Arkansas pitching coach Matt Hobbs has had a couple of a-ha moments with fifth overall pick Hagen Smith. Let's start with the first, when he saw him as a high school sophomore, facing another player who was already committed to the Razorbacks.
"We're watching him throw and are like, 'This guy is a slam-dunk Friday night starter in the SEC,'" Hobbs said by phone. "His deception and his ability to spin the baseball, get swings and misses in the zone on his fastball. Even though it was a different heater than he throws currently, he was still getting swings and misses inside the strike zone with his fastball. And I always think that matters a lot."
Smith was already committed to Oklahoma State, but reopened his recruiting process when the assistant who had signed him left the staff. Hobbs didn't waste a moment.
"We just tried to recruit the heck out of him as soon as he became available."
The voracious optimism required some dreaming.
Smith could occasionally hit 96 mph as a freshman, and could hold that velocity band for an inning or two as a sophomore. But even back at that high school game Hobbs was projecting what he'd look like at 225 pounds as much as admiring the present, and thinks Arkansas strength and conditioning coach Hunter Bell deserves as much credit as anyone for the left-hander averaging 95.7 mph on his fastball this past season and frequently popping higher.
The version of Smith that the White Sox drafted possesses the highly coveted low approach angle delivery from the left side, lending an "upshoot" feeling to his running and riding four-seam fastball. But before a huge addition in strength that peaked before his junior season, Smith's slot could drift even lower, with a long rotational arm action, where even "launching himself off the mound to grab the positions" in his delivery produced only average metrics in terms of fastball carry and raw spin.
Now, a stronger Smith sinks into his lower slot by riding on his back leg to load up power. His short, repeatable arm stroke that has built up so much optimism for starter-level command is the product of a cue Smith built up to "get on top of the ball" and produce more traditional four-seam backspin. Hobbs grants that the 16-17 inches of carry and 12-13 inches of arm side run that Smith now produces with his fastball is not too uncommon, but the way it presents to hitters is.
"To throw it at a 5-foot-6 release height with a width and approach angle that's below 5, with spin that's 2400 RPM and a fastball that reaches 100 mph -- not that he throws 100 mph every pitch certainly, but it reaches 100 mph -- that I've never seen before." Hobbs said. "He throws from the extreme side of the [first base] rubber as a left-hander, which means right-handers are going to give up on the pitch away and it's going to be a takeoff heater up and away from them. And also the fastball that's starting away from them that cuts into the glove side of the righty is like, impossible unless you're cheating in for it. Only time we really saw that pitch get hit was in a count where you're throwing lots of sliders."
What a segue, since Smith's sweeping slider is the thing that's truly weird, and the product of trial and error rather straightforward pitch design.
"Instead of the top of the seam, he's on the skin of the ball and his thumb has moved toward his index finger. Instead of being under the ball and being on a seam and spinning it off of the seam, he spins it off the skin with his thumb more toward his index finger and he just throws the top of the ball. In his brain, that's what he's thinking is just 'rip through the top of the ball,' and it went from a pitch he'd throw 78 mph sometimes to, well the slider itself was up to 89 mph this year. Some of that is just strength, but he's got more depth, he's got more side to side. It's got a steeper approach so it's coming from a weird, tough angle to hit, and he doesn't have to manipulate his slot at all to get there."
Hobbs concedes "a slider is a slider to a certain extent," but frequently gets feedback that due to the combination of Smith's low slot, short stroke and extreme crossfire angle from the first base side of the rubber, hitters never feel like they see him particularly well. And while a slider is a slider, Hobbs concedes that he's not sure how this one actually works, and discouraged -- or in case he wasn't joking, banned -- Smith from showing the grip to other pitchers on a talent-rich Arkansas pitching staff.
"Please don't explain this to anybody else. I don't want our guys to throw this pitch because I don't think it would work for anybody but him."
While such an atypical arsenal and arm slot gives Hagen Smith exactly the sort of unique look that teams crave from pitchers these days, it would suggest that refining his changeup or adding a cutter won't be such a turnkey process -- not that Garrett Crochet's was either. Luckily, Smith has already started.
The 161 strikeouts in 84 innings that Smith produced in his junior season did plenty to build his resume. But it came after Smith largely did not pitch in the fall so that he could work on his changeup. Originally thrown as a splitter, Smith added a finger to his grip to produce more traditional changeup metrics, and Hobbs' central critique of the pitch as is, is that it needs be in the strike zone more to become something Smith uses to same-handed hitters.
Smith's current cutter achieves the central goal of mirroring his slider's horizontal sweep and staying up just a bit higher, and being thrown a bit harder. Hobbs just envisions that the best version of the pitch will be thrown harder and creep into the low-90s, carry a bit better in the strike zone, and become something that plays off his fastball rather just getting hitters to swing under it when they're sitting on sliders.
"And when I say this stuff, these aren't criticisms of the kid," Hobbs said. "I'm just saying what has to get better. I mean, Paul Skenes had to add a pitch. He didn't throw a splinker in college. If he needs to add a pitch, then everybody needs to add a pitch."
Just as Crochet won't go beyond fastball-cutter until he needs to against major leaguers, Hagen Smith did not give SEC hitters extra looks at a larger arsenal either. But the comforting notion is that as much time as Hobbs spent during this interview reading off Smith's metrics off his laptop and explaining how they presented to overmatched hitters from his unique release point, he's already seen his protege ratchet up to the higher intensity pro ball will demand.
Fellow top picks Travis Bazzana, Jac Caglianone and Braden Montgomery combined to go 0-for-9 with six strikeouts against Smith this past season, with the latter coming as Smith struck out 14 in six scoreless innings in front of a raucous Texas A&M crowd in his home state.
"Hagen turns it on when it's time to turn it on," Hobbs said. "He's got a gear that he can just shift into that can end an inning. If you want to know an incredible statistic about Hagen this year is he had exactly 84 innings pitched, it's because he never threw a third of an inning. He never came out of a game in the middle of an inning. Not one time all season. I just knew he could get out of it. We never wondered whether or not there was a better option in the bullpen. And that's not because we didn't have good pitching. We led the country in just about everything you can on the mound."
Hobbs coached Golden Spikes winner Kevin Kopps a few years back, as well as previous White Sox second-round pick Peyton Pallette. He expected four other members of his pitching staff to get selected through Day 2 of the draft. Yet he wastes no time hesitating to say that Hagen Smith is the best pitcher he's ever coached, and his other a-ha moment was realizing that was probably the case before this past season ever started.
"We were in a bullpen in October and he's just finishing out the fall because we were getting ready to have him throw one inning," Hobbs began. "It's me, him and a catcher, and our analytics guy was in there and our video coordinator was in there because that's just who's in there when he throws bullpens. The last three fastballs he threw were 97, 97, 98 mph and we were all like, 'Oh this is going to be a little bit different this season.' Then he goes out and faces hitters a week later and it's 99-100 mph for an inning with an 88 mph slider and he struck out three hitters on 11 pitches.
"You start looking at him and think how many other pitchers in the country can do what he just did. The [Chase] Burns kid is up there, he can do that. Outside of him, maybe [Trey] Yesavage is good. But there's no left-handed pitcher that can do that. There's nobody in the draft that does what he does left-handed. Well, how many times does the best left-handed pitcher in college that we know can perform go outside of the top 15 picks? Never."
As a side note, Hobbs offered unprompted that Sox third-round selection Blake Larson was a good pick, and someone he really liked as a lefty who was sitting mid-90s and could already reliably throw strikes at his age. Arkansas was interested prior to Larson committing to TCU.
