The winter meetings are rightfully dominating headlines right now, but what’s getting a lot less attention is the fact that this is a crucial part of the offseason for the game’s top prospects. Offseason practice and training set the foundation for the happenings of the following summer, and the best young players in the minors are doing some important investing into their own futures right this second.
Considering they’re a stage of their careers where they are still quite malleable from a physical standpoint, it’s often wiser to evaluate prospects based on their process instead of their results. This isn’t always the easiest thing to do because there is so much more easy-access detailed information about the major league game. Thanks to Statcast, though, we have a whole bunch of data points for Triple-A games from 2023 and onward, giving Baseball Savant users the same information about pitch shape as what’s available for MLB.
Knowing about the release, speed, spin, and movement patterns for a given prospect’s pitch types makes it easier to project how they will translate to the highest level. According to Baseball America, the two highest-rated pitching prospects in baseball who have yet to make their MLB debuts are righty Andrew Painter and lefty Thomas White. Their placement in the rankings could very well change in BA’s upcoming 2026 preseason update, but either way, both are expected to be huge parts of the future for the Phillies and Marlins, respectively.
They are two big, physical arms with intriguing stuff that can be better understood by identifying pitches around MLB that move in a similar fashion to theirs. White’s tantalizing strikeout rates and Painter’s high ERA coming off Tommy John surgery are indications of their results at the minor league level, but what are the next steps for them? How have MLB hitters performed against arsenals that look like theirs? What do their closest comps tell us about their true ceilings?
Painter has the makings of a wide arsenal with plus velocity, a combination that usually enamors pitching coaches. He’s quite fastball-reliant for the amount of pitch types he flashed at AAA-Lehigh Valley this past season, but used four offerings between 10% and 20% of the time, so there are plenty of ways he could go from here. It still remains to be seen how the fastball will play in the zone, especially against lefties (.417 xwOBA), but 97 mph with cutting action is pretty good in a vacuum. It has average vertical movement for his arm slot.
He has a knack for spinning the ball, with three distinct glove-side offerings; the curveball was his favorite with the platoon disadvantage, while he used all three interchangeably against righties. The changeup was his go-to secondary against lefties, working beautifully as a swing-and-miss pitch, while the sinker was used sparingly against righties. In general, the curveball generated the weakest contact of his weapons in same-side matchups, while the changeup and cutter got the most ground balls.
Painter stands at 6’7″ with unremarkable release height and extension considering his physical frame, which was the basis for the Cam Schlittler comparisons you see here. Both can grip it and rip it, making use of two fastballs with natural cutting action. Schlittler’s cutter has a little less carry and a little more cut than Painter’s, but he’s still the obvious blueprint to follow for Painter to be a successful four-seam/cutter guy at the MLB level. Finding a curveball comp was hard; I settled on Kenley Jansen’s slider because the resemblances are quite striking, besides Jansen’s longer extension down the mound.
Likewise, I had to reach back to 2024 to find an apt comparison for his slider. I’d understand if the Adbert Alzolay parallel is causing Phillies fans to wince, given the sudden downward trajectory of his career, but his single-season PLV grades on the pitch ranged from 5.2 to 5.5 over the course of his time in the show, consistently above-average, into the 70th-percentile range. The changeup is a few ticks short of what Brad Keller’s shot up to once he converted to the bullpen, but his velocity on the pitch was in the high-80s a year ago, so Painter’s is effectively a blend of the current and former versions of Keller’s. At 2.5% usage, the sinker wasn’t a huge part of his plan last year, but like Hurston Waldrep’s, the velocity would be higher than almost all MLB sinkers with less arm-side run than most.
For reference, Schlittler’s four-seam had a 30th-percentile PLV in 2025, although this could be chalked up to location issues, given its slightly above-average grade in Fangraphs’ stuff models. His cutter’s PLV was in the 70th percentile and got a 121 Stuff+ from Fangraphs, so while the similarities aren’t as notable as they are with the four-seamer, it does provide us with a measuring stick. The PLV grade on Jansen’s slider was above-average, while Keller’s change was 44th-percentile in 2024 and 78th-percentile this year. It’s safe to assume Painter’s would be on the good side of average and between the two.
