The Sun Comes Up Tomorrow

MLB All-Star pitcher Shane Smith '18 triumphs for the White Sox after years of setbacks. 

In the spring of 2017, pitcher Shane Smith '18 and his Govs baseball teammates had sky-high expectations for their season. The year before, they’d captured the ISL championship, and Smith—already a rising star—had been named the ISL’s Pitcher of the Year. The team was hungry for a repeat.

But the season unraveled, and their championship chances faded. Smith, intensely competitive and wired to win, kept glancing toward Head Coach Mike Kinnealey, known as "Coach K", waiting for him to bark at his players. Instead, Coach K calmly delivered the same line he’d offered all year: “The sun’s going to come out tomorrow. This is not the end of the world.”

“At the time, I couldn’t believe it,” Smith says now. “I was thinking, ‘Don’t you have more than that to kick our butts into shape?’ But now I take ‘the sun’s going to come up tomorrow’ more to heart than I ever did.”

Nearly a decade later, Smith has ridden a roller coaster that would have flattened most athletes: shoulder surgery, Tommy John surgery, COVID cancellations, years in the minors, and finally—against staggering odds—an MLB All-Star season with the Chicago White Sox. Through every setback, Coach K’s simple refrain became his mental reset button.

Of his optimistic philosophy, Coach K says, “With teams, it’s almost like we’re a body, and we’re digesting all of this stuff, including games that went wrong, and we have to learn to flush it, otherwise it impacts the next game.”

For Smith, being able to “flush” the haywire pitches or the disappointing outcomes is what elevates him as an elite athlete and gives him longevity in the sport. 

When I’m upset about a start and need to get over it quickly, I think, ‘the sun’s going to come up tomorrow.’ Learn from it, dump it, and get back to work.

“In the big leagues, you pitch, you wake up—whether your performance was good or bad—and within three or four days you’re pitching again, maybe in a different city, potentially against a different opponent,” he says. “When I’m upset about a start and need to get over it quickly, I think, ‘the sun’s going to come up tomorrow.’ Learn from it, dump it, and get back to work.”

A Kid Who Slept With a Bat

Growing up in Danvers, Massachusetts, Smith wrestled and played lacrosse, hockey, basketball, and football. At night, he sometimes slept with a baseball bat or football tucked beside him.

“Playing sports was my favorite thing in the world,” he says. “I just wanted to be outside.”

Sports were also a way for Smith to bond with his father, who has been one of his biggest supporters. “My dad’s a huge part of my life, both athletically and personally,” he says. 

Smith turned to Govs for more athletic opportunities and to compete alongside other formidable athletes. “When I came to Govs, I realized that I wasn’t such a big fish after all,” he says. “I wasn’t the most athletic, or the strongest, or the fastest. I had to figure out how to be successful, which included putting in the work, like getting up to lift weights at six in the morning.” 

Coach K remembers Smith arriving at Govs “physically larger than most ninth graders, with a politeness, an earnestness, and a humility balanced with a real fiery competitive streak,” noting that “coaching him was a pleasure.” 

His freshman year, Smith was a three-letter winner in football, basketball, and baseball, but his talent as a baseball pitcher began to outshine his other prospects. “The summer going into my sophomore year, I had a pretty good feeling I could play Division I baseball in college,” he recalls. 

In order to have a shot at Division I ball, Smith needed to improve his grades, and he was inspired by the student-athletes around him who were focused on the fields and in the classroom. 

“Govs was the best and most positive peer pressure that I'd ever experienced at the time,” Smith says. “I saw all these other athletes doing a ton of homework and going to the library for hours at a time, and I realized there was no reason I couldn’t do that, too. It kicked me into gear.” 

He recalls turning to his advisor, Ray Long '96, for support. Long, who also coached Smith in football, saw an immediate transformation academically. “He took the work ethic that he had in sports and applied it to the classroom,” he says. 

Smith would go on to captain both the football and baseball teams his junior and senior years, experiences that helped him develop his leadership skills. “I learned how to be coachable, how to be a good teammate, and how to lead,” he says. 

And his time at Govs had another lasting impact: “I’m still connected to the friends I made there,” he says. “Some of my best friends from Govs came out to see my MLB debut.”

Everything Goes Dark

Only, Smith almost didn’t have an MLB debut. He enrolled at Wake Forest University and pitched for the Demon Deacons. Then came the first blow: a shoulder injury that required surgery. His comeback season in 2020 evaporated when COVID shut down college baseball.

