Jonathan Cannon’s path with the White Sox has gone from promising to precarious fast, and at this point, it’s fair to wonder whether he’ll get another real shot in Chicago.
That’s a harsh place for a pitcher who was, not long ago, viewed as one of the club’s better starting options. Cannon broke into the majors in 2024, when he was called up in April and made 21 starts across 124.1 innings.
After Garrett Crochet and Erick Fedde, he was seen as the White Sox’s best starter. He followed that with 22 starts and 103.2 innings in 2025, but by August 8, he was sent to Triple-A for a “reset.”
Since then, he’s only appeared in four big league games, and none of them came as a starter.
The numbers help explain why the team cooled on him. Cannon posted a 4.49 ERA in 2024 and a 5.82 ERA in 2025.
That’s a real drop, but it’s not the kind of split that screams total collapse. In 2024, the White Sox were so bad that even ordinary competence stood out.
In 2025, they were better, and the margin for poor pitching got a lot tighter.
Now the context has shifted again. In 2026, the White Sox are a winning team with more depth, and Cannon has slipped further down the ladder.
Will Venable told MLB.com in December that he still viewed Cannon as a starter, but that was then. Late in the season, Cannon hasn’t had much of a runway, and the organization appears to have moved on, whether that’s justified or not.
What makes the situation tricky is that the underlying profile didn’t really change much from one season to the next. Cannon works mostly with a sinker, cutter, sweeper, and change-up, with the sinker and cutter standing out as his best pitches.
He said himself that he had trouble getting groundballs in 2025, which is a problem for a pitcher built around a sinker. But Baseball Savant shows his GB% was in the 26th percentile in both 2024 and 2025, so that particular issue wasn’t actually new.
His strikeout production was similarly modest in both years: 17.4% in 2024 and 18.5% in 2025, compared to an MLB average of 22.2%. He did throw slightly more pitches in the strike zone in 2025, moving from 47% to 51%, and his pitch mix stayed mostly the same aside from using his cutter more than his sinker. The clearest year-to-year change was that his sinker lost effectiveness, falling from +2 in 2024 to -11 in 2025.
Even his 2024 season wasn’t clean from start to finish. He was briefly sent back to Triple-A that year, too.
But he also had a peak moment on June 18, when he worked 8.2 scoreless innings against the Houston Astros, allowed seven hits and one walk, and turned in the kind of outing that changes how a rookie is viewed. That night mattered.
It helped shape the way the organization and the fans saw him.
By 2025, though, the story had changed. It wasn’t one dramatic fall so much as a steady slide, with fewer good moments to balance out the bad ones.
He did get a pair of relief appearances last September, but after the August Triple-A reset, he never won back a starting job. This season brought one major league chance, and it went badly: three walks, no outs recorded.
For now, he’s still in Triple-A, where his 5.22 ERA doesn’t exactly force the issue. And with Hagen Smith, Drew Thorpe, Shane Smith, David Sandlin, and Tanner McDougal all looking like more likely rotation options, Cannon is not close to the front of the line.
September roster expansion could still give him a door back in. The White Sox need innings, and Cannon remains an option.
But with the team improving and his standing slipping, his future in Chicago looks cloudy. He may still have a major league future somewhere.
It just might not be with the White Sox.
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