There is an ace inside of Shane Smith. I know it because, on Tuesday the 16th of September, I saw the Holy Trinity possess him. Ed Walsh was the father and Chris Sale was the spirit. The holy ghost was Mark Buehrle, and when he’s not inside of Shane, I believe the ghost lives in the statue.
The possession occurred as Smith opened the game against Jackson Holliday, a well-regarded young hitter and the offspring of Dan Plesac’s most sworn enemy. Smith’s first strike of the game was a fastball down and away at 98 mph. It was an absolute dot.
The fastball has been Smith’s piece due resistance.[i] His four-seam is averaging 95.5 mph for the season, but he is the lone White Sox pitcher who has gotten stronger as the season goes along — he topped out at 99 mph during the first inning against the Orioles. That fastball has been his best put-away pitch this season, at 24.2%, and his whiff percentage has increased 8% in August-September compared to the previous two months (June-July), according to the CHSN broadcast on 9/16. The MLB fraternity of 2025 is batting a flaccid .199 against it.
Smith’s fastball has been so great that he’s becoming straight-up disrespectful with it. The first case of Holy Possession for Mr. Smith was the two “fuck you” center-cut fastballs that he blew past Salvador Pérez back-to-back for a strikeout on August 25. It felt like, in some unexplainable way, Salvy’s mother had been personally insulted. That’s how disrespectful those fastballs were.
The second strike to Holliday was a kick changeup, down and in. The kick change is the main reason the White Sox can claim Smith as their own successful developmental project. Smith averaged nearly 11 strikeouts per nine innings across Double-A and Triple-A in 2024, but he was doomed to a reliever role by a two-pitch mix. The pitches were good enough: a 94 mph fastball and a good, heavy curve. But he failed to develop a cutter or a slider with the Brewers system. Neither pitch were very good enough to play off one another. They also didn’t mesh with his curve, which has more of a Doc Gooden 12-to-6 shape.
The kick change makes more sense for Smith. Because the kick change breaks downward more than it does sideways, it basically splits the different between his fastball and his curveball. Now the batter is seeing a similar shape at three drastically different speeds. It’s a true three-pitch mix, and all three pitches are top shelf, hide it from the kids, hardcore pornographic filth.
On a 2-2 count, Smith rears back and runs a sinker inside the zone and near Jackson’s hip. This sinker is a new Brian Bannister/Ethan Katz wrinkle that has also been given to Davis Martin this season. The sinker is a natural complement to the kick change, in theory, because both pitches are thrown at max effort. The difference between the two is 5.7 mph on average, according to Statcast before the Orioles game, but their movement profile provides a much greater difference than the average sinker/changeup combo. The average starter has a smidge of overlap between the two — Smith has a full eight inches of vertical drop differential between them. There ain’t no way for a hitter to sit on one and accidentally run into the other.
And it is that vertical separation that gets Jackson to swing over-the-top of a full count changeup at the knees. Strike three. It’s like watching Will Sennett pitching to Timothy Chalamet.
Of course, as we know, that spirit can be fleeting. Smith’s four earned runs in four innings against the Orioles can testify to that, but it cannot Testify! At just 25 and with six years of team control to come, Smith can now be transitioned from hopeful rotation cog to future ace.
Now the question is: How do the White Sox get him there?
[i] Bone apple tea.
