Jonathan Cannon’s first spring start represents adjustments Sox are looking for

TEMPE, Ariz. — The White Sox will have to rely on a cadre of young pitchers in 2025. Newcomer Martín Pérez will be the elder statesman at 33 years old, but otherwise, Gen Z will be heavily represented in the starting rotation this season.

Jonathan Cannon, who won’t turn 25 until mid-July and is expected to be a part of the Sox rotation this year, made his first Cactus League start of 2025 on Friday. Facing the Angels, he gave up two runs in the first inning and then settled in and pitched a clean second inning.

Cannon is one of a trio of under-25 starters on the Sox roster, Drew Thorpe and Nick Nastrini the others. As new manager Will Venable has taken in his team’s performance thus far this spring, he said the pitching has impressed him.

“There’s been a couple innings that we know that have gotten away from us. But overall, it’s been really good,” Venable said of his staff. “And really, for us in talking about the race to two strikes, we’ve done a really good job in that area. And really like the guys making the adjustments that they’ve been making.”

In Friday’s outing, Cannon demonstrated the kind of the adjustments Venable has been pleased with this spring. Cannon hung a few breaking pitches in the first inning and then was able to keep the ball down in the zone more in the second, but in the bigger picture, his adjustment is in working on pitch selection. He threw about 30 pitches on Friday, and Cannon said he used more sweepers to left-handed batters than he would traditionally throw because he’s working on developing that pitch as an additional weapon.

“I felt like it was kind of an untapped tool,” Cannon said of his sweeper. “Definitely toward the end of the year, I used the fourseam a lot, and I feel like the sweeper is another pitch that I’ll be able to attack lefties with. And that’s been a point of emphasis in spring so far, so I wanted to make sure I keep getting my reps with it and working on it in games.”

Venable said he wants his young pitchers in particular working on pitch usage and pitch design, as well as things like controlling the running game and communicating with their catcher during the game. Spring starts, especially the first one for a pitcher, are more to do with execution than results.

That said, pitchers still use the feedback they get from opposing batters to gauge how well their pitches were working, and they still study film to assess their in-game judgments.

“We’ll sit down tomorrow and go over it because it looks different on film the next day than it does in person,” Cannon said. “You’ll think ‘Oh I definitely executed that pitch,’ and then you look and it was kinda middle. We’ll look at the execution and also the hitters tell you what you need to know too.”

On the whole, the projections for the White Sox in 2025 aren’t great. They are not expected to lose as many games as last year, but the improvement in in the win-loss column will still be slight.

But at this stage of the rebuilding project, it is sort of like an early spring training game. Results still matter, to some degree, but it’s more about execution and development. The White Sox pitching staff will likely have plenty of growing pains, especially with several of them being so young and relatively inexperienced at the Major League level.

That makes having someone like Pérez valuable beyond what he can do on the mound. Along with Cannon, Thorpe, and Nastrini, there are several other pitchers on the Sox staff who are under 30: Jonathan Heasley, Davis Martin, Bryse Wilson, and Sean Burke.

“We have Martín and then kinda all the young guys. It’s been great, Martín’s great,” Cannon said. “I’ve really enjoyed picking his brain. I feel like we kinda have similar mixes. It’s just he’s left-handed, I’m right-handed, so I’ve definitely asked him a lot about some of the sinkers to the off-handed hitters and how he approaches it and that kind of stuff. He’s very wise and he’s been around this game a long time.”

Pérez told reporters on Thursday that he doesn’t expect the White Sox to be baseball’s worst team again in ’25, and Andrew Benintendi added on Friday morning, saying that there is no reason to go into a season with low expectations.

“We have to have an expectation to win,” Venable said. “I don’t think that that’s fair to anybody here, if we’re not going out and expecting to win every game and understanding that there are things that we need to work on to achieve that is very important. But yeah, we’re going out with the expectation that we’re going to do all the little things that we have to do to win a game.”

The Sox dropped to 1-6 in the Cactus League after Friday’s 3-2 loss to the Angels, but there are good things on the horizon, and much of that is about the pitching. On Wednesday, prospects Hagen Smith and Noah Schultz dazzled, throwing back-to-back scoreless innings. And though Cannon got off to a wobbly start in his first outing of the spring, his ability to adjust and experiment with different pitch usages bodes well.

In the bigger picture, Cannon and the rest of the staff will have plenty of opportunity in the 2025 season to keep making adjustments and continue their development.