By his third year, Smith understood the stakes. “Your professional window is really around 21 or 22 years old,” he explains. “I went into that season working my butt off.”

He’d spent his summer training under the hot North Carolina sun, lifting, throwing, working out—repeat. “I was putting in my 10,000 hours of what it takes to master my craft and be as best as I could be,” he says. 

Smith felt at the top of his game, but in his third start of the year, with his family in the crowd, he blew out his elbow throwing a curveball, which required Tommy John surgery, a common over-use injury among elite baseball players. 

“The light at the end of the tunnel was bright, and then it went dark immediately,” he says. “That really broke me. I thought everything I've worked for in my life was now gone.”

The Smith family gathered around him, debating his options. He could return to Wake Forest, relinquishing his baseball dreams, or he could try to get drafted as a free agent—no bonus, no guarantees.

“I knew I’d get a plane ticket, a place to stay, and rehab,” he says. “But at least I’d have a foot in the door. I hadn’t shown anyone what I could do.”

As Smith hoped and waited to be drafted, he made plans to go back to college—and in fact was driving through rural Virginia on his way to Wake Forest with his parents when he received the call: “Do you want to come play with the Brewers?”

Two days later, in 2021, Smith was on a flight to Arizona. “It was a wild turn of events, and I approached it as ‘everything you do from now on is a gift and a blessing,’” he says. “Being given that second chance was like jet fuel, and I knew I had to make the most of it.”

One Pitch at a Time

Smith worked his way steadily through the Brewers’ system. By 2024, he was a starter at Double-A. Midseason, he was promoted to Triple-A—and he kept dominating. That December, he learned he’d been selected first overall in the Rule 5 draft by the Chicago White Sox.

Here’s how the Rule 5 draft works: if a team leaves an eligible minor leaguer off its 40-man roster, another club may select him. In Smith’s case, the White Sox did—and were then required to keep him on their active MLB roster for the entire season.

It was the moment Smith had been waiting for, and he remembers watching the draft surrounded by his family. “I was the first name called, and there was this eruption of emotion and relief and joy and recognition that I hadn't received in a long time,” Smith says. “We were all crying and hugging each other.”

He told Coach K that he was building his MLB rookie season one pitch at a time. “Not one day at a time, but one pitch at a time,” Coach K recalls. “He said, ‘I'm going to execute everything as best I can, and then I'm going to do it again, pitch by pitch by pitch by pitch.’” 

It worked. Smith excelled as an aggressive, starting pitcher with the White Sox, finishing with a 3.81 ERA over 29 starts, leading the team with 146 1/3 innings pitched and 145 strikeouts.

Ray Long wasn’t surprised by Smith’s ability to surmount the odds. “It makes sense that he's been able to have the success he’s had even with all the setbacks, because he's not ‘woe is me,’” he says. “That’s just not how he’s built.” 

In another wild turn of events, Smith was named to the MLB All-Star team, the first White Sox rookie to receive the honor. “Two years earlier, I was coaching Govs basketball, working at a bar, and living at home on a minor league salary,” he says. “My life looked nothing like this.” He emphasizes that above all else, he is “grateful for the support I’ve had over the years.”

An All-Star, But “Still Shane”

In January, Smith returned to Govs to speak with current athletes and catch up with his former coaches and mentors, enjoying giving back to the school that gave him so much. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without Govs,” he says. 

Even in the midst of his meteoric rise, Coach K says Smith is “still Shane,” with the same balance of humility and confidence he had at Govs—and he’s still answering text messages. “I congratulated him the day he struck out Shohei Ohtani twice against the Dodgers, and he wrote back to ask, ‘What are you up to these days?’ That’s pretty generous.” 

For athletes at Govs, Long says Smith’s story is both inspiring and grounding. “Our students can see that he’s a literal All-Star, but he’s also a regular person who sat in math class and played on the same baseball field as them,” Long says. “It shows them what’s possible if they work hard enough.”

A regular person who’s also gearing up for his second MLB season. Smith doesn’t have predictions; all he can do is show up and give it his all, like he’s done day after day, year after year. 

Baseball is a game of failures, but every time I’m given the ball, if I go out and do my job and compete and make pitches, more often than not, things are going to go my way.