There's a lot more to fastballs working than just velocity, and we're certainly going to get a little bit in the weeds here, but it's the simplest place to start with Shane Smith's. After sitting at 94 mph his previous two outings and looking more like someone regressing to his career velocity norms, Smith's fastball rebounded to average 96.4 mph last Saturday pitching in front of friends and family at Fenway Park, and even clipped 98.
It was also the best outing of the season for Smith's slider, and his low-90s seam-effects changeup is the breakout, profile-changing offering here. But throwing harder obviously helps a lot, since it's even part of why his changeup is so good and unique. And at this point, even the most empirical-minded analysis of why Smith is throwing harder than ever could be boiled down to he's a big boy and he's got that dawg in 'em.
"Any time you are a starter and you get a chance to compete for a big league job with a new club, you are going to go out and attack almost like a reliever," said Brian Bannister at the end of spring. "We see when starters go to the pen, they jump in velo. [Smith]’s been able to sustain it. He’s very physical, very similar to [Sean] Burke. He’s a big person and can generate a lot of force in the lab. You’ve seen those upticks in velo, and you combine that with his ability to spin and the addition of the new changeup, it’s a really exciting arsenal."
While the typical right-hander's four-seamer has vertical carrying (16.1 inches of IVB, inverted vertical break) and running action (7.6 inches) to the arm side, Smith's fastball averages well-below typical carry (13.2) and run (3.6), to the point where it appears to the hitter to cut to the glove side. For a good portion of his career, Smith tried to fight against his tendency to cut the ball in order to try to maximize its vertical action. But with natural movement tendencies, resistance tends to be futile, and Smith was embracing the cutting action near the tail end of his time in the Brewers organization. As a tacit endorsement of that transition alongside selecting Smith first overall in the Rule 5 draft, the White Sox have asserted that it's a playable fastball shape even when Smith slides back toward league average velocity.
"He has a great fastball," pitching coach Ethan Katz said last week. "Everyone knows how much I downplay fastballs, but he has a great fastball. And one of the things is getting him up in the zone, particularly with some of these lefties on this Red Sox team, we know what we can do when we get up in the zone. That can impact them and definitely help the secondary stuff. That's going to be huge for him to get the fastball to protect the secondary stuff."
That might be harder to argue based on just the averages, but the White Sox are accounting for how much the shape varies. As an example, just Smith's last start saw him run up some heaters at 17 IVB with seven inches of run, and some that looked more like cutters at 10 IVB and two inches of run. The cutter shape is especially relevant for opposite-handed hitters, against whom Smith is typically tasked with cross-firing something hard up and in to set up his world-beating changeup low and away.
"The metrics on the fastball, it’s not an outlier in a lot of ways. He’s throwing a lot harder this spring, but it’s not like the fastball has a ton of movement," Bannister said at the end of spring. "I actually like the randomness of it. it cuts sometimes, it backs up sometimes, the hitters don’t know what it’s going to do. When it comes in 96-99, that’s a pretty exciting feature and the randomness is actually going to help him be more efficient and get through games with lower pitch counts."
Pitching in with freelance Cubs coverage in the second half of 2023 allowed me to have a view of Justin Steele breaking out for a fifth-place finish in the National League Cy Young race despite below-average velocity and eerily similar below-average rise and run on his four-seamer to Smith. Just last year, Steele averaged 13.2 IVB and 0.3 inches of armside run -- pretty close.
As my friend Sahadev Sharma explained, Steele's heater played well above his apparent raw ingredients because the left-hander toggled between a more traditional riding four-seamer and a cutting fastball that bores in on the hands of opposite-handed hitters, seemingly at will. Steele didn't so much change his grip on the pitch much beyond whatever subtle differences emerged in his release when he altered his intent with the pitch.
“When I’m going in to righties, I’m thinking straight line through and keep bearing in on them rather than throwing it in and having it leak back over the plate,” Steele said. “I’m kind of more on the side of the ball; still throwing it with true spin, but it’s rotated a little bit so it stays in. When I’m going away to a righty, it looks like a ball the whole time and it just keeps riding and goes toward the plate.”
For Smith, it's still a little early in the process for him to have too much advanced notice on how his fastball will act, but he's starting to notice some patterns.
"I know when I'm trying to go certain places, either in the zone or out of the zone, I know that it's probably going to do something different," Smith said. "It doesn't really run that often. But sometimes it has a similar [four-seam] shape, but then sometimes it cuts. I kind of know when it's going to do it, but I'm not trying to do it on purpose."
A fastball that moves unexpectedly sounds like a nightmare to command, but Smith has been able to keep his walks (8.9 percent) and his zone rate (56.8 percent, up from last year with the Brewers) because he's been gaining a feel for predicting the action, even if it's not as much autonomy as you're used to pitchers talking with.
"If I go to a certain location I know it's probably going to cut, but I go to another one it's probably going to stay true. But I'm not trying to do either one," Smith said.
When Smith is sitting 96 mph, this all becomes something fun and quirky about his bluntly overpowering heater. When it has the knock-on effect of dragging his changeup up to 92 mph, his need to master the finer details is even less critical. But for most young pitchers, the velocity they enjoy at the opening of their career provides a buffer for them to develop the softer skills they'll need as it dissipates.
For Smith, his unique heater already outlines some of what those subtler pieces of craft will look like down the line. For such a natural supinator, he's still in the early stages of reliably throwing gyro sliders that drop off his cutting heaters, and lining up his curveball with his straighter four-seamers. Until the velo jump and the overnight adaptation of a plus changeup, that was going to be what slowly dragged Smith to the majors through the bullpen. Now with the boost of his fabulous offseason of development, there's a path to much more.
