Cade Smith named AL Reliever of the Month after dominant May for Guardians

June 3: Cade Smith’s dominant May has earned him another major league honor.

Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that the Guardians closer has been named the American League Reliever of the Month for May, marking the second time in his career Smith has claimed the award after also winning in September of 2025.

Smith was nearly untouchable throughout the month, posting a 1.32 ERA across 13 appearances while converting all 13 of his save opportunities. The right-hander struck out 25 batters in just 13 2/3 innings, allowed only one walk and finished the month with a 0.73 WHIP and a .184 opponents’ batting average.

Here we go again with the Guardians having multiple names on a list consisting of some of the better pitchers in baseball this year. Cade Smith is quietly having one of the best seasons of any reliever this year.

After losing their closer last year, the Guardians’ bullpen hasn’t missed a beat since Smith took the job. Highlighted by his league-leading 24 saves to this point, there is no denying that he should be considered one of the best in baseball.

Despite simply being baptized by fire in the new role, Smith has dominated the new opportunity to a point where it does not look as if he is going to loosen the reins any time soon.

What makes this season that much more impressive is that he is doing this despite losing the feel for his fastball. After limiting opposing hitters to a .302 slugging percentage with a 37.6% hard-hit rate, he hasn’t had the same luck in 2026. Hitters are posting a .420 slug this year, doing so with a near 50% hard-hit rate.

The difference comes from the development of his splitter, which has held hitters to a .138 slugging percentage, generating a whiff rate of 50%.

As it currently stands, Smith ranks in the high-90th percentile in three key categories on Baseball Savant. His xERA (98th), whiff% (97th), and K% (99th) demonstrate his insane dominance over the rest of the league that should make it an easy decision to book his ticket to Philadelphia.    (Cristian Crespo - Just Baseball) 

Cade is a 2017 graduate of Mennonite Educational Institute in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada.

2018-20: Smith played at the Univ. of Hawaii.

The Draft process is not foreign to Smith, who was selected in the 16th round of the 2017 Draft by the Twins. The native of Vancouver, British Columbia, decided to attend Hawaii. There, he made 34 appearances (15 starts) over two-plus seasons.

The 6-foot-5, 230-pound righty recorded 22 strikeouts in 18 1/3 innings with a 4.42 ERA in 2020. He made five appearances (two starts) and walked eight batters, holding opponents to a .261 average. Smith saw the most time during his sophomore campaign in 2019, when he went 2-2 with a 4.53 ERA in 16 appearances (seven starts) with 54 strikeouts, 26 walks and four homers in 59 2/3 frames.

In 2024, the Baseball America Prospect Handbook rated Smith as the 25th-best prospect in the Guardians system.

Cade Smith, the Guardians' No. 25 prospect, was the highlight of the Guardians’ 12-3 victory over the A’s, as he recorded five strikeouts in two hitless innings with one walk. He set a club record for the most strikeouts in a debut of two innings or fewer. The 24-year-old righty’s heater averaged 96 mph and topped out at 97.9 mph. Cade’s debut couldn’t have gone much better.

“To see somebody make their Major League debut just like that and dominate, it was great,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “I couldn’t be more thrilled for him and his family today.”

There was so much standing in the way of this emotional and incredible moment for the Smiths. Let’s go back to last August.

Cade hasn’t been able to travel home to Vancouver to see his parents, sister or brother because of restrictions of the application process for a U.S. residency, which he first applied for in December 2022.

His parents were hoping to come to him since they hadn’t seen him since Spring Training, but Tim had an appointment with a cardiologist scheduled and before they traveled, it was determined that Tim needed open heart surgery, which he underwent on December 19. Cade was stuck in the United States, limited to checking in on his family via FaceTime.

“For him, he couldn’t be around to help his mom or comfort anyone,” Tim said.  After a successful procedure, the countdown began. Tim knew that his insurance prevented him from traveling to the United States for at least 90 days after his surgery. That meant no Spring Training and an even longer wait to see his firstborn. Meanwhile, Cade put together a strong camp, and as regular relievers on the big league roster were coming down with illnesses or injuries, the possibility of Cade making the Opening Day roster became more and more likely.

