Now the path is pretty straightforward. If Thorpe shows even flashes of that kind of form in preseason work, the White Sox will have to give real thought to putting him on the Opening Day roster.
That becomes even more likely if the team doesn’t make a meaningful addition to the rotation through trade or free agency. Given how the staff looked when the season ended and how reluctant the franchise has been to spend heavily on pitching, they may not have much of a choice.
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What makes Shelton worth tracking from here is that the bat is creating more certainty than the rest of his profile. Scouting reports have long flagged questions about his swing mechanics and speed, and his defensive future is still not settled. For a White Sox system looking for players who can force their way back into the conversation, Shelton is doing the one thing that matters most in the fall: giving the organization a reason to keep revisiting him. [Read more 🡒]