A Walk in the Park: Hagen Smith Went First, and Chicago's Plan Held in Houston
By Jess Henderson ·
Hagen Smith threw 38 pitches under the closed roof at Daikin Park on Tuesday, and seven of the nine outs he recorded came on the ground. The first White Sox playoff game in five years went to a rookie left-hander who had never pitched more than three innings in a major league game. Three innings is what he gave them: two hits, no walks, no runs. Chicago beat the Astros 6-3 in Game 1 of the AL Wild Card Series and leads the best-of-three 1-0.
Both clubs had planned a bullpen game. The White Sox used an opener or bullpen game an MLB-leading 31 times this year, James Fegan of the Chicago Sun-Times reported. "If we can get higher end two, three-inning outings from some of these guys, we're going to lean in that direction," general manager Chris Getz told him. Houston opened with AJ Blubaugh, a rookie right-hander.
The part of the plan with a name on it was Yordan Alvarez. He led the American League in average, on-base percentage and slugging (.316/.432/.601), and the White Sox had mostly declined to pitch to him during the season, walking him at a 27.6 percent clip, per Fegan. Smith had held left-handed hitters to a .194 average. "When you looked at that, plus just the environment, who is going to be able to handle this moment, plus the quality of pitcher that we wanted, Hagen was the choice," Will Venable told Matt Kawahara of the Houston Chronicle before the game.
Smith started Alvarez in the first inning with a cutter for a called strike, then a slider he swung through, then another slider he grounded to second. In the third, Cam Smith hit a 110 mph single, Taylor Trammell bunted him to second, and Jeremy Peña's lineout moved him to third with two outs. Alvarez swung at the first pitch, a slider, and grounded to third. Chicago never walked him. Three of his four trips came against left-handers, and all three ended in groundouts. His only hit was an eighth-inning single off right-hander Grant Taylor.
The White Sox took Smith fifth overall out of Arkansas in 2024. As a junior there he struck out 161 hitters in 84 innings, a school record, including 17 Oregon State hitters over six innings on 78 pitches at Globe Life Field. Before that, as a senior in Bullard, Texas, he threw seven no-hitters, tying a Texas high school record. A left shoulder impingement cost him about a month at Triple-A Charlotte this summer. He debuted Aug. 9 against Cleveland, coming in after a rain delay of 2 hours and 23 minutes. "I didn't know I was going in till about an hour into the delay," he told Jeff Agrest of the Sun-Times. "I was like, 'Sounds good to me.'" He finished the regular season with a 1.29 ERA and 41 strikeouts in 28 innings over 18 games, 15 of them scoreless.
Walks have been the one thing to watch with him. He issued 16 in those 28 innings, and Venable said after the debut, per Agrest, "If he's in the zone, he's going to be really hard to deal with." On Tuesday, 28 of his 38 pitches were strikes. I wrote those two numbers in my journal, under a reminder to buy coffee filters, and drew a box around them.
Houston's version of the plan lasted two outs. Blubaugh threw 27 pitches, 13 for strikes, and walked three of the five batters he faced. Chicago scored in the first without a hit, on Christian Walker's throwing error and a Munetaka Murakami sacrifice fly. Bryan King gave up four hits in the second, including Sam Antonacci's two-run single. Colson Montgomery, batting ninth for the first time all year after hitting .099 in September, led off the fourth with a 432-foot home run off the batter's eye. Two more runs came on an infield single and a wild pitch. Houston used eight pitchers. Chicago used five.
After Smith, Jordan Hicks retired all four hitters he faced and got the win, Sean Newcomb gave up a two-run pinch-hit homer to Nelson Velázquez, and David Sandlin got four outs. Taylor took the last seven, striking out five on a major league career-high 54 pitches. In the eighth, after a Miguel Vargas throwing error let Peña score, Taylor froze Yainer Diaz, the tying run, with a full-count curveball. Venable's word for it, to Fegan afterward, was "Heroic."
Game 1 winners have taken 15 of the 16 best-of-three Wild Card Series since the format began in 2022, the Chronicle's Greg Rajan noted. Game 2 is Wednesday at 4 p.m. CT, Sean Burke against Hunter Brown. The last White Sox playoff win before this one came on Oct. 10, 2021, in a Division Series against the same Astros.
Smith's longest major league outing is still three innings. He has now thrown that many twice, and the second time, Alvarez hit the ball on the ground both times he saw him.