White Sox preparing to call up Jacob Gonzalez from Charlotte

Jacob Gonzalez was pulled from Triple-A Charlotte’s game, and the in-game removal quickly pointed to the White Sox preparing to use a roster opening in Chicago. The stopgap came with Munetaka Murakami sidelined by a hamstring injury that was expected to keep him out for multiple weeks, and Gonzalez looked like the left-handed infield bat the club needed immediately.

The White Sox were set to select Gonzalez’s contract from Triple-A Charlotte, giving the 24-year-old his first major league promotion. Listed by MLB as a shortstop born May 30, 2002, in Glendora, California, Gonzalez had spent his 2026 season forcing the issue. In 52 games with Charlotte, he hit .317/.419/.688 with 19 home runs and 62 RBI, production that stood far above the line he carried through his first minor league stops.

That breakout mattered because Gonzalez had not always looked like a fast-track bat. MLB.com’s prospect notes showed a combined .238/.307/.343 line across his early professional seasons, a profile that raised questions about whether the 2023 first-round pick out of Ole Miss would hit enough to justify the White Sox taking him 15th overall. This year answered a lot of that. He paired more power with the strike-zone control that evaluators had long liked, and the result was a sustained run of damage in Charlotte.

The surge had become impossible to ignore in recent days. Gonzalez homered three times in a doubleheader and earlier in May was named the White Sox Minor League Player of the Week. MiLB also noted that he joined a growing list of recent Winston-Salem Dash alumni to reach the majors, alongside Rikuu Nishida, Noah Schultz and Sam Antonacci. For Chicago, the timing made this look like both a deserved promotion and a practical roster move: Gonzalez earned the look with his bat, and the White Sox needed a ready middle-infield answer while Murakami was out.

MLB lists Gonzalez’s debut as May 31, 2026, a milestone that closed the loop on a player who had spent the spring turning Charlotte into a launching pad. For now, the expectation is simple: Gonzalez is there to give the White Sox a left-handed shortstop option who can help at once, with the power that made his Triple-A rise impossible to leave in the minors.