After only covering 94⅓ innings last season in the Brewers farm system and appearing in relief half the time, it's not hard to conjure some stats that make it look like Shane Smith is staggering as he approaches the same benchmark as a full-time major league starter.
Smith has a 5.81 ERA over his last six starts, covering just 26⅓ innings, with 15 walks against 26 strikeouts. That said, he's been on extended rest for each of his last five starts, and Smith's fastball has averaged a healthy 95.5 mph over that same stretch. Pitching coach Ethan Katz doesn't see fatigue as the culprit here, and is more concerned about the 25-year-old right-hander becoming tentative in response to poor results
"He's still strong, he's doing things really well," Katz said. "Numbers-wise, he had a bad start versus the Cardinals, but visually if you watched it, it was a very good outing. It was a lot of weak contact, a couple mishaps that extended innings. But I loved how he threw the ball against the Cardinals. Obviously with the numbers and the conversation the next day, no pitcher would be pleased with that.
"The other day [against the Diamondbacks] he got away from his game a little bit in what he was doing. He threw a 3-2 slider to the No. 9 hitter that started that second inning and walked him, and that's not what we've been doing. He got away from his process and it snowballed into a three-run home run."
The Sox are likely to continue pushing Smith back and extending his rest at every opportunity, and Davis Martin's eventual return could grant even more flexibility in that regard. Katz even remarked that while he thinks Smith's stuff has potential for more swing-and-miss than he's currently generating, he doesn't mind the weak-contact nature of his results because it keeps him more efficient.
Here's where we acknowledge that things change quickly in baseball, especially with pitching health, but the goal is to avoid straight-up shutting Smith down, and Katz doesn't feel recent results are pushing them toward such a resolution.
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Grant Taylor ripped off a couple of 96 mph cutters during his two-inning save on Saturday, which is such an exciting concept that it can easily distract from the grunt work for which he's using them.
"We're using it more as a way to get back into counts and offset some things, but not try to put away guys too much with the cutter; versus righties it's going to be more contact than swing-and-miss," Katz said. "He's had a ton of success with it, but hitters up here will start to run it if he tries to live off the cutter. When they're gearing up to a fastball and it cuts back into their bat path, especially when he's up in the zone. That's kind of what happened with [Marcus] Semien in Texas."
Despite the wide, starter-like arsenal that Taylor has been so fond of developing, there's been a clear shift toward leaning on his oft-triple-digit fastball since moving to the major league bullpen, with an emphasis on locating it upstairs for whiffs (he's thrown it 58 percent of the time through his 10 big league innings). If the fastball is now the headliner and the cutter is a strike-grabber, Katz and the Sox are banking on Taylor's curveball becoming the putaway breaking ball that works to hitters of either hand.
Taylor throwing a kick change is a cool concept. In practice, it's currently shelved.
"The curveball is one of the best in baseball for movement, velocity, all of the above," Katz said. "We haven't really talked about the changeup right now because there is such a plethora of good options."
Not to be any more patronizing than usual, but it sounds as if the best way to discern Taylor's future usage is to look at the opposing lineup. The Sox don't generate enough save opportunities for "closer" to be Taylor's role, even if this coaching staff believed in such rigid slotting for their bullpen.
But unless there's a left-on-left matchup that takes precedence, Taylor will likely be facing the heart of the opposing batting order at the latest point in the game they're set to come up. If it seems like he's entering the game for the bottom of the order, it's probably because he's lined up for two innings of work. If someone else is facing the heart of the opposing order late with a lead, it probably means Taylor isn't available. We wondered how long it would take for him to assume the role of the top leverage arm in the bullpen, and the answer appears to be 10 innings.
Honestly, maybe it took less.
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Discerning what changes the White Sox have in mind for Aaron Civale's attack plan is a little challenging given that he uses somewhere between six and eight different pitches, and it's hard for small tweaks to his arsenal to register.
Katz insists that the more productive way to onboard a new pitcher is to ask questions before laying out new asks. So while video analysis led the Sox to believe that restoring Civale's 2023 mechanics would be beneficial, a question they asked redirected the process a bit.
"He let us know, 'I've been dealing with a little bit of a knee thing,'" Katz said. "Because the problem was everything was just up in the zone and he wasn't commanding anything down in the zone. Not being able to get into his back leg as much, he couldn't drive anything down. For him it's important because he's trying to do a lot of good work up in the zone."
Civale came to the Sox running an alarmingly low 22.2 percent ground-ball rate with the Brewers, which is both a career worst and making him more vulnerable to home runs (five in 22 innings with Milwaukee). With opposing hitters noticing his troubles locating down in the zone, Civale's command needed to be pinpoint, or he needed to nibble to survive.
But Katz feels they've both found a workaround for Civale to work down in the zone without putting more stress on his right knee -- which he says is in a better place -- and that his start to the season has created a lot of opportunity down there. At the very least, it provides a very clear cue for tracking Civale's chances for success in every outing: Is he able to get the ball down when needed?
"Teams seems to be trying to wait him out up top, and that's where us getting down opens up those avenues, instead of just trying to be pinpoint at the top every single time," Katz said. "We're seeing some different things and having a lot of good conversations between him and myself, trying to combat whatever they're trying to do."
