Due to this year’s shortened MLB draft, there are still many quality college players left on the market. Beginning Sunday morning at 8 AM CST, teams around the league could officially begin talking to these undrafted free agents (UDFAs) and sign them to deals worth up to $20,000. Despite the spending restriction, organizations do have the freedom to come to terms with as many players as they’d like.
Without any deals through the first two days, it was announced by D1Baseball.com this morning that the White Sox reportedly signed Ty Madrigal, a left-handed pitcher out of Saint Mary’s College. As you can see in the featured photo above, he is indeed the twin brother of second baseman Nick Madrigal.
Background
Ty is a bit undersized but stands in a few inches taller than his brother at 6’0″, 190 lbs. During his senior year of high school, he was named the Sacramento Bee Co-Player of the Year along with Nick after putting up solid numbers as a two-way player. Ty would finish his high school career with a .280 batting average and 2.32 ERA.
The left-hander stuck with pitching and played at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. He primarily served as a bullpen arm beginning his freshman year, though he also started a handful of times. Madrigal enjoyed a sustained period of success as a reliever during his junior season, compiling a 1.90 ERA, 1.077 WHIP, 54 strikeouts, 19 walks, and 2 saves over 47.1 IP (22 games, 1 game started). It was enough to notch him an All-WCC (West Coast Conference) Honorable Mention at the end of the year.
After medically redshirting his senior campaign due to an elbow flexor tendon strain, Madrigal returned for his fifth season in 2020 and slotted into the Gaels’ rotation as the number two-starter. He would only make four starts before COVID-19 wiped out the season, the results of which are listed below.
By the end of his five-year college career, he accumulated the following numbers:
10-10 record, 3.77 ERA, 14 GS/74 G, 3 SV, 157.2 IP, 81 BB, 154 K, 1.560 WHIP, 1.90 SO/W
First Look
As for his scouting report, Madrigal provided a bit of his own in a personal tweet posted just the other day. He has a two-seam fastball that sits in the low-90s, similar to some of the other guys the White Sox selected late in this year’s draft. He also has a slider that ranges anywhere between 71-77 mph and a changeup that registers around 80-83 on the gun. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot out there on this guy, both in terms of video and scouting reports, so we’re kind of limited in what we can see.
Why it makes sense
In much of these UDFA deals going through so far, there has been a common trend in who has been singing. A large portion of the players have been pitchers and graduating seniors who essentially have reached the end of their amateur careers. While the majority, if not all, of the seniors have likely been granted an extra year of college eligibility, there are many other factors beneath the surface that can make a decision like that much more complicated than it seems.
In the case of the 23-year-old Madrigal, he is already a little bit on the older side and decided against a sixth season at Saint Mary’s to get his professional career underway. With a family connection in the organization likely being the key reason for this signing, it also doesn’t hurt for the White Sox to take a chance on a guy who can provide depth at the lower levels of the minors. It seems that Madrigal would be a natural fit for a bullpen role in the organization, though they could choose to give him some starts at first to see what he has to offer. Overall, the club adds their sixth arm of the draft class for very little money and gets a feel-good story to go with it. Let’s see if he can tap into his prior success and replicate similar results to his junior season.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on the undrafted free agent market to monitor additional signings as they are made public.
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Featured Photo: Saint Mary’s College/Twitter
