Shane Smith is an iffy All-Star, but still a hell of a Rule 5 pick

Getting tagged for five runs in a loss to the MLB-worst Rockies prompts a lot of questions.

Is Shane Smith wearing down as he approaches his single-season career-high in innings? Does he need more breaks, which the eventual return of Davis Martin might accommodate for a time? Or does he need fewer disruptions to his routine, since he's noted that figuring out how to handle the extra days is a learning experience of its own? Should he finish the season in the bullpen? Is he an American League All-Star?

Turns out that last one is no longer up for debate.

Smith was named to the American League All-Star team on Sunday, joining Dan Uggla as the only players to earn an invite to the Midsummer Classic for the same season they were added as a Rule 5 pick, and becoming the first rookie pitcher to earn the honor in White Sox history. He is, unsurprisingly, the club's sole representative.

The White Sox's press release on the matter spends a lot of time focusing on the All-Star caliber nature of Smith's first 13 big league starts -- 68.1 IP, 18 ER, 27 BB, 64 K -- and we are just five years removed from Cy Young awards getting handed out for similar workloads. But going from a 2.37 ERA to a 4.20 -- an elite mark to a below-average one -- as Smith has over the course of four starts prompts re-examination of whether the wild early success was legit, and if it will prove sustainable in the long run, which it will need to be in order to be part of a Sox playoff team.

And that's a notable departure, since most of the process of adding Smith via the Rule 5 draft has been defined by the normal questions being made irrelevant.

"When you have a Rule 5 guy, you're trying to see 'where does he fit?'" said pitching coach Ethan Katz.

"With any Rule 5 pick, to get a guy who's pitching as a quality starter fits the goal of any team," said senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister.

Neither of the previous two pitchers the White Sox selected in the Rule 5, Nick Avila and Shane Drohan, made the Opening Day roster out of spring camp. Dylan Covey made the team back in 2017 and posted miserable numbers as part of three rebuilding Sox teams, and even that represents more staying power than most. In any other year, Mike Vasil pitching to a 2.59 ERA in roles of slowly graduating significance would be one of, if not the biggest Rule 5 success story across the league.

That Smith's slider is getting progressively harder and seemingly morphing into a cutter that struggles to miss bats, that there's uncertainty over the best way to use him after months of him looking like easily the best starter on the team, or that he's getting All-Star honors when he's been pitching like a rookie of recent, all these issues fit the inverted nature of Smith's progression, where he flew past the hurdles the White Sox expected to grapple with, even if time is revealing that maybe they just got pushed further down the road for half a season.

For example, Smith's changeup seems like it needs a tweak to return to reliable performance. But the Sox originally expected to have to build it from the ground up, only to find that Smith had not only discovered the grip that worked for him over the winter, but looked to have mastered by the first day at Camelback Ranch.

"He had already hit on a one-seam, seam-effects changeup grip," Bannister said of meeting Smith in spring. "He threw it in the first pen, and I was like, 'Well that's what I was going to work on with you [laughs]', so give him all the credit."

"I was lightly watching because there were other bullpens being thrown, but when it was finished, Banny came up to me and he said, 'We got this one right,'" said Chris Getz. "There were things we were hoping to get to tap into, but he took to it extremely quickly."

Getz has championed the Smith selection last December as an endorsement of the White Sox's process as a collective whole, even if the newly created department of acquisition means that its director, Matt Grabowski, is a new name that gets frequently referenced now. There were surely plenty of names bandied about earlier in the research phase, but Getz said by the options for the first overall Rule 5 selection were being submitted to him for approval, Smith was the one.

"We had confidence in the pick because of the conviction in so many different people; it was almost a consensus across the board," Getz said. "More than anything, it was his athleticism, the way that he moved down the mound."

It's obviously rare, new and encouraging that the White Sox found value by plucking Smith from the Brewers; both an organization that commands respect across the league for how they reliably find ways to prevent runs, and an organization the Sox seem eager to hire from at any reasonable opportunity. But there's an almost guilty smirk that comes across the faces of White Sox officials in private conversations when it's suggested that they got the better of the brain trust in Milwaukee.

Because sure, they could determine that Smith's extreme supinator profile mapped well for a seam-effects changeup, but not know how quickly he'd take to it. They could like his build and athleticism, but there's a few steps between that and Smith hitting 99 mph in his second spring training start. Prior to taking him in the Rule 5 draft, the Sox were more working off their observations of traits that boded well, or in the case of Smith's fastball shape, banking on there being more to it than could be seen via pitch data.

"It was actually pretty insane how well his fastball performed, even though off the cuff, the metrics don't scream that this is a really good fastball," Bannister said. "You just kind of know something's there, your spidey sense goes off. I love the concept of barrel-chested pitchers; guys who have bigger torsos like Bartolo [Colon], [Curt] Schilling, [Roger] Clemens. It's a thing, guys that hide the ball. And I also like guys that have natural counter-rotation in their delivery. You see that both in Smith and Grant Taylor, and in Paul Skenes; halfway through their stride, they almost rotate backwards.

"It says their hips load rotationally, it's like winding a spring. But also it helps them hide the ball a bit longer and it tends to lead to a little more extension. There were just all these cool elements."

Based on the traits they liked and the state of the White Sox roster, taking a shot on Smith made sense for them. And based on the state of the Brewers' 40-man and what Smith had shown through last December, he wasn't enough of a sure thing for them, and the Sox aspire to one day be in a similar position where they're not compelled to so deeply explore the rough in a search for diamonds.

"When you looked at him and saw the performance and the swings, you knew there was a lot there, and you knew the delivery played a big factor in the deception that it created," Katz said. "But also trying to project what a Double-A hitter would chase versus what a big league hitter might need to see, you knew there were some pieces that needed to be changed a little bit, and added."

Smith should have another start before the break, and the Guardians look as accommodating as the Rockies should have been for making the numbers under his All-Star chyron looking more flattering. Too much of American society is built around how impressive something looks in a particular moment of televised content, and Smith's All-Star case is certainly not going to be exempted.

But we like to walk and chew gum at the same time in these parts. And in an admonishing tone, we can note that Smith's being the Sox All-Star rep is reflective of a team that is playing better baseball than last year, but has yet to build out the core of future good teams with future stars that can be relied upon. And at the same time, remark that as quickly as Smith has gone from a no-doubt All-Star to a shaky case for selection, it's only slightly faster than his progression from a projection bet to an apparent heist from a model organization.

As it turns out, there's another gap to navigate between Rule 5 heist and reliable mid-rotation starter, and for some reason American League All-Star is sitting in the middle of it. But if Smith's 2025 progression had happened in any kind of normal order, it wouldn't have been as much fun to watch in a White Sox season that needed some surprises in order to be interesting.