The post 3 White Sox arms show signs of pitching development breakthrough appeared first on Sox On 35th.
The following is a guest post submitted by Matthew Mueller. All statistics are accurate as of July 21, 2025.
We’re halfway through the 2025 season, and, in my estimation, life is pretty good for the White Sox.
They are: “normal bad.” No, 37-66 does not deserve a banner. But merely avoiding, as it appears the team is doing, an unthinkable back-to-back run of world-historically bad baseball seasons makes me happy, and it probably makes Chris Getz happy too. What is Getz (and I, as well) not pleased about, though?
The bats.
For a team that appears to be pulling itself out of the mud, the White Sox currently rank in the bottom five in just about any team batting stat that matters. Whether you look at OPS, SLG, AVG, or you really like FanGraphs and look at ISO, wOBA, or EV90, this is one of the two or three worst-hitting teams in baseball (although hard hit rate and barrel rate tell a slightly different story). Despite a strong showing for the offense out of the gate in the second half, the strongest force dragging this team towards eventual respectability has been, aptly, respectable pitching.
The staff ranks 20th in the league in ERA (bad, but not truly terrible), 23rd in both batting average against and hard hit rate allowed, and 20th as a staff in RA9-WAR. Of course, I must use RA9-WAR here because the peripheral stats that input fWAR hate this walk-happy band of soft tossers. In any case, through preseason blowouts from, if I’m counting correctly, four guys expected to contribute to this staff and missed time from the likes of Jonathan Cannon, Davis Martin, and Martin Perez, this team continues to pitch perfectly okay.
As with any young team, there have been rather extreme highs and lows – bad weeks and great months. In this piece, I want to look at the last calendar months (ish) of three starters: Sean Burke, Shane Smith, and Adrian Houser. The performances of these three starters, in one way or another, are indicative of different areas of organizational pitching development within the Getz-Bannister-Katz braintrust.
In assessing their performance in this window of time, I’m going to try to discern 1) some changes (if any) they’ve made or experienced to achieve this form, 2) if this current level of play is more or less indicative of their true talent as compared to previously demonstrated results, and 3) how their performance fits into the overarching goals of the organization’s pitching development and deployment.
Sean Burke
It’s been quite the calendar year for Burke. After surprisingly shoving for three starts to end the 2024 campaign, the hype reached unsustainable levels when Burke was announced as the Opening Day starter for the Sox in March of this year. For every reply of “who?” under Burke’s christening post from the team’s social media account, there were somehow what seemed like three equally condescending slick pitchbot spreadsheets that empirically proved that, ‘no, you’re the stupid one for not watching three White Sox games last September.’ I was just excited that my Opening Day tickets purchased far in advance were going to let me see a pitcher I was excited about, rather than what’s left of Martin Perez. The results, however, have been inconsistent.
If you’ve watched any White Sox ball this year, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what a bad Burke game looks like (admittedly, you’ll kind of know what the good ones look like, too). That plus-extenstion four seamer that was to be his lodestone skill can’t find pay dirt (truthfully, neither can the sinker or changeup); the pitch count elevates, and then that please-be-a-strike slider he pulls out in a 3-1 count gets swatted into the bleachers.
In April, Burke ran a 6.00 ERA. More importantly, that desirable swing and miss stuff that he’s shown throughout his professional career was yielding him just a 16 K% – good for the bottom 30 among the 130 pitchers with a minimum of 20 IP during the month. However, he’s been righting the ship since then, and his June performances gave us both some solid results (4.29 ERA) and some peripheral indicators of further success (3.61 FIP, 25.6 K%, 6.7 BB%).
How’d he do it? Well, it has a lot to do with his curveball.
Burke loves his get-me-over curveball. Thus far in 2025, the right-hander is 22nd in the league in curveball usage. Looking at his June results, the curveball spiked to a dominant 43.6% whiff rate – all while he upped the pitch’s usage to nearly 30% – his second-most thrown pitch after his four-seamer.
Leaguewide, curveballs are common pitches for starters against opposite-handed batters due to their relatively straight finish. This is true of Burke as well – his curve has more depth than average and lacks much horizontal break. However, the month of June saw Burke begin using the curve 11 percentage points more (up to 22.8%) against same-handed bats, sacrificing four-seam and slider usage. June saw Burke register a 40% whiff rate against righties with the pitch.
Burke, however, is a lot more than a single arsenal tweak away from unlocking that mid-rotation upside that lies among his higher-end outcomes. First, there’s the obvious elephant in the room: his command. Even beyond his double-digit walk rate (which can be managed when he’s running a mid-20s strikeout rate), Burke’s averaged roughly 17 pitches per inning this year. Although demonstrating, at times, the ability to work deep into games (see June 5th against the Tigers), pitch counts are Burke’s enemy.
