Noah Schultz has a 6.04 ERA heading into tonight's game against Max Fried and the Yankees, which will take place exactly a week ahead of the Aug. 3 trade deadline, as the first place White Sox hunt starting pitching help as their top priority.
The 22-year-old left-hander can't be accused of minimizing the stakes.
"There's really only one way to move in this situation," Schultz said. "Pressure is a privilege. It's something to get into this situation, but it's fight or flight, natural selection, and people survive. You've got to prove how you stand and sustain a position."
That may sound a little dramatic, since Erick Fedde allowed three home runs in 4 1/3 innings himself on Sunday and has still been contributing to wins. Schultz is also the youngest player on the roster, most Sox personnel grant a fair amount of grace to his developmental trek, and his professional career-high in innings is only two or three starts away, so performance isn't the only thing factoring into how the rest of his season plays out.
"He's a baby giraffe, he's 22, he literally is still growing," said pitching coach Zach Bove. "I have to remind myself, others too, that this guy, it's going to take some time. We all want this finished product and every start to get better than the next. The reality is it's just not the case. That's the challenge: How do we clean up the things that need to be cleaned up from the last start, but also keep the big picture in mind that this guy is so young, so inexperienced and this is part of it."
White Sox coaches argue that Schultz didn't have much batted-ball luck in his last start in Texas, but it's hard to get BABIP'd for 11 hits if you're missing bats, and the lanky lefty has the 42nd highest contact rate out of 192 MLB pitchers with 50 innings or more this season. Normally what allows a pitcher to get whiffs is a nuanced conversation, but for Schultz it can be simplified.
For much of his prospect trajectory, Schultz's slider was on a shortlist for the best individual pitches in the minors. Through 12 major league starts, it's simply been inconsistent. The 32.9 percent miss rate on it is good, albeit not dominant, but the .629 opponent slugging percentage against it reflects the lack of feel for locating it. That he threw it just eight times last Tuesday and didn't get a called strike nor a whiff on it made the pitch a central focus of his most recent bullpen session on Friday.
But what Schultz and Bove are working on may make future pitch classifications tricky.
"We focused on just getting the -- he calls it the slider, it's the curveball -- getting consistent depth on that pitch, getting it down under [barrels]," said Bove, who thinks calling it a curve is a good cue for visualizing the sort of dropping action they're shooting for.
"No. 1, it's helpful. No. 2, the shape we're going for is -4 to -6 [induced vertical break]. You could call it a slurve, but I call that more of a curveball than a traditional slider or sweeper."
Schultz isn't too wrapped up in the classification debate. For him, the more important distinction is that after working to carve out two versions of his breaking ball — a sweeping east-west mover against lefties, a more vertically-oriented breaker for righties — the new project is to focus on one shape. It aligns with a larger emphasis to try to simplify the plan, and line up with the delivery mechanics he’s had when he’s most effective.
"This year I've been a six or seven-pitch pitcher, and it's just like, simplifying things, which I think will help with in the long run with shapes, locations, and everything that kind of goes into it," Schultz said. "Trying to do what I do well again. We switched up the arsenal, looking at past videos from previous years and previous outings. We had switched the slider to a sweeper and killed the vert on it, then had sweeper and curveball instead of the one I used to have, which you know had some depth to it
"But we know [the] sweeper didn't really play well versus righties and like [the] curveball does, versus the [breaking ball] that I had, that was kind of a mix of both that played throughout the whole minors and my whole career building up to it. Just kind of getting back to doing what I used to do, things that I had success [with] to get here."
There are delivery consistency issues behind the slider's effectiveness as well, and anyone who spends time on the injured list, as Schultz had for right knee tendinitis, has compensatory mechanical habits to iron out upon return. But this 'back to basics' approach seems like an appropriate position to retreat to for a week that has the potential to be definitive for Schultz's role in the rotation down the stretch of the season.
Even in confirming that Schultz is making his next start and saying, "Noah is someone we really believe strongly in," Will Venable affirmed that the starting rotation is up for review all the time when he prefaced his answer with "we evaluate every time through what’s our best five." And Sean Burke is only a few lockers over from Schultz as a testament that you can be optioned to Triple-A for underperformance one year in the organization, and the best starter on staff the next.
But Schultz would rather stick around. Trying to find your footing in the majors while the team is in the middle of a division race seems pretty difficult, but that's the appeal to him.
"It's almost a good thing that there's no room for error," Schultz said. "There's instant feedback. Sometimes you're facing a guy in Double-A or something and you just kind of blow them away with stuff. That obviously makes sense to say it out loud, but against [major leaguers], you can't get away with stuff. So there's instant feedback, which is the best way to learn and improve."
