With one week until Opening Day, I posted my best guess for the 26-man roster the White Sox will carry from Camelback Ranch to Milwaukee Thursday afternoon.

Within 24 hours, my bracket was busted. LaMonte Wade Jr. was among four players the White Sox released in their latest round of cuts today, and I'd tabbed him for a left-handed bench bat role, albeit with little confidence. At least the rest of my picks are in play. As they say, 25 out of 26 ain't bad.

The White Sox now have 36 players remaining in camp, and only four more spring games to help Chris Getz and Will Venable whittle it down. The Cactus League schedule wraps up on Monday, and then all eyes turn to Milwaukee on Thursday.

While we wait, below is a selection of the week's biggest and best stories on Sox Machine. On the recommendation of White Sox hitting director Ryan Fuller, James talked to new hitting coordinator Sherman Johnson, who explained how he's applying what he learned in Baltimore to help develop White Sox hitting prospects. Meanwhile, Josh talked to Brooks Boyer about various White Sox business items, and we also covered some Justin Ishbia real estate dealings that could be of interest to White Sox fans in the coming years.

As always, thanks for reading and supporting.

-Jim

By JAMES FEGAN

New White Sox hitting coordinator Sherman Johnson played pro baseball for a decade, but his major league career consisted of a single 2018 September call-up with the Angels, which was more than enough time to provide lessons that would inform his coaching career.

On a getaway day in Houston, veteran starter Charlie Morton left after a single inning and gave way to rookie left-hander Framber Valdez, for whom Johnson was entirely unprepared.

"He was throwing me backdoor sinkers at 96 mph, and James, I'm not going to lie to you, it's the only at-bat I've ever had in my life where I did not know where the sinker needed to start for me to swing," Johnson recalled in a recent phone interview. "You can go look up my at-bats against Framber Valdez in a big leagues. You will see him throw me a backdoor sinker and see him punch me out and I just kind of sit there like 'I cannot believe that got the corner.' I had no shot.

"I never want hitters that come through the Chicago White Sox to feel that way in the box. So they're going to see all the shapes, they're going to see all the different speeds, and we're going to build solutions for how they move, and what they need to combat."

Assembled seemingly in response to that moment, the cages full of White Sox minor league hitters in the header photo are segregated by pitch shape. Johnson refers to this, the second half of practice in the batting cage after hitters have completed their personalized slate of daily routines and drills, as "geometry class." When geometry begins, hitters are asked to spam reps against a machine recreation of pitch shapes they'll see that night, or just see eventually; an oddly horizontal left-handed slider, a super-verty right-handed four-seamer, all the many possibilities the game of baseball offers.

Johnson says they've been effective finding pockets of time for minor leaguers to use the Trajekt machine during spring, even though the major league roster and a project like Munetaka Murakami getting acquainted with MLB pitching takes priority. And another measure of organizational uniformity the Sox will have this season, beyond HitTrax at all the affiliates, is with individualized pregame scouting formats that are supposed to newly mirror the big league version in quality throughout the organization, including three keys at the top of the report for each hitter to remember in the box, even if no other piece of information sticks.

The organization also made some news on the non-baseball side of things:

Farm director Paul Janish tells us how and where 17 notable White Sox prospects are expected to start the 2026 regular season

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