Cade Smith's journey from Opening Day limbo to Guardians postseason pitching priority

CLEVELAND — For five days, Cade Smith sat in limbo.

The week of Opening Day, the Cleveland Guardians had settled all but one roster spot. The front office weighed whether to fill the vacancy with Smith, a rookie, or with a veteran reliever squeezed out of another club’s bullpen competition. The latter option would help compensate for injuries to Trevor Stephan, Sam Hentges and James Karinchak.

About eight hours before the first pitch of the season, as Smith played cards with his siblings in a San Francisco hotel room, he learned he had made the roster. There would be no external addition. The Guardians opted for the untested kid who wanted to quit baseball in 11th grade, went undrafted, studied biology and pondered a career in medicine before giving pro ball a shot.

Now seven months later, the Guardians build their postseason pitching plans around him.

Before Smith flaunted baseball’s best fastball and before he became the first Cleveland reliever in a quarter-century to eclipse the 100-strikeout mark, he was a lanky high school junior in Abbotsford, British Columbia, who didn’t see eye to eye with his coach. He switched teams, made Canada’s junior national team and received his only scholarship offer, from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Smith spent his college years in Honolulu, but not until he got a white Toyota Echo his junior year did he occasionally ditch the textbooks for the beach. The summer of 2020, Smith went unselected in the pandemic-shortened five-round draft, but he signed with Cleveland, an organization boasting a reputation for prolific pitching development.

The Guardians fawned over Smith’s makeup, his willingness to embrace instruction and his ability to tackle adversity on the mound. The son of two teachers, Smith marveled at the feedback at his fingertips. He pored over TrackMan data and, as he progressed through the farm system, he added velocity, tweaked pitch shapes and refined his arsenal. He added a splitter that, this year, has proven essential to navigating his first 162-game slate. And he started racking up strikeouts at ridiculous rates.

The day before the 2024 opener, unsure if his season would begin at the Oakland Coliseum or with Triple-A St. Paul, Smith snapped photos on the infield in Oakland with his family. He hadn’t seen his parents or siblings in more than a year. His dad, Tim, underwent heart surgery last December, which restricted his ability to travel, and Smith had applied for U.S. citizenship and wasn’t permitted to trek home.

And yet, as he detailed the long-awaited reunion and the roster uncertainty, Smith remained rather stoic. If he was saddled with emotion or suffering from anxiety, he didn’t reveal the slightest hint of it.

“Cade’s kind of a robot,” Guardians pitcher Tanner Bibee said.

“He’ll show personality with the guys,” Fry said, before presenting a deadpan facial expression, “but it’s still just, ‘Ha. Ha.’”

That evenness, though, has fueled his standout rookie season. It’s why pitching coach Carl Willis stressed that while no starter wants to exit a game, it’s easier to accept when you see the 6-foot-5, 230-pound brute galloping through the bullpen door.

“It’s like, ‘OK, I’ll go to the dugout,’” Willis said.

It’s why, when catchers David Fry and Austin Hedges mimic manager Stephen Vogt and bench coach Craig Albernaz in the dugout before and during games, their impersonations often include bits about summoning Smith from the bullpen in the first couple innings. It’s their way to tease the coaches about their jobs being a breeze. Smith always makes them look smart when he jogs in from the bullpen and mops up any mess a previous pitcher created.

During the playoffs, Smith has trotted to the mound as early as the second inning, and not as some innings-eating long reliever, but as a reliable force who prevents a game from slipping away before the Guardians deploy the top arms from a bullpen that ranked at the top of the league’s ERA leaderboard.

Who would have forecast this rapid rise?

Well, anyone who watched his debut. With his family planted 13 rows behind the visitors dugout, Smith logged two scoreless innings against the Athletics. He struck out five. His teammates and coaches still reference that day to illustrate that there was no question that he would stick. No one was ruing the front office’s decision to skip out on an external addition.

Cade Smith, 95mph ⛽️ pic.twitter.com/pGCUrWQQzm

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) October 16, 2024

Of course, Smith conveyed more matter-of-factness after that outing (or any of them, really). He’s unflappable on the mound and unmoved off of it. When pitching for Team Canada in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, with Bo Naylor as his catcher, the U.S. was headed for a mercy-rule win, and the batterymates convened in the dugout. Smith outlined his preferred plan of attack for the next inning. Naylor reminded him there wasn’t going to be a next inning. But that’s the way Smith’s wired.

“He’s a machine,” said Erik Sabrowski, a fellow rookie Guardians reliever, “in a nice way.”

He certainly is one on the mound.

He’s one of 31 rookie relievers ever to strike out at least 100 batters. Of that group, he posted the fourth-lowest ERA (1.91). He was one of six relievers with 100 or more strikeouts this season, and his ERA is the lowest of the bunch by more than one-half run. Smith surrendered only one home run in 75 1/3 innings — to Seattle Mariners utilityman Dylan Moore, who posted a .687 OPS this year.

“I’ve never seen it,” Hedges said. “I’ve never seen it from a rookie, coming in that unfazed.”

Smith possesses the pure stuff and the fortitude to handle a late-inning assignment, but with closer Emmanuel Clase locking down the ninth, it allows Vogt to deploy Smith the way Terry Francona once sent Andrew Miller into the trenches whenever trouble arose.

Smith’s fastball rated as the most effective pitch in the sport in 2024, per Statcast, ahead of Chris Sale’s slider and Clase’s cutter. It averaged 96 mph, but with elite extension, it might as well be a marble zipping toward the plate at 106 mph. Smith said that until he reached pro ball and studied the metrics, he didn’t realize that perfecting his extension and release point could boost his arsenal. As the season unfolded, he solved some inconsistencies with his splitter. If hitters assume that power fastball is headed their way, he has no qualms about offering an 88 mph change of pace.

Hitters vs. Smith’s fastball: .174 average, .253 slugging percentage
Hitters vs. Smith’s splitter: .175 average, .228 slugging percentage

“If he didn’t have the best fastball in the world,” Hedges said, “you would see a lot more split-fingers, because this thing is just devastating. … Between him and Clase, I haven’t caught too many guys where you can pretty much tell the hitter what’s coming and it’s still probably going to go our way.”

Odds are, whichever external addition the Guardians would have added for Opening Day wouldn’t have fallen into that category.

“The fact that he’s a rookie,” Sabrowski said, “doesn’t make sense.”

(Photo of Cade Smith: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)