Top White Sox prospect Noah Schultz has given interviews before, but SoxFest represented a larger cluster of them than the quiet left-hander has ever completed in a single 48-hour span. The fun thing about watching the best prospects is they improve so quickly you can watch them encountering and conquering new issues in real time.
Answering my questions in a backstage area of the second floor of the Ramova Theatre, and you can still see Schultz reaching the point where he could keep extrapolating, but the question has effectively been answered, and the cleaner route is to end it at that point. He's a driver recognizing a stop sign a hair late, and the car rocks to a halt for half a moment.
Just 90 minutes later, Schultz is on stage. A crowd that's heard about their towering top pitching prospect but is seeing him in person for the first time is eating out of Schultz's hand once he mentions he's from "nearby Oswego, 45-minute drive away," and his answers are now rounding off in manner that conveys decisiveness.
"I believe in myself, and I believe in my abilities," Schultz says to punctuate an answer to a question about the majors being a step away. A roll of applause confirms a direct hit. An audience wary of false confidence from men sporting White Sox zip-up fleeces nevertheless like the 21-year-old's burgeoning hints of bravado.
Schultz won zero of his 23 starts last year, a function of the four-inning limits of his outings that White Sox coaches felt angst about. Everyone in Sox player development could convincingly argue that Schultz avoiding injury over 88 innings and bulking up to six-foot-10, 240 pounds was a more important than threatening a 5-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 2024, but they still lamented removing him so cleanly from the competitive aspect of the sport.
They may well have accounted for some of the applause when Schultz named the Double-A Barons winning the Southern League championship last September as his best moment in baseball. Schultz pitched in Game 1, but waxes more poetic about the home crowds later in the series. He's an easy figure to pick out in the video of the hysterical celebration following DJ Gladney's championship-winning walk-off single, bouncing higher than everyone else in the dogpile, as if he'd bounded out of the dugout with a pogo stick in tow.
Which is to say Schultz is enthused about shifting to a five-day schedule, starts where he could earn the right to pitch longer with good performance, and chances to dominate a game the way he's threatened to. It's what he's spent most of the offseason considering.
"It's big on conditioning, trying to add general strength in everything, trying to avoid injuries and trying to be successful so I can see how long I can go in games this year," Schultz said of his winter program. "It'll often be new, but I know that I've got a lot of guys helping me, guys who have done it before."
Keeping his delivery in sync as Schultz continues to get bigger, via his own efforts and also his genetics, has occupied less concern. When he was first drafted in 2022, much of understanding Schultz's amateur development came via talking to Mark Sheehan, a devotee of famed pitching instructor Tom House. Sheehan explained how Schultz's low slot, short-stride delivery -- alien in both how it played to hitters and how it looked on video -- was borne of their process of honing in on what felt most natural to the gangly left-hander's body; a motion he could repeat while his eyes and shoulders stayed square to the plate throughout.
The explanation delved into a level of theory about adolescent physical development that no sportswriter could be expected to credibly audit. But now that Schultz has faced almost 500 batters as a professional and walked well under 7 percent of them, their practices have a more easily verified backing.
"The most important part of this is throwing strikes, and that's what I try to do," said Schultz, who will still do some of Sheehan's drills in the mirror, or will text him midseason when a pitch is flattening out. "I was with him when I grew 13 inches in two years. The one [added inch] is not really going to change anything. But at the time I was a real work in progress and I learned a lot about myself and about my body."
The commitment to a delivery that looks like few others comes during a crescendo of an era of pitching where unique looks and approach angles are being championed. Schultz's dominant low-80s slider (40 percent CSW at Double-A) was conceived from a curveball grip that takes on an extra degree of cruelty from his low lefty arm slot. Schultz has only had a handful of individual bullpen sessions with senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister, and putting them in the same place more next month is a benefit to having him in major league camp, but he's still spent the winter working on a seam-shifted changeup.
Schultz's gift for rotating his wrist to his glove side to rip off a breaking ball is such that Bannister and Matt Zaleski have both preached the virtue of not asking him, nor similarly gifted supinators like Hagen Smith, to make the opposite move with their wrist to pronate a changeup. Commanding his changeup had been the one area where Schultz's location had been the sort of unreliable that you'd expect from an enormous 21-year-old, so he's been a quick sell on a convincing alternative.
"It's something I hadn't really heard of and then I was taught it, and it's pretty cool how it works," Schultz said. "I had tried pronating with the changeup and it didn't really work as well. I learned from Brian Bannister when he first got here, he helped me with it. He taught me to cut through it, which if you think 'cut through it' it goes the opposite and dives the other way. It really helps."
A documented ask made of Schultz was to reintroduce his four-seam fastball to his mix late last season, and it's a reintroduction because he previously threw it in high school. His sinker was a more traditional fit with Schultz's low arm slot, but his uniquely low release height (given his height) paired with a carrying mid-90s heater played for the whiffs the sinker was missing. He's familiar with all the approach-angle reasons it should continue to be effective for him next year, and why he can feel like he's headed to Glendale with answers in-hand for concerns that he was dominating the minors just off the strength of his slider for much of 2024.
He's fond of it for a more concrete reason. If the Barons championship was Schultz's favorite moment in the sport, his Game 1 start -- as frustratingly shortened as it was -- was his biggest start to date. He turned to his new heater, and showed a feel for how to wield it for whiffs (31 percent in-zone swing-and-miss) pretty quickly.
"That's probably when I threw it the most and I got a bunch of strikeouts with that, so it was good," Schultz said. "A pitch can be great in the bullpen, but if the hitters hit it, is it really that great of a pitch? I think it really depends on how it plays on the field."
There's enough of a real sample to be confident on how Schultz's stuff plays on the field. When the season starts, 110 innings and a five-day schedule will test if it plays in a rotation.
