Found Money? White Sox Rookie Smith Debuts vs. Twins

Development, development, development...that is the mantra for the 2025 Chicago White Sox. The first four games of the season have had some interesting moments, however. Two offensive barrages where the team utilized a rarely deployed multi-homer strategy and a pitching feat that has only been accomplished a handful of times in baseball history. That's right, your 2025 White Sox are one of only five teams in the history of the sport to have their starting pitchers not surrender an earned run through the first four games of the season, which is hard to fathom considering what we went through just a year ago.

That brings us to game two of tonight's three-game set against the hated Minnesota Twins. The pressure will be on Shane Smith, who is making his Major League debut for the Pale Hose. Smith, who is just three days shy of his 25th birthday, will aim for history tonight as the club completes its first turn through the rotation and looks to make its mark.

Getting To Know You

The Sox selected Smith with the first overall pick in this past winter's Rule 5 draft, claiming him from the Milwaukee Brewers. The mechanics of the Rule 5 draft are a baseball oddity, so I won't go into full detail on it here, but here's what you need to know: if the Sox do not roster Smith for the entire season, they will return his rights to the Brew Crew. We saw this happen back in the Winter of 2016 at the beginning of Rebuild 2.0, when the team selected Dylan Covey from the Oakland Athletics.

Covey hung around with the Sox for parts of three seasons before making pit stops in Boston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Covey was able to stay on the Sox roster for the entirety of the 2017 season, preventing his return to Oakland. While there were some backchannel rumors of injured list manipulation to keep him with the club, the Sox fulfilled their commitment and had him on the 40-man for all of 2017. 

Smith comes to the team with a higher level of intrigue, I must say. If you look at his minor league numbers, one could ask the question as to why the Brewers would be willing to leave him unprotected during the Rule 5 Draft. For his career in three minor league seasons with Milwaukee, Smith posted a 2.69 ERA with 11.6 K/9 and 3.0 BB/9 across 157 IP. Those are pretty solid numbers for a pitcher that ascended all the way to Triple-A and was seemingly knocking on the door of the big leagues.

Smith has had injury issues since entering pro ball, as he has never pitched more than 94.1 innings in a single season. So, how the Sox decide to deploy the fireballing righty will be an interesting case study. He did make 16 starts in AA last season, averaging 5.43 innings per start, so there was at least an effort within the Brewers organization to stretch him out.

Knowing that the Sox are not in a competitive season will allow the club room to experiment with Smith and attempt to find the right role for him. For now, he has been installed into the starting rotation, likely thanks to Drew Thorpe's season-ending injury. But this presents an opportunity for Smith to make a name for himself. 

During his final Cactus League appearance on 3/19 against his old club, Smith logged four innings, as it appears the team is going to at least try him in a starter's capacity to begin the 2025 campaign. Smith raised some eyebrows this spring as he logged 10.2 IP with a 3.37 ERA, 11K, and 4BB. This is a very small sample size in the Cactus League, but that's all we have to go on at this point, folks.

Much of Smith's work this spring wasn't able to be viewed by fans unless you were in Arizona for the Cactus League tilts, so we're largely looking at just stat lines right now and going off of the glowing reports you hear from coaches and scouts during Spring Training. 

Looking at Cactus League game data, Smith looks to feature a four-pitch mix with a fastball topping out at 98 mph, a curveball sitting in the 81-83 mph range, the ever-popular kick change-up in the 90-92 range, and a slider sitting 91-93 mph. Needless to say, power appears to be the name of Smith's game. It will be fascinating to watch him tonight against the Sox most hated division rival and one that has given them fits for much of the last two decades. The Twins have, in recent years, been a team that hammers fastballs, so the game plan that is devised by Ethan Katz and Brian Bannister will be of interest to me. Will we see the organizationally popular kick change utilized with great frequency? 

However Smith decides to go after the Twinkies hitters, I know I'm hopeful that he is able to continue this early season run of solid performances from Sox starters. You all know I love nothing more than seeing the Sox put one in the left hand column at the expense of the team from Canada South.

Stacked Deck

We have to be honest though about the situation with Shane Smith. The odds are he won't be a significant contributor for the team in 2025 and into the future. Rule 5 picks simply don't have a great history. People love to mention Sox killer, Johan Santana, when discussing Rule 5 picks but it shouldn't be a controversial statement to say that a two time Cy Young Award winner is an outlier. 

If you look historically at Rule 5 picks for starting pitchers, there aren't many that have stood the test of time and been able to be meaningful contributors. Santana is the most notable on the list, but in the last 20 years, it's hard to find other Rule 5 picks that you could even name as steady big leaguers. The most successful Rule 5 starting pitchers of the last two decades is comprised of a list featuring the likes of: R.A. Dickey, Brad Keller, and Nestor Cortes. That's not an inspiring list, aside from Dickey's brief peak that resulted in a Cy Young Award himself. But you get the picture here.

I would love nothing more than for Shane Smith to be a guy that can stick at the back end of the Sox rotation. It would be great if it was simply a matter of him having a clean bill of health to allow him to reach his potential. But again, we need to be realistic here. The odds aren't in his favor, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be rooting for him.

If the Sox are somehow able to harness Smith's power arm and utilize him in any meaningful capacity, whether as a starter of high leverage reliever, that would be an organizational win and some found money by Chris Getz and Co. It would be refreshing if the team was able to find an undervalued asset for a second straight year, similar to what the team had in Erick Fedde during 2024. 

This team needs to look for talent anywhere and everywhere as they try to escape the doldrums of baseball hell, and the Rule 5 Draft is just another avenue. History says that Shane Smith likely won't be a meaningful part of the White Sox future, but there are certainly intriguing tools here that fans can dream on. If the organization is able to maximize Smith's talent, and he can become a mainstay on the team's staff in any role, that provides a beacon of hope that pitching development program under Brian Bannister and Ethan Katz is going in the right direction.