While Rick Hahn and the White Sox front office basked in the praise from their third rebuilding megadeal, they received some sobering news: Flamethrowing right-hander Zack Burdi, a 2016 first-round draft pick, likely will need Tommy John surgery.

Burdi was removed from Triple-A Charlotte’s game July 9 after feeling something in the back of his elbow, general manager Rick Hahn said. Burdi was in Chicago on Friday to have his arm examined by team doctors, and Hahn said the initial prognosis is that the Downers Grove native has a tear in the Ulnar Collateral Ligament in his right arm.

Burdi will visit Dr. James Andrews next week to confirm the prognosis, and if he does need Tommy John, his target return to the White Sox would be spring training of 2019.

While Hahn framed Burdi’s injury as not necessarily affecting his timeline, that he struck out 33 percent of the batters he faced in Triple-A — a level he rose to shortly after being drafted out of Louisville — suggests he could’ve been ready for the major league bullpen before 2019. So while the White Sox are fully committed to a total rebuild, Hahn said Burdi’s injury is a reminder that not all prospects are guaranteed to work out.

“That certainly crossed our mind around here today as we got that news,” Hahn said. “It shows you can make the best laid plans and sometimes the baseball gods laugh.

“But certainly part of what we’re trying to accomplish here is accumulate as much talent as possible knowing that things happen. Players get hurt, some guys don’t develop quite as quickly or as well as you anticipate, and fortunately at the other end of the spectrum you get some pleasant surprises. So one way to insulate yourself against the unpleasant surprises is having a critical mass of options in the system and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.”

This is why volume often is so important to the success — or failure — of a rebuild. The White Sox, in acquiring Eloy Jimenez (No. 8) and Dylan Cease (No. 63), now have nine of MLB.com’s top 100 prospects (all, actually, are in the top 68). Burdi isn’t in that group, but is ranked by MLB.com as the 10th-best prospect in the White Sox system.

It’s unlikely that every one of the White Sox top 10 prospects will pan out, given the nonlinear nature of player development. And there’s the idea of TINSTAAPP (There’s No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect), which was coined by Baseball Prospectus founder Gary Huckabay to illustrate the often difficult nature of developing pitchers.

So for now, even with the Quintana trade, the White Sox are still in the mode of accumulating as much young talent as possible. And that Burdi looks likely to undergo major surgery serves as a stark reminder of why the White Sox can’t afford to stop stockpiling minor leaguers yet.

“Once we get to a point where we start seeing some of the impact talent develop the way we anticipate or hope, and contributing at the higher levels of the minors, we’ll have a better sense about what a championship team will ultimately look like,” Hahn said. “They’ll be holes. We might not have found an answer at a specific position internally and will have to go out and either deal from a position of strength to acquire via trade or be aggressive in free agency when the time comes. But at this point, we’re still in the first stages of this process, and that’s talent accumulation.”