Opening Day is a special time of year for most baseball players. There’s the pageantry, the hope of a new season and a fresh start that can be a joyous occasion, even for someone that’s done it many times.
But for at least one member of the Pirates bullpen, this year’s Opening Day had a good bit more meaning than just the start of a new baseball season.
For left-handed reliever Josh Smoker, it was his second time lining up on the first day of the season, having done the same thing with the Mets last year. It’s not going to be any less sweet for the well-traveled Smoker, who took a long road to becoming a major-league regular.
Smoker was a first-round draft pick of the Washington Nationals in 2007 out of Calhoun High School and had a tough adjustment to professional ball. He dealt with bone spurs in his throwing shoulder and was limited to 11 starts in his first full season in 2008 and nine in 2009.
Moved to the bullpen in 2010, Smoker started to have some success, and in 2011 he posed a 2.31 ERA with High-A Potomac. In 2012 he pitched just six games before having surgery for a torn labrum, and he missed the entire 2013 season. That year, he was also released by the Nationals, making him a free agent as he returned from injury.
There weren’t exactly a lot of suitors. In 2014, Smoker didn’t get a single offer from organized baseball and spent the year with the Rockford Aviators of the Frontier League, playing the likes of the Washington Wild Things. He thought he was headed back there for 2015, but a tryout with the New York Mets turned things around and Smoker ended up not just back in organized baseball, but thrived. He moved all the way up to Double-A in 2015 and made his MLB debut with the Mets in 2016.
In 2017, he made the Opening Day roster for the first time in his career, but an old foe resurfaced to sidetrack him again: his shoulder. A June trip to the disabled list sidetracked Smoker’s season, and more worrisome, Smoker and the Mets began to realize that his oft-utilized split-finger fastball might be part of the problem.
Smoker started out the 2017 season throwing his split-finger about 22 percent of the time. By the end of it, it was down to nine percent, with his curveball climbing to 39 percent of his offerings.
This season, Smoker has swapped out the heavy use of the split-finger in exchange for a slider that he feels can offer the same middle-range velocity and movement in between his fastball and curveball.
“My slider is where I want it to be,” Smoker said before breaking camp. “That’s what I worked on all this offseason, was to improve my slider. I think I accomplished that. … The best it’s ever felt. I’m really, really happy with it. That has kind of always been my weakness.”
Armed with some more weapons in his arsenal and a four-pitch mix, Pirates pitching coach Ray Searage wants Smoker to be more aggressive.
“He shows flashes of being a consistent left-handed reliever,” Searage said. “There’s a lot of deep counts that he gets into. We had a serious talk. I told him, ‘You’ve got the weapons to get people out, but you’re behind in the count all the time and you’re treading water when you’re facing these guys. You go in there and throw strike one, boom. I showed him the numbers. When hitters get 0-1 to 1-0, it’s a vast difference. It’s still a work in process, but there’s something to work with there. There’s tools. There’s weapons.”
That message has been received loud and clear by Smoker.
“Stop trying to nibble,” he summarized. “Trust my stuff. I have good stuff and I just have to go after guys. … Command-wise, I’m definitely really happy with that. That’s always been my issue in the past, command. I’m really happy with how I came into camp and commanded both sides of the plate.”
Coming into the spring, getting traded from the Mets to the Pirates while focusing on a new pitch and joining a bullpen with a multitude of different players trying to make the MLB club made Smoker something of a long shot. The fact that he still has an option year left as a holdover from when the Nationals cut him instead of paying his salary over rehab only added to that factor. But Smoker came into camp with confidence that he could make the team.
“You don’t know until they actually tell you, but I kind of had a feeling it was going to happen,” he said.
After learning he’d made the team, Smoker called his parents, but said that his dad was so emotional, he had to cut off the conversation short. Smoker then called his wife, Nicole, a special education teacher in Georgia.
“She was in the middle of class, so you could hear her students in the background,” Smoker said. “That was cool. They knew what the call was for. She kept them in check with everything that’s going on with me. I’ve said it from day one, my parents and my wife, everything I’ve been through, they’ve been through, too. Whenever I had my shoulder surgeries, they were hurting just as much as I was. As sweet as it is for me, they’re having the same feeling as me. I’m just glad they get to experience it with me.”
From his family’s Georgia roots, to his wife’s classroom, to the nine minor-league stops he made along the way, Smoker has made a lot of fans on the way to becoming an MLB regular. With new weapons and a new attitude, he’s hoping that fanbase will be cheering for the Pirates for a while to come.
