In Brief: A chat with 2023 fifth-rounder Christian Oppor

The electric lefty talks college ball in Florida, keeping walks down, and playing against older competition

When the White Sox selected Christian Oppor with the 152nd pick in the 2023 draft, they were already familiar with what the young lefty could offer on the mound. Just one year prior, then 18-year-old Oppor was featured on Chicago’s draft board as a high school talent worthy of a late-round pick, but the Oakland A’s swooped in and selected him in the 11th round. Oppor and the A’s were unable to work out a deal, and the young southpaw elected to play a year of college baseball for Gulf Coast State Junior College in Florida.

“My senior year of high school, I was getting looked at by a lot more pro scouts than college scouts. But when I went down to Jupiter [Florida] there were a lot of junior college schools, and I had a really good outing down there,” Oppor says of his decision-making process prior to signing in Florida. “I started talking to more southern schools, and knowing it was warmer down there when we played sounded a whole lot better than playing back up in Wisconsin or Iowa. So, that a was a pretty good chunk of why I picked Gulf Coast State College.”

In his lone year playing in Florida, the Madison, Wis. native pitched to a 6.24 ERA in 13 appearances (12 starts) while sporting an obscene 12.83 K/9 figure, due in large part to an electric fastball that opposing hitters couldn’t seem to make any contact with.

Encouraged by his mature approach and promising peripheral statistics, the White Sox locked him up with a fifth round pick in the 2023 draft.

Standing in at 6´2´´, Oppor sports a three-pitch-mix highlighted by a high-90’s fastball and accentuated by a slurvy secondary pitch with impressive movement that sits in the low-to-mid 70s. He also tosses a developing changeup that will likely be a key in determining whether or not he has potential to pitch as a starter as he makes his way through the Pale Hose system.

The White Sox assigned Oppor to the Arizona Complex League for his first taste of professional action, and he dazzled in his brief stint in rookie ball. In five games (one start), Oppor covered 7 2⁄3 innings with a 1.17 ERA and a 30% strikeout rate. Perhaps more surprisingly, he issued only two walks in that time despite a reputation that suggested walks were going to be more of an Achilles heel in his game.

When asked what he thinks about scouts and evaluators lumping him into the electric-but-wild category, Oppor says “I started out hot in college with keeping my walks low, and I just wanted to imitate that here. I was always trying to strike people out in college, but here I just stay loose, pump the zone, and make them try to hit it. The guys behind me are going to make plays. My velocity is going to be down, but it’s been working and once I get more comfortable, I can start to throw harder and harder.”

Indeed, 46 of Oppor’s 55 pitches in professional baseball have been thrown for strikes, indicating that the big lefty has every intention of following through on his promise to pump the zone and prove evaluators wrong regarding concerns over his command of the strike zone. At 18 years old, nearly three years younger than his average competition in the ACL, Oppor appeared undaunted on the mound.

“It was a little different when I first got here, and everyone [in the ACL] is pretty much from a big D1 school,” he says. “But I wasn’t really looking at how much older they were, I was focusing on how much more I can develop here. Plus, there’s a lot of good guys on my team, so it made it easy to make friends and settle in.”

If Oppor continues to settle in and produce at the professional level, don’t be surprised to see him rifle up into the organization’s Top 30 prospect list by the end of 2024. This young Sox southpaw has all the poise, talent, and maturity to make big leaps year after year within a White Sox system that is desperate to produce homegrown, top-self pitching talent.