Prospect Buys for 2025: Grant Taylor, CHW

Chicago has friends in low places (Low-A Kannapolis, in particular)

Grant Taylor, RHP, Chicago White Sox

Buy: Where you can acquire for less than a top-150 prospect.

There have been a few pitchers this year that caught my eye immediately on film. I was loud about Quinn Mathews and George Klassen early on but missed the post-Tommy John Kumar Rocker train before it left the station. Grant Taylor was on his way to sound-the-alarm status through just 19.1 innings before going down with a lat injury in June that ultimately ended his season.

Serving as the starter is a bit of an experiment for Taylor. He pitched almost exclusively in relief for LSU in 2022 before making four exceptional starts on the Cape that summer, and between a UCL injury that held him out for all of 2023 and his most recent ailment he’s recorded just 11 starts across three full years. The most likely landing spot for him is out of the bullpen – in part because of his injury and usage history, furthered by his excellent raw stuff – but Chicago’s apparent willingness to at least try him in longer spurts lends credence to the idea that there’s a potential rotation future in his range of outcomes.

Taylor’s stuff was simply too overpowering for Complex and Single-A competition in the brief time we got to see him in game action. His arsenal is led by a high-octane heater that sits 96 mph but can be dialed up to 99 when he reaches back for it. It has some bore – riding life combined with arm-side run – and plays extremely well at the top of the zone. His seven feet of extension and low vertical approach angle make it play up even more, and by now folks who read my work regularly know that I’m a sucker for a good heater because it elevates the rest of the repertoire. He complements the fastball with a low-90s cutter, a hard slider in the high-80s that generated a whiff rate over 50%, and a high-70s curveball with vertical bite. Four pitches is enough to turn a lineup over, though I’d prefer to see him develop a convincing platoon neutralizer and there’s a world where he’s a 95-and-a-slider bullpen piece.

There’s plenty of risk in Taylor’s profile. When healthy, though, he was one of a handful of minor league arms that flashed mid-rotation upside or better. The results speak for themselves; 72% of all plate appearances against Taylor ended in a strikeout or ground ball and he walked just two hitters in the meantime (2.8%). He’s a confirmed participant for the Arizona Fall League and is very likely to pitch in one of the two Statcast-enabled stadiums in the circuit, making him a plausible candidate to earn buzz as one of the only inspiring arms in the league.