Give or take two weeks, White Sox pitching prospects Hagen Smith and Noah Schultz are the same age. They both throw with the same hand, and they both spin sliders so well that the organization is reluctant to ask them to do much else.
"I'm excited to see him throw in person because well, all his videos seem pretty good," Smith said of his counterpart who will join him at major league camp.
Going the college route, Smith waited a bit longer than Schultz to get a larger draft bonus and proved his mettle in full starts against SEC hitters rather than minor leaguers, but both are tasked with adjusting to a five-day starter schedule and helming around 110 innings in 2025. The idea is that their combination of major league proximity and ceiling will soon render the difference in draft bonuses irrelevant.
Comparatively, the gangly 6-foot-10-inch left-hander who throws from a unique low slot might have had the more traditional path. With a low slot and release height and an extreme first-base side of the pitching rubber placement for a fastball that both runs and rises, Smith's heater leans into its unique look over such old-school concerns as owning the inside half of the plate. His slider is even weirder, where he anchors his grip on the skin of the baseball rather than a seam, and Arkansas pitching coach Matt Hobbs jokingly(?) banned him from showing teammates something so unrepeatable for others.
"If people asked, I'd show them, but I don't think anyone ever actually listened to me and actually tried to use it," Smith said. "It's just a mental thing. When I threw it, it felt right and I was able to throw it harder."
But while the White Sox have emphasized adding strength to make Schultz's immediate skills more physically sustainable, Smith's breakout -- his slider ticking up to the high-80s and developing starter-level command -- is so tied to bulking up to his present 235 pounds that he regards Razorbacks strength coach Hunter Bell as one of the architects of his game. They still text regularly, as even with Smith's training plan shifted to the White Sox purview, Bell remains a mentor to him.
"It helped my delivery a lot, being strong enough to get into certain positions down the mound," Smith said. "Before I wasn't strong enough. My body was moving fast but I wasn't strong enough to handle the velocity at which I was moving down the mound."
No one looks askance at Smith's 7⅔ innings of professional work last year, with three earned runs and seven strikeouts. But the three abbreviated outings were viewed as purely functional, and whatever hiccups were attributed to Smith being worn out at the end of a college season and subsequent playoff run, leading to him being given a break from participating in instructional league.
"He didn't say it, but you could tell his body was kind of out of gas; he had been going since September of last year," said White Sox pitching coordinator Matt Zaleski. "The performance for me, that didn't really matter. It was more getting him adapted to minor league life. How long he's in minor league life, I don't have any idea."
Like Schultz, the episode inclines the White Sox to lean conservative on Smith's workload, but the talent suggests a Jairo Iriarte/Jake Eder-style bullpen audition in Chicago in September, preferred by Brian Bannister to initiate rising starters, wouldn't be out of line. Zaleski referenced not having Smith throw too many changeups at the risk of undermining his feel for supinating his wrist for spin, and Bannister suggested further developing a cutter could be the way for Smith to round out a mix they deemed worthy of the fifth-overall pick even on the strength of just two pitches.
For his part, Smith has spent his offseason splitting the difference by working on both. He thinks his cutter has been one of his best pitches during bullpen sessions this offseason, which at least triggers a memory of Garrett Crochet's cutter taking over his arsenal past year. And Smith is working on a splitter to fulfill the function of a changeup, without requiring himself to pronate his wrist to make it play against opposite-handed hitters.
"The biggest thing was trying to figure out something comfortable for me," Smith said. "My mindset is with a changeup is to throw it as hard as I can, just throw it and let the grip do whatever it does."
A version of Smith that commands four pitches with the velocity that dominated the SEC last year doesn't have much of a future in minor league ball, and the White Sox have acknowledged as much. It's the faint signs of fatigue after Smith's first full year of starting in college that invites a more cautious approach, and that already fits with their long rebuild.
"Guy who just got drafted, who from a skillset standpoint could pitch in the big leagues probably pretty soon, assuming health," said farm director Paul Janish, to put it another way.
In the interim, Smith arrives in Arizona in a week and a half as an early litmus test of a new front office, that hasn't been able to display its vision for the future much on a major league field. With so much focus on larger, organizational infrastructure-level improvements, little of the talent battling for roster spots last spring was meant to represent what Chris Getz & Co. believe can return the White Sox to contending for division titles.
As they've made quite clear, Smith is a central piece of a player group that's meant to look the part, and by all accounts he'll stand out right away.
