Caleb Bonemer probably didn’t know that when Gerrit Cole hit him with a pitch last month, seemingly in response to the youngster battering a home run his prior time up, it would go viral.
Bonemer is a promising 20-year-old prospect for the Chicago White Sox and faced Cole, a veteran ace for the New York Yankees on a rehab assignment. It’s a matchup that usually goes the pitcher’s way, but Bonemer had gotten one over on Cole and driven one out of the park. And that’s the memory he’ll hang on to for a long, long time.
“That whole game was pretty wild,” Bonemer said. “It was cool to be able to have some success off of him (Cole) in that game. I mean, our whole team, we were amped up going into that game and just being able to put up four or five runs off of him was pretty sweet.”
Plus, that home run and not the subsequent response is more emblematic of Bonemer’s rise. Since being selected in the second round of the 2024 MLB Draft, Bonemer has steadily climbed the ladder in the White Sox’s organization. The former Okemos star made it a mission to not stagnate as he seeks an eventual leap from the minor leagues to the big time. This season it’s been about more power and fewer strikeouts.
And if prospect rankings are any indication — he’s the No. 14 overall prospect in MLB Pipeline’s latest top 100 rankings — Bonemer is well on his way.
“I always wanted to play pro ball,” Bonemer said. “And then kind of once I started to play against the high-level competition and had a lot of success, then I kind of realized that, yeah, it was probably a good opportunity for me.”
As he works through the minor leagues, Bonemer has made it a goal to not end a season where he started it.
Those changes can be relatively minor, like refining parts of his swing or cutting down on strikeouts, both things he’s working with Winston-Salem hitting coach Adam Sinkoe on of late. And in the bigger picture, it means Bonemer, who started this season in High-A ball with the Winston-Salem Dash, would probably like to end the campaign with the White Sox’s Double-A affiliate, the Birmingham Barons.
The template for that sort of expedited rise is there for Bonemer, too. He got drafted in the summer of 2024 and spent the latter half of that year playing fall league baseball. He started the 2025 season in Low-A with Kannapolis and quickly dominated, earning Carolina League MVP honors and getting moved up to Winston-Salem, where he finished 2025 and finds himself now.
And since arriving in Winston-Salem, things have continued to trend up for Bonemer.
In just 11 games at the end of the season with Winston-Salem in 2025, Bonemer hit .278 with seven extra-base hits, seven walks and an OPS of 1.020. It set the table for a 2026 season where Bonemer, who turns 21 in October, has continued to thrive and grow at the plate.
Bonemer is batting .250 with a .977 OPS but has ticked up his power considerably, with 15 home runs that ranks second in the South Atlantic League.
“He puts in a lot of work in the offseason, too, with his hitting coaches that he goes to with his agents,” Sinkoe said. “So he knows exactly what he wants to do and how he needs to approach training. And it’s really awesome. He trains super hard. He’s not somebody that you have to push for him to, ‘Hey, like you need to challenge yourself more.’ He wants to challenge himself as much as humanly possible.”
Bonemer credits the power increase to physical maturation, as a lot of loud outs to the warning track from a year ago are clearing the fence as he’s gotten a year older, bigger and stronger.
“I felt like if I was just a little bit stronger, those would’ve been homers,” Bonemer said. “So yeah, that’s kind of how I saw it. But I didn’t really try to change too much with my whole approach and swing.”
Undergirding Bonemer’s growth and rise as a player is a professional-like work ethic that stemmed back to his high school and youth days.
Okemos head coach Raul Presas remembers first seeing Bonemer as a middle schooler and recognizing the talent. He got to coach Bonemer as a freshman at Okemos, which happened to be Presas’ first season as head coach, along with Bonemer’s older brother Gabe, who plays collegiately at Calvin College.
Presas and Co. purposefully let Bonemer be a bit of a freshman, not heaping expectations to lead and take ownership of a team. Having an older brother around helped, too.
“I’ve often referred to them as the foundation of my years as a baseball coach,” Presas said. “The leadership they provided on the field, just their mental makeup and everything that they brought to the program in my first year, allowed for the program to be where it is today.”
And eventually, Bonemer stepped into his starring role for Okemos. He won Michigan Gatorade Player of the Year twice, joining the likes of Spencer Schwellenbach and Derek Jeter.
Presas recalled a game in the Diamond Classic against Grand Ledge, where Bonemer pitched and had a monster game at the plate in a win.
“He was without question the best player in that game, in that setting with hundreds of people at the park at Municipal,” Presas said. “And he was just — he just stood out.”
In high school and now the minor leagues, Bonemer’s biggest differentiator might be his pro-like work ethic.
Sinkoe, who works with Bonemer daily with the Dash, raved about the way the infielder handles his business and allows the hitting coach to be thinking about the bigger picture.
This season, that’s meant honing Bonemer’s mental approach and command of the strike zone to cut back on strikeouts. Bonemer’s 66 strikeouts are the sixth most in the South Atlantic League.
“He is 20 years old, but he is super mature,” Sinkoe said. “He is well beyond his years in terms of his thought process of how he goes about his routines, his cage work, his approach to the game. It’s definitely a two-way street where it’s not just me telling him, you know, ‘Hey, you need to do this, this, and this.’ It’s very back and forth where he teaches me things, too. And it’s cool working with a guy like that where we can bounce things off each other and he is really in command of his career. So working with him, it’s different than with a lot of guys. He knows exactly what he wants to do and what he needs to do to be successful.”
Once he got selected with the No. 43 overall pick in the 2024 draft, Bonemer had a pretty clear idea that he’d want to go pro and forego playing college baseball, where he was slated to play for Virginia.
He knew he wanted to play in the big leagues, and felt this would be the straightest path to end up there. So far, he’s proving to make good on that idea with his bat and work ethic, moving through the minor league levels with purpose while making a name for himself as a prospect.
And though he might need some more seasoning and time to physically develop at various minor league stops — he’s projected to be a MLB debutant around 2028 — Bonemer evidently isn’t going to be hanging around the minor leagues for very long on his present trajectory.
That could mean ending this season with a promotion to Double-A. But even if it doesn’t, it’s a good bet that Bonemer is going to end this season a better player and prospect than he started it.
“With the White Sox, they’ve just kind of been just letting me go out there and play and do my thing, which has been great,” he said. “I think that’s pretty much the biggest thing, is just kind of go out there and play and do what you can do.”
Andrew Graham is a freelance writer.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Okemos’ Caleb Bonemer, top White Sox prospect, reveling in minor-league rise
Reporting by Andrew Graham, Special to The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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