How the White Sox’s Jacob Gonzalez went from first-round bust to potential star

Posted June 14, 2026 1:19 pm

By Keith Law

I had given up on Jacob Gonzalez this offseason, after two-plus years of the White Sox’s 2023 first-round pick failing to produce at all in the high minors. I left him off my ranking of the top 20 prospects in the White Sox’s much-improved system, noting that he’d hit .232/.307/.345 as a 23-year-old in Double A and Triple A in 2025 and calling him “an extra infielder, if that.”

That Jacob Gonzalez no longer exists. The one the White Sox just recalled from Triple A, who was leading the minors in homers at the time of his call-up and was off to a very strong start despite playing a new position (first base), might be one of their best hitters — and a future All-Star.

Gonzalez completely remade his swing this offseason. It was a swing overhaul reminiscent of what the White Sox did last spring with another of their first-rounders who had stalled in the minors, Colson Montgomery. I recently spoke with Gonzalez and Chicago’s director of hitting (and miracle worker) Ryan Fuller about how they completely rebuilt his mechanics in such a short period of time.

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In college at Mississippi, Gonzalez hit with a deep crouch and was way over his back side through most of when he was making contact. His hands started very high, creating a much longer path to the ball once he got started. When he hit, he’d struggle to transfer his weight consistently, and often spun off his front heel, flying open as a result, yanking the ball to right field. With the aluminum bats in college baseball, he made it work, but with wood bats he had difficulty getting results starting from his professional debut.

After putting up subpar numbers his first two-plus pro seasons, Gonzalez knew something had to change. He said those adjustments actually began at the end of last year.

“Since I started in pro ball, I had been struggling to get my direction to go towards the pitcher and not towards right field,” he said. “I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Then one day, the second-to-last week of the (2025) season, I decided to stride closed and see what that did.

“That was the first time ever my direction was good. The last week of the season I felt good, so went back to how I hit in college but with my stride closed, and I went into offseason working on that. Just feeling my direction and trying to drive the ball to left-center more.”

Once the season ended, the work continued for Gonzalez at the White Sox’s January minor-league camp in Arizona, where Gonzalez lives.

“He wasn’t invited, but he asked to be a part of it,” Fuller said. “He was the oldest guy there. He came in with his swing, where he was hunched over his setup, and his back leg had a ton of weight on it. It was a very compromised position from the setup. He was adamant that he wanted to stick with it, but we saw pretty quickly other guys were looking better than he was — and he’s the Triple-A player and first-round pick. We told him, your OPS is in the .600s. You have bat speed, but it’s not able to come out where you’re setting up.”

“Ryan just showed me what they thought, I told him what I thought, and we tried to do what I wanted to do within what they were doing,” Gonzalez said. “They obviously wanted me to hit tall, like I am right now. When we first agreed on it, it wasn’t how I hit right now. I changed maybe after two or three weeks. I told them I like to hit pre-loaded — I don’t want to have to load before swinging. I’d rather just stride and swing versus do a whole load while I’m striding. I like having my weight on my back leg and just get going, and that’s how I hit in college — but it was super low.

“Now Ryan was saying, ‘Do what you want to do, but stand up and do it.’ It was probably halfway between where I was in college and where I am right now. We were good with that, then I kept striding closed and feeling my direction go to center and I was driving balls out to left-center.”

“We had talked last year about giving him more freedom to load and get into the ground from a strong spot, and being more upright,” Fuller said. “He did it for May last year and had really good numbers.”

May was probably Gonzalez’s best month in a dismal 2025 season, with half of his eight homers on the season coming that month. It was the only month where he slugged better than .400.

“We wanted to get him more upright, so we showed him the Hawk-Eye (computer-vision system for tracking ball trajectories) data. We said, here’s what we want to attack, here’s why, and here’s what we think is going to happen,” Fuller said.

The next step was a change in Gonzalez’s hand position when he started out, before loading.

“I was wrapping (my bat) too much, so tried to put my arms out more, kind of like Matt Olson or (Shohei) Ohtani do, hands out in front of me,” he said. “As I did that, I couldn’t be as squatty that way, so I stood up a little more. I still felt my weight in back leg and back hip, I was still striding and I was feeling good.