Another stumbling block for Burke is his reverse splits. Due, at least in part, to the relative ineffectiveness of his slider (righties and lefties are both running .350+ wOBAs against the pitch), righties hit him harder than lefties, slugging 40 points higher, and making hard contact six percentage points more often than left-handed counterparts. With there being very little special about his slider, I would favor a tweak, already underway as of June, of pushing that usage down, possibly in favor of a sinker that has yielded solid results despite suboptimal characteristics in a small sample.
All in all, I see Burke’s recent success as a sign of tangible growth. Across the month, Burke, barring a blowup against the Astros, pitched admirably against three quality offenses, and one can point to visible changes he’s made in pitch utilization that perhaps contributed to that change in performance. I’ve appreciated the Sox’s patience with him. By not sending their 2021 third-round pick to Charlotte after his early-season woes, Burke’s been allowed to make adjustments and improve his results.
Ultimately, I think his starter upside is capped by his poor natural command and current inability to attack righties. However, at just 25, and having previously demonstrated an ability to adapt, maybe Burke has another gear yet.
Shane Smith
For stretches this season, Smith has looked like a guy you could give the ball to in the playoffs. The gem of the 2025 Rule 5 draft flashes a prototypical starter’s arsenal – headlined by his much-discussed kick change, which sits at 90 mph and features over three additional inches of vertical drop relative to the MLB average cambio. I’ll tell my future kids about Shane Smith’s May. 25.7 K%, .301 wOBA allowed, and an ERA of 3.28. Times, though, have been tough since.
With his start on June 17th, Smith began a four-start stretch of allowing five or more runs in each appearance. Has he hit a wall? Was he ever that good in the first place?
Whether or not Smith has hit a wall, physically or mentally, is indeed an important question here. Real Smith heads know that before being scooped by the Sox last December, his previous organization, the Milwaukee Brewers, was developing him as a reliever. As of today, Smith is set to surpass his highest-ever single-season innings mark within July. The possible physical toll of that workload increase has potentially been made manifest in his recent performance.
Of potential importance is the fact that in June, Smith lost around an inch of ride on his four-seam fastball. Despite good velocity, the subpar deadzone-y shape of Smith’s four-seamer makes it a so-so pitch. Any deterioration to the already vulnerable offering is noteworthy. The results potentially bear out this deterioration – left-handed hitters (whom Smith shows his four seamer to roughly 50% of the time) saw over a 100-point increase in xwOBA from May to June.
Another potential pain point for Smith is the deterioration of his changeup’s performance. The pitch has, within the half-inch, held the same shape throughout the year; however, Smith’s lost about 20% on the pitch’s whiff rate (down to 17%), and, importantly, its in-zone whiff rate has all but evaporated (sitting at 5%). Without changes to his pitch’s Swing%, Edge%, or Zone%, it seems to me as if Smith’s command of this pitch has left him, and he’s too often leaving the pitch in vulnerable parts of the zone.
So his four-seam shape is decaying, and his best secondary isn’t being located as consistently? I think this guy might be tired. The question of Smith’s potential fatigue came to a head in his last start against the Guardians. Going only three innings, surrendering two solo shots, and striking out five, Smith was abruptly removed. The theories are wide-ranging. This start’s proximity to the All-Star Game, which Smith participated in, is of note alongside the second-half usage patterns of another former White Sox starting pitcher who had never previously started professionally: Garrett Crochet. However, it’s worth noting that in three July starts, Smith’s arm angle dropped about a degree, and he’s lost RPMs on all of his pitches. To me, this screams fatigue.
Through it all, the blow-ups, the arsenal decay, and the evaporation of his once pristine ERA, Smith remains an out-and-out organizational win for the White Sox. You become a smart organization by figuring things out about players that other smart organizations failed to – and that’s happened here with Smith. Perhaps we will see the 2024 Crochet arc in the second half. Brian Bannister has spoken about preferring not to fully shut down pitchers in the past, and Smith seems like a good candidate for the three-and-dive plan.
It’ll be unpleasant in the short term, but I feel confident that 2026 Smith will look a lot more like that Pitching Ninja mainstay that we saw earlier this year (Since writing, Smith has, of course, been added to the 15-day IL with a mysterious injury – not exactly surprising for a guy that may need a break).
Adrian Houser
The exploits of Houser have escaped the small White Sox communities that would typically be the target audience for discussion of Burke’s curveball rate against righties or the induced vertical break on Smith’s four-seamer. The veteran is considered one of the more desirable starting pitchers available at this year’s deadline. However, with an 82.0 LOB%, a K-BB% of about 10%, and a HR/FB under 4%, it’s an open secret that he’s pitching somewhat over his skis. The question is then, is there anything, beyond luck, that has allowed Houser to unlock this new form, and what do those changes say about how the White Sox can improve the stocks of veteran pitchers?
