Sox Pop on the Farm 61 — May review! — 2025-06-07

We had the full South Side Sox minors crew together (Joe Resis, Kristina Airdo, Melissa Sage-Bollenbach, Hannah Filippo) joining host and reluctant minor league recapper Brett Ballantini to discuss recent trends and the overall look of the system, along with discovering how badly Brett can beat a bad joke into the ground. With a full crew, we opted for a potluck approach this time around, so here were our topics in rough order of appearance: Rundown of the state of the system, if the season ended today there would be only one playoff team in the mix, the Birmingham Barons (themselves just 28-24 at time of recording) Joe's first topic was an obvious one: Kyle Teel, just called up from Charlotte. Praise for his game, appreciation that the White Sox are embracing a youth movement (one year late), as it were, and acknowledgement of Teel fighting his way out of a long and rough slump in-between hot starts to April and ends to June Kristina voluntarily chose to discuss the wincably-bad Charlotte pitching staff Melissa countered with talk of Lucas Gordon's case for promotion Hannah talked Kannapolis clubbers, including the impressive Caleb Bonemer Brett wrapped up the first half with a rundown of the system and posing the question of why a top-ranked system produces so few wins Joe started the second half with an in-depth study of Samuel Zavalas and the extended Zavala family Kristina flagged concern in Birmingham surrounding the disappearance of Hagen Smith Melissa says whoa there, how have we talked this long without mentioning site hero RIKUU NISHIDA in Birmingham? Brett's pick is to take a WAR review of the Garrett Crochet trade and estimating that this could be at the very least a win-win deal for both sides Hannah laments the loss of Oscar Colás, now an Angel Please support our White Sox writing and podcasts.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices