With the fifth overall selection in the 2024 draft, the White Sox selected Hagen Smith, a left-handed pitcher from the University of Arkansas. Smith, who entered the draft as MLB Pipeline’s fifth-best draft prospect (and the outlet’s No. 1 pitcher), is coming off a huge season with the Razorbacks that culminated in the SEC Pitcher of the Year award.

Smith fits the mold of pitchers that the White Sox have recently targeted and have had success with, particularly under scouting director Mike Shirley’s tenure. In Shirley’s inaugural draft, the Sox selected Garrett Crochet who, despite also coming from the SEC, was much more of an enigma compared to Smith due to the cancellation of the 2020 season’s second half and Crochet’s injuries that season. Shirley has very directly compared the two, and he alluded to this recent success with similar players factoring into the decision-making process.

Then, sandwiched in-between first round shortstops Colson Montgomery (2021) and Jacob Gonzalez (2023) Shirley, Rick Hahn and Co. selected local product Noah Schultz from Oswego East High School. The theme with the White Sox in the 2020s has become big, southpaw arms with abnormal delivery traits that help their plus “Stuff” play up.

What Smith did all spring at Arkansas was induce swing and misses. His 47% Whiff rate (percentage of swings that resulted in a miss) was the second-highest in Division 1 college baseball to only Wake Forest’s Chase Burns — who the Cincinnati Reds took second overall. Smith’s 21% Swinging Strike rate (percentage of all pitches that resulted in a swing and miss) was also second to Burns.

With all the whiffs, it’s no surprise the strikeout numbers were equally as loud. Smith punched out 48.6% of the hitters that he faced in 2024 (again, second to only Burns’ 48.8%). In his 16 starts, he struck out 10 or more in 11 of them. In a college baseball run environment that has recently ballooned to the point where the average ERA in D1 is 6.21 (MLB’s average is 4.07), it’s hard to understate the kind of season that Smith had. To boot, Smith was also pitching in the toughest conference in college baseball where coaches liken the atmosphere to “a Super Regional every weekend.”

In those matchups with SEC opponents, Smith was 7-0 in 10 starts with a 1.35 ERA (best in the conference by 84 points) and 110 strikeouts to 22 walks over 60 IP. That 47% strikeout rate was the best conference-wide by 9%, while his ERA and FIP were also the best by over an entire run.

SEC hitters slugged .196 against Smith. The next closest among qualified pitchers was LSU’s Luke Holman at .315. It’s safe to say that the conference Pitcher of the Year award came as a surprise to no one.

Smith features a four-pitch arsenal: fastball, slider, changeup, and cutter, with the latter two being rarely used this season because, well, he just didn’t need them – the fastball/slider combination was devastating enough to college baseball’s best hitters.

He threw his fastball 54% of the time and hitters hit just .174 on it. It had a 42% Whiff rate and a 38% In-Zone Whiff rate that both ranked second in D1 behind fellow-draftee Louisiana-Lafayette’s LP Langevin. Smith’s fastball sat 95-97 while topping out at 100 mph. The pitch gets slightly better than average arm-side run, but its vertical break (or “ride”) is right around league average, which is typically undesirable. As a pitcher, you don’t want your pitch to look like everyone else’s because that gives hitters a lot of practice on your pitch’s shape. However, Smith differentiates himself in other ways to mitigate this “dead zone fastball” concern, particularly with his release traits.

On average Smith releases his fastball 5´7´´ off the ground, which is roughly in the 35th percentile for left-handed pitchers in college baseball. This matters because it helps his fastball perform better than it theoretically should given its movement profile.

In general, the hitter vs. pitcher matchup is all about angles. To over-complicate the game of baseball, the pitcher presents an angle with which his pitch is approaching the plate at, and then the hitter swings his bat at an angle that attempts to do damage based on the pitch coming at him. With such a low release height, a velocity that sits in the mid-to-upper 90s, and Smith consistently locating in the upper regions of the strike zone, he creates a very flat plane (or approach angle) that hitters must try and meet; an incredibly challenging task with a difficulty that was reflected in his 2024 performance stats.

This fastball profile of plus-velocity from a low slot that allows unassuming movement profiles to excel has become much more in vogue in recent years among pitching coaches, analysts, and roster constructors. Smith’s fastball has both of those traits, but his ability to also command it consistently to the top of the strike zone is what makes it a truly elite pitch.

To back it up, Smith’s main secondary (36% usage) is his slider that hitters hit an even .100 on in 2024 with a miniscule .152 wOBA and a whopping 56% Whiff rate. Right-handed hitters helplessly whiffed at 62% of the sliders that Smith spun, with most of them ending up mere inches from their feet.

The final 10% of Smith’s usage was composed of his split-changeup (8%) and his cutter (2%). The former averages 88 mph with a solid 37% Whiff rate and a .250 batting average vs. right-handed bats. It grades well stuff-wise, but Smith presently doesn’t have a great feel for commanding it, which is why there’s potential for his cutter to step up as his third offering. When asked post-draft about the prospects of the Sox working with Smith to further develop his cutter, Shirley noted that Crochet and Schultz are “of the same sector” and that “our success rate in this arena is something we need to build on.”

Over the last calendar year, the White Sox organization has added and developed a lot of pitching talent. One might even (cautiously) say that it has intriguing pitching depth. However, that was the case even before selecting Hagen Smith, and thus everyone expected them to take their favorite college bat in this year’s draft – someone like Florida’s Jac Caglianone, West Virginia’s JJ Wetherholt, or Texas A&M’s Braden Montgomery. All three of these bats were available when the selection of Smith was made, yet all have some considerable red flags.

Caglianone might be Bryce Harper, but he also has the highest Chase% of any hitter selected in the top two rounds since 2017 and will likely be limited to solely first base as a pro. For a team that is experiencing the reality of what it looks like when your Top 5 first baseman draftee is a league average hitter over his first 2,000 major league plate appearances, any significant marks against this type of player were likely too much to overlook.

Wetherholt came into the 2024 season as the top college prospect by a lot of evaluators, but he missed about half of the season with a hamstring issue – one that’s been known to be reoccurring. That’s more organizational PTSD.

Montgomery put up loud numbers in the SEC with impressive bat speeds and exit velocities from both sides of the plate as a switch hitter, but his production really tapered off down the stretch, and he showed more swing and miss than you typically want to see from a college hitter selected in the Top 5.

The pick of Hagen Smith signals that despite the need to inject some hitting talent into the farm system, the decision-makers opted for the “take the best player available” approach. The White Sox leaned into their recent LHP success and further invested in Brian Bannister with a player that could be in the starting rotation as soon as next season.

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Featured Image via Gunnar Rathbun/ Arkansas Athletics