Since June 1st, Houser has pitched to a 2.34 ERA and 3.07 FIP. The last time we saw Houser in 2024 with the Mets, he seemed unlikely to reach this early career ever again. In that stint in Queens, he ran an ERA near 6.00 and a double-digit walk rate. What has Houser done to recapture what made him a valuable pitcher on those early 2020s Brewers squads?
Well, for one thing, since coming to the Sox, Houser’s throwing every pitch in his arsenal as hard or harder than he’s ever thrown it previously. Maybe he’s aggrieved about being DFA’d, maybe he’s made some Bannisterian mechanical tweak (he’s added over an inch of extension), or maybe he’s simply most comfortable pitching for teams with anemic offenses. In any case, Houser already has some outlier pitch shapes.
His sinker, for instance, has more depth than average and, along with his four seamer, has a great deal more run than league-average offerings. With the added velo, Houser is now running the highest Stuff+, via FanGraphs, of his career on his four seamer and changeup (92 and 96, respectively) and the second highest such mark in his career on his sinker (102).
Additionally, Houser has made some pretty significant arsenal tweaks, adopting a very White Sox-y repertoire that involves pushing slider and four-seam usage down to accommodate greater usage for his curveball and change. His arsenal now more closely resembles that which he threw in his career year in 2021 with Milwaukee, albeit with more changeups – moves that one would typically implement to improve demonstrated weakness against lefties. Last year, lefties ran a 0.384 xwOBA off Houser. Now, his 0.355 xwOBA is bang on his career average versus opposite-handed hitters.
These changes, and the surface numbers that they undergird, loom large in the mind of Sox fans. However, it’s worth remembering that when that lowercase “breaking” from Jeff Passan comes across your ticker, everyone can see his 4.03 xFIP and 44% hard hit rate as well. Right now, Houser throws a fastball at 95 mph or slower down the middle 17.2% of the time, and is 14th out of 263 pitchers in the rate at which those fastballs get turned into outs. In other words, the ERA says “stud,” and just about any other statistical indicator says “Bailey Falter.”
No, Houser will not return top-100 prospect type value. He is, after all, an expiring contract. The dullest minds on White Sox Twitter will react to the forthcoming Houser trade much as they did to last year’s Fedde trade, I presume. Ultimately, though, Houser represents far more than the soon-to-be 18th-ranked prospect in the organization. He’s another link in the chain of left-for-dead pitchers who have come to this god awful team and, at the very least, recaptured some of what made them valuable in the first place.
What’s next?
One of the cruelties, among many, of White Sox baseball in the past few seasons has been how short the season really is. Like in my more half-hearted Out of The Park saves, with almost every nook and cranny known about this team by July 21st, we’re now collectively sim-ing to that July 31st trade deadline. And after that, sim to fall league, sim to free agency, and then it’s late March all over again. Once the trade returns are fully metabolized and the new additions receive their minor league assignments, we’re left with about 50 more games of bad baseball, though this time, there’s no more morbid curiosity regarding unkind historical records. So what do we care about down the stretch?
For me, the single most interesting White Sox storyline to follow in the back half of this year will be the jockeying for position among young White Sox starters as they look forward to a far more crowded 2026 rotation. The combined pressures of Hagen Smith rounding into form, Noah Schultz (hopefully) resetting in Triple-A, Tanner McDougal banging down the door in Birmingham, and the looming returns of Drew Thorpe, Mason Adams, and Ky Bush are no doubt felt by a squad of young starting pitchers that are hopefully aware of the growing precarity of their once-safe jobs.
The labor market, my friends, will continue to tighten, and if Smith never finds the changeup again, or Burke can never keep the walks down, or Jonathon Cannon continues to struggle with injury – are these guys in the 2026 rotation? Are they on the 2026 White Sox? Only time will tell. Trades, certainly, will solve some of these squeezes, but Bannister and Katz have demonstrated an ability to draw water (innings) out of the stone (veteran pitchers) on multiple occasions.
If 2026 brings with it a renewed interest among White Sox front office members in caring more about their win total than their draft position, some eggs will need to be broken. In these next two months of essentially meaningless baseball, perhaps you’ll pay more attention to the minor league squads and their new draftees. Maybe you’ll watch some old friends ride into the postseason on new teams. Or maybe you’ll get really into the WNBA.
Out of the corner of my eye, though, I’m going to keep checking Burke’s curveball rate.
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The post 3 White Sox arms show signs of pitching development breakthrough appeared first on Sox On 35th.