The Chicago White Sox selected Shane Smith from the Rule 5 draft going into 2025, and it seemed like a rare miscalculation from the Milwaukee Brewers: They’d let an affordable, potentially great arm go, and now one of the worst teams in baseball was using him as their ace starter.
The Sox had Smith as their for Opening Day guy in 2026, but after three starts, he’d only made it through 8.1 innings and his ERA was 10.80. They sent him down to Triple-A, where he did slightly better but still got banged around, and he landed on the injured list not long after.
The funny thing about Smith’s struggles is that his underlying metrics don’t show a huge difference year-over-year. His primary pitch is his fastball, which he used 45% of the time in 2025, along with a change-up and curveball (17% use and 15% use last year, respectively).
His fastball, which didn’t have huge velocity or movement, was seen as his limiting factor during his prospect years and it’s part of what made the Brewers get rid of him. They didn’t think that offering would challenge major league hitters, and without a truly competitive secondary pitch, they thought he’d washout. Instead his fastball had +20 run value in 2025, and +2.8 R/100.
The effectiveness of Smith’s pitches, and his fastball especially, came from location. He threw 53.6% of his pitches inside the zone last year, about 5% more than the MLB average, while also getting above-average whiff rates. If you look at his heat-maps from last year, you can see big red circles in the center of the zone — Smith’s pitches went where he wanted them, and he wanted them inside.
In 2026, his velocity is basically the same as last year, and his whiff rate has gone down but not by a huge amount; it’s about a 2% difference, which means very little over such a small sample size. Batters aren’t pulling his balls more, and while they’re getting a higher exit velocity off him, they’re still averaging just 90 mph against him. The biggest difference is Zone% — he’s throwing inside just 44% of the time this year .
In his outing against the Miami Marlins on April 1st, it took him 72 pitches to get through three innings, with only 46 pitches thrown for strikes. During spring training, he walked nine batters and hit another five in less than 11 innings. He also stopped throwing the first pitch strike; last year, he threw a first pitch strike 60% of the time, but that dropped down to 51% this year.
Interestingly, he didn’t walk a ridiculous number of batters in his three failed big leagues games, at least at first. He walked two batters in each of his first two games, before things got out of hand, and he walked five batters in his third start (played against the Baltimore Orioles; that’s the game that got him demoted). When Smith got sent down to Triple-A, he walked about one batter per inning pitched. I’m not saying these are competitive walk rates, because they aren’t, but he was allowing a comparable number of hits and these walks aren’t through the roof except a couple of outliers.
But his Chase Contact% did go up by about 5%, so the extra hits could also be a side effect of his poor command; his Chase% itself also went up by the same amount. So he threw more outside pitches, hitters swung at them more, and they made more contact.
Other than his fastball, the only pitches that have really lost effectiveness are his change-up (.556 wOBA) and sinker (.570 wOBA). But the xwOBA on his change is .267, so it seems like he had some bad luck there due to a small sample size. He only threw his sinker 41 times in his 2026 major league games, so I think those numbers need to be thrown out for now.
It’s really just his fastball where everything has cratered. It has the same velocity and spin as last year, and it has the same horizontal break. But it has a different vertical movement. Last year, its IVB was -1.5, noticeably below MLB average, while this year it’s 0.3 — just a tic above normal. Usually more ride wouldn’t ruin a pitcher’s fastball. But Smith is an unusual case. He doesn’t have a great arsenal, so he based his whole game off a well-located fastball.
That larger IVB, while not a problem itself, is a side effect of his new delivery. And that’s what’s really going on; he’s throwing with a new arm angle. He threw at a 34° angle in 2025, and for 2026 it’s gone up to 38°. Pitching is finicky, and if you prioritize perfect location, changing your arm angle by 4° can mess with that. Smith’s Stuff+ has actually improved year-over-year, potentially due more movement on fastball, but his Location+ is down from 98 to 92.
That leaves two questions — why his arm angle went up, and whether he can re-learn to locate his pitches inside. Smith did an interview with Sox Machine during the offseason, where he talked about some adjustments he made to his delivery. It seems like he tried to dial back on some of the cross-body movement that was such a big part of his work last year. Throwing cross-body is when a pitcher rotates their body glove-side too much during their delivery, rather than keeping their body angled straight towards home plate. It made Smith’s pitches deceptive, but it’s not usually a favorable way of throwing because it can mess with a pitcher’s command, and it can risk injury. Smith pitched well that way, but he did walk some batters during bad stretches last season, and it didn’t seem like the most sustainable way to pitch. Moving to a less cross-body delivery often increases a pitcher’s arm angle, and therefore, could change Smith’s ability to locate his pitches.
According to another Sox Machine article, Smith is working with pitching coordinator Mark Zeleski to go back to the more complicated delivery he had last year, which seems like the right move. That odd delivery was part of who he was as a pitcher — and it let him get away with an arsenal that wasn’t overly special by itself. Sometimes you need to throw-out the book and look at the individual pitcher. If Smith can pitch with odd mechanics, then let him. He had some poor stretches last year and recovered from them, so he’s capable of bouncing back. He’s off the injured list, and in five starts this month has a 4.41 ERA with 19 strikeouts in 16.1 innings.
The White Sox are a contending team that will need good arms for the playoff race. Pitching is their weak area, and even if they make trades, they aren’t going to add a ton of starting pitchers that way; they’ll be lucky to get one. Smith could still have a chance to salvage his season, and his status as the White Sox ace.