“I started wrapping again from that position because I was feeling weak. My first movement has always been for my chest to go down. I’ve always hit crouched, so my body wants to go down when I swing. I asked, ‘Why do people like (Paul) Goldschmidt start with their bats angled down, or Matt Carpenter, who’d lean backwards?’ It’s because they are setting their posture so when they make their first moves they’re in a good spot. Now I’m upright, so that when I make my first move down, I don’t even think about, it goes down, but it’s in a good spot.

“I asked Fuller one day, ‘What do you think about if I try a Carpenter-ish upright start so I can make the move I want to make?’ He said, ‘Yeah, try it out,’ so I did that at the end of February.”

“He asked a million questions,” Fuller said. “He’s inquisitive in the best way possible, and then he did it. We said give it spring training, and he did the same drill work every day, with the same setup. He turned into a totally different player, had a great spring training, then carried it into the regular season.”

Gonzalez finished the 2025 season with 46 games for Triple-A Charlotte, hitting .204/.310/.293 with just two homers. His contact quality was, to put it mildly, poor. His hard-hit rate was just 32.5% and his 90th percentile EV — the figure where 90% of his batted balls were hit below that exit velocity — was 100.5 mph, well below the median for the level. He returned there to start 2026 and was, indeed, a totally different player. He hit .317/.419/.668 in 52 games, with 19 homers, and was hitting everything hard. His hard-hit rate there was 44.2% and his 90th percentile EV was up to 105.1 mph.

You can see the difference in his swing now, as he’s much more upright and his entire approach, from setup to swing to follow-through, is quieter. He’s starting with his hands lower so he doesn’t have to make a big move to load, his back elbow never gets as high as it used to and his front leg stays much stronger through contact. The result is harder contact where it’s also easier for him to tap into his raw power, as he’s pulling the ball more naturally now (rather than yanking it foul or pulling off the ball to go the other way), and making more efficient use of all that bat speed.

It’s also helped that Gonzalez is noticeably stronger than he was a year ago. He said that he didn’t even realize it.

“My wife told me the other day when she saw old pictures of me, ‘you’re way bigger than that!’” he said. “I’ve put work in the weight room and tried to get stronger every time I go in there.”

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Going into Saturday’s games, the White Sox were fourth in baseball and second in the American League in team OPS. It’s an offense that has powered a surprising resurgence for a club that lost 121 games just two years ago. Chicago has several development success stories in their lineup, including Gonzalez. As an organization, they preach collaboration across departments as part of their process.

“Our hitting department wants to collaborate as much as possible,” Fuller said. “We try to build these guys to be incredibly strong and incredibly stable to build the engine. Things like, this is the movement pattern we’re working on in the cage, or here are three movements to prep before you get to the cage. We can make gains before they even touch a bat, so maybe their lower half is moving much better after that prep, or they get stronger.

“We call it calibrating, there’s always calibrating going on. The game is always giving us feedback. We focus on three main skills for hitters: decisions, contact and damage. We tell the guys, most big leaguers have two of those three skills average to above-average. Jacob was a decisions and contact guy with low damage, so he’s gone into that this year.”

I asked White Sox general manager Chris Getz about the remarkable turnarounds for Gonzalez and Montgomery (who hit 21 homers in 71 games in his MLB debut season last year and has 16 in 65 games for Chicago through Friday), in particular, and what we might glean about their development philosophy from what we’ve seen.

“I don’t have a lot other than you have to believe that players can get better in this business,” Getz said. “Mythically, college first-rounders are expected to take off from the jump and shoot quickly to the big leagues without many hiccups, and the recent success of Jacob is a great lesson that if you have a solid development environment, a high aptitude player, and believe in your hitting leadership like we do in Ryan Fuller and (hitting coordinator) Sherman Johnson, the pool of potential acquisitions becomes so much larger.”

I feel like long-suffering White Sox fans might need smelling salts from reading that.

Through his first 10 games in the majors, Gonzalez has more than held his own, with nine of his 17 balls hit into play above 95 mph for a 52.9% hard-hit rate, with four of those above 105 mph, so the hard-contact skills he displayed in Triple A appear to be intact. If he can improve his swing decisions now that he’s facing big-league pitching, with his chase rate over 30% in that small sample, he has real All-Star upside, with 25-homer potential and a long history of drawing enough walks to keep his OBP above the median.

I was out, but he’s pulled me back in.