Shane Smith, the South Siders’ 2026 Opening Day starter, was optioned to Triple-A Charlotte on Wednesday. Smith’s demotion comes after his start on Wednesday, where he flashed some of that nasty swing-and-miss stuff we saw for stretches last season.
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Smith was still erratic, however. He walked five Orioles, plunked a sixth, and burned through 99 pitches in 3 2/3 innings. Despite failing to end the fourth inning, Wednesday was still Smith’s longest outing of the year. That kinda says everything you need to know right there.
The issues are easy to diagnose. Smith has completely lost the ability to spot his fastball. Compare his 2025 heat map to 2026:
At his best, Smith features one of the liveliest four-seam fastballs in baseball. The pitch can overpower hitters even when they are sitting on it. Smith also added 1.3 inches of rise to his four-seamer early in 2026, which could help generate more swings and misses in the strike zone. None of this does a pitcher any good, however, when he’s constantly missing wide of the zone.
James Fegan got Smith and some of the White Sox development staff to talk about the fastball issues on Monday, and I was struck by this quote by Brian Bannister:
“He lost some of the qualities that made him unique,” Bannister said. “He had this unique little step forward that threw hitters off on their timing, and then he would speed up right after that to go slow, fast. You get some visual deception in a way that Tarik Skubal does.”
This isn’t the first time Bannister has talked about “visual deception” this season. Bannister is one of those guys who is always looking for the next big thing; in 2024 and 2025, he bet on the kick changeup and was correct. He’s now wagering on “funky,” a concept that has long been a staple of Japanese baseball culture but has grown more en vogue recently in MLB, from the more obvious (Nestor Cortes’s double leg kick) to the more subtle, like Shane Smith’s herky-jerky tempo from last year. The organization even has a term for them: “residuals.”
Smith took it upon himself over the offseason to regulate his windup tempo — we’re left to infer that Bannister hadn’t communicated his philosophy of funk to his pitchers before the offseason — and in doing so, he took away a piece of what made him a budding star last year. It’s like taking the loud parts out of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—now the song is just some mumbly guy playing two notes over and over.
While an early-season demotion does not seem so bleak after last year’s extended Spring Training, where Colson Montgomery got his groove back, it also doesn’t instill much confidence in a ballclub when the Opening Day starter can’t make it to Tax Day. It’ll be up to the White Sox brain trust to get Smith back to the funk.
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