White spent most of 2025 in AA, where he struck out 39.3% of batters on his way to a 1.59 ERA, 2.24 FIP, and a 2.54 xFIP. The Marlins had seen enough to promote him to AAA after just 45.1 innings, and he made two starts for Jacksonville down the stretch. The strikeouts stayed, and while he had some trouble with walks, that was a consistent theme throughout his promotion up the minors all year. Despite his 6’5″, 240-lb frame, he drops down to a 6-foot release height with minimal extension, creating a deceptive look. Maybe the Marlins like lefties that can reach high speeds lower to the ground? The commonalities with Ryan Weathers are quite intriguing; the latter sits closer to 97 mph with his heater, which had a 94th-percentile PLV this past year. Imagine two plus fastballs from the left side to go along with Eury Pérez’s in that rotation. In his short time on the doorstep of the majors in 2025, White used his heater 45% of the time against lefties and 50% against righties.
Even without context, being compared to Max Fried when you’ve only just turned 21 years old is pretty impressive. The Yankees’ southpaw gets more horizontal action on his sweeper, but White’s is harder with more depth. It was his most-used non-fastball against righties, just ahead of his changeup. Fried’s sweeper had a below-average PLV even though it still racked up called strikes like nobody’s business (24.9%), and his arsenal is so diverse that he only used it 11% of the time in 2025. Meanwhile, White’s is more of a swing-and-miss pitch that he uses more often. Even from the perspective of a single pitch type, it’s strange to see similarities here because Fried and White are not the same type of pitcher at all. Nonetheless, picture a slightly tighter version of Fried’s with more velocity, drop, and general usage. He won’t command it as well, but that’s what White is working on here, and it doesn’t sound fun for opposing hitters.
I find it interesting how this exercise has helped reveal some coincidences between White and other pitchers in Miami, if you choose to see them that way. They could, of course, simply like starters with multiple slider shapes – Weathers and Perez fit that bill, and so does White. His slider matches closely with that of the now Japan-bound Sam Long, whose gyro shape was loved by stuff models and not so much by location models, leading to a PLV grade just above 5-flat. White used his slider in perfect tandem with his sweeper against lefties in AAA, and like Long, his current drawback is precision. He’s a double-digit walk rate guy, and this pitch in particular got hit hard when left over the plate. To be exact, opposing hitters saw 28 of them, and it only generated four misses – zero from righties on 13 offerings. Despite that, it’s a couple ticks harder than Long’s, which should bode well if he can figure out how to locate it.
The changeup was a whiff machine to righties, and its biomechanical characteristics take after Yuki Matsui’s patented left-handed splitter. The San Diego reliever practically never threw it in the zone, and it still had an above-average PLV score, so the fact that White’s is harder with even less spin, which has demonstrably opened the door for more seam-shifted movement, should make it a pitch-modelling darling. A foot of separation in induced movement between his changeup and his fastball, which has a ton of carry relative to his lower arm angle, will help him neutralize right-handed bats. The trend of young arms coming to the big leagues and sticking because of advanced off-speed pitches looks to be safe with both White and Painter.
Digging into pitch type comps for pitchers like these illustrates how small the margin for error is in the major leagues. If Painter and White were an exact hybrid mixture of all their lookalikes listed here, they’d already be dominating in the NL East, but it’s not that simple. They are 22 and 21, respectively, with a shared need to learn how to hit their spots, execute in critical counts, and sequence their weapons to stay ahead of the best hitters on the planet. In any case, this is why the minor leaguers of today are not held to their most recent results, because winning has not yet usurped development as their primary on-field goal. This analysis should vindicate the folks around the industry that have spoken as highly of Painter’s and White’s potentials as they have – there are a lot of good pitchers in this group of comparables! The most difficult part of their journeys still lies ahead, though, and when they do get called up for the first time, they should be welcomed with open arms.
