By Mike London
Salisbury Post
SALISBURY — Owen White drove home from Hendrix Barbecue on Thursday night with a lot on his mind.
White is a 26-year-old with a glorious past and an uncertain future. White had the surreal experience on Friday of having his baseball jersey retired by Jesse Carson High School in front of a huge throng that had come to watch the Salisbury-Carson boys basketball game.
“I’m very honored that Carson would do that for me,” White said. “No doubt, I’m thinking I’m still pretty young for something like that to happen. But it was a great night because I got to share it with my family, my friends and my coaches.”
White scored 942 points for Carson basketball, was a standout for the 2017 Christmas tourney champs, and is one of the top 10 scorers in school history, so he wasn’t out of place in the Carson gym. He was mostly joking, but he was confident he could have scored a few buckets against the Hornets if the Cougars had activated him.
“I think what really got to me watching the game was seeing (Carson guard) CP Perry out there because he was always hanging out at our practices when his dad was coaching us,” White said. “That reminded me of how fast time flies. It was 2014 when I got to Carson as a freshman, and it’s hard to believe it’s already been 11 years since then.”
White was still playing football as well as basketball and baseball in his early years at Carson. He played some receiver and some quarterback. But once it became obvious he had a big future in baseball, it no longer made much sense to keep taking those potentially hazardous hits on the football field.
The son of Casey Lanning White and Tim White, who are members of athletic halls of fame, White was twice the Rowan County Male Athlete of the Year, the Darrell Misenheimer Award winner for the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years. No one had won back-to-back awards since West Rowan’s KP Parks.
While the 6-foot-3 White was a fine basketball player, an excellent shooter and rebounder, it was baseball that made him a legend at Carson as a pitcher, shortstop and hitter.
As a .375 career hitter, White set Carson records for hits, runs, RBIs and doubles. As a pitcher, he established two school records that will be hard for anyone ever to break — 32 wins and 358 strikeouts.
White was Gatorade’s North Carolina Player of the Year as a senior in the spring of 2018. He was headed to South Carolina, but when the Texas Rangers drafted him in the second round that summer and offered $1.5 million, White was eager to sign.
A number of setbacks followed — Tommy John surgery, a season lost to COVID, a broken hand — so White wasn’t in the news much for a while. He reminded everyone of his potential in 2021 when he was named the most outstanding pitcher in the Arizona Fall League where he went 5-0 with a 1.91 ERA against other prospects.
When he followed that sensational showing with a 9-2 record at two levels of the Rangers’ farm system in 2022, he appeared to be well on his way to big things. Baseball America rated White as the No. 59 prospect in baseball prior to the 2023 season. He pitched in the 2023 Futures Game in Seattle, playing with and against a host of players who are now established MLB standouts.
White began to struggle for the first time as a pro in the upper minors and also in brief auditions as a relief pitcher in MLB, the first of which was with the Rangers in 2023.
The winter and early spring between the 2024 and 2025 seasons were crazy for White. He was traded to the Reds, and then he went to the Yankees. While he was briefly a member of those organizations, he never pitched for either. Then he landed with the Chicago White Sox.
The White Sox gave him a chance to re-establish himself as a starting pitcher with the Triple-A Charlotte Knights last spring. That was the good news. The bad news was an 0-8 record in 20 appearances, including 17 starts. White pitched some very solid games, some five-innings, two-runs type of efforts that he certainly could have won, but he was never in the right place at the right time.
“That’s just the way the cookie crumbles in baseball sometimes,” White said. “Triple-A is a high level of baseball. In all honestly, I felt like I pitched as well for Charlotte as I have since I’ve been in pro ball.”
White needed a cortisone shot late last season, but he said he feels great right now. He became a free agent in November when the White Sox dropped him from their 40-man roster, so he’s free to sign with anyone.
“They just finished the winter meetings and I wouldn’t say there’s anything that’s set in stone right now, but I should know something soon,” White said.
White lives in Salisbury with his wife, Maddie Barnhardt White, who was a star athlete at Carson in softball and volleyball. They have a 7-month-old son named Woodland.
There were several reports, still unconfirmed as of Friday afternoon, that White will be signing with the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO, the Korea Baseball Organization. That’s the most popular sports league in Korea. Teams are allowed two “foreign” pitchers.
Former Catawba College slugger Jerry Sands had quite a bit of success in the KBO.
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