That was, until last weekend. The Guardians’ front office and Vogt worked together to create the final 26-man roster. Cade was told that he did everything he could to earn his spot, but the club was going to still look for external relievers to possibly add to the roster. If they found a match, Cade would begin the year at Triple-A Columbus. If they didn’t, the Opening Day roster spot was his.

In the case that he would make the team, the Smiths would need to see if it’d be possible to be in attendance. That sent Tim back to his doctor to try to get approval.

It had been 97 days since Tim’s surgery -- just seven days past the minimum required to travel to the United States. Tim asked his doctor for permission to make it to Oakland just in case his son would make his big league debut. Less than 24 hours from the time he’d need to be on a plane to make it in time, Tim was given the green light.

“God has worked things out for us,” Tim said. “The timing has been crazy.”

The family was finally reunited. It was the first time Cade saw his parents in a year and the first time being with his siblings in a year and a half.

Cade got word that he was likely to make the roster, but he didn’t celebrate until the Guardians officially posted their roster. He was sitting in a hotel room with his family, playing cards just like old times when the news broke. They paused their game and hugged.

In the fifth inning, Cade started to warm up in the bullpen. As he made his way to the mound in the sixth, the Smiths held their phones high to record the moment, beaming with pride.

With a four-run lead, the Guardians were ready to let Cade get his feet wet in the Majors, but he proved he didn’t need the extra cushion. Tim sat back in his chair, unable to process the ending of the unbelievable story this family has written over the last 12 months. When he was asked what it was like to watch his son run onto the Major League field, he couldn’t hold back tears.

Tim smiled and said, “That’s more than we could ask, right?” (M Bell - MLB.com - March 30, 2024) 

March 30, 2024: The moment was almost too much for a father to process. Tim Smith sat in an aisle seat of section 113 at the Oakland Coliseum, waiting for his son, Cade, to get called out of Cleveland’s bullpen to make his debut. The Smith family would be flying back home to Vancouver the next day and couldn’t miss this special moment. They had endured too much for destiny to be that cruel to them, considering the Smiths went a year without seeing their oldest child.

Everything had fallen into place up to this point. Tim had gotten clearance from his cardiologist to travel after having open heart surgery in December. He needed to leave to be in Oakland in time for Opening Day. It was nearly a miracle that this all came together. So, for the ending to be even more than any of them could imagine, it was just icing on the cake.

For five days, Cade Smith sat in limbo.

The week of Opening Day, the 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. 

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. 

“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 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’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. 

“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. (Meisel - Oct 17, 2024 - The Athletic)  

Problem-solving comes naturally to Cade Smith. His father teaches high school and his mother teaches elementary school. To Smith, a sturdy right-hander from British Columbia, it is not enough to be graded. He wants to study the teacher’s comments. He has to learn why he is good. 

Fry, a catcher recovering from Tommy John surgery, said Smith reaches so far in his delivery that he seems to be dropping the ball in his glove. Smith’s extension ranks in the 98th percentile in MLB, giving hitters little time to react to his explosive fastball or disappearing splitter.

Smith fanned 262 hitters in 167 minor-league innings, good enough to earn the final spot in the Guardians’ bullpen last spring. He fanned five in two innings in his debut on Opening Day and went on to average six strikeouts for every walk.

“You don’t want to say that you’ve arrived, because you want to continue to learn and grow and compete,” Smith said. “There’s going to be ups and downs, and I hope it’s a long process of learning. But it was exciting that I could help the team and to see the fruit of my efforts was satisfying.” 

“He was so thoughtful in his decision-making process,” general manager Mike Chernoff said. “He wanted to think about: ‘How can I maximize my development?’ You never know with young pitching, but there were a lot of indicators and ingredients that we felt like, with some small tweaks, he could be very successful.” (Kepner - Feb 28, 2025 - The Athletic)

 July 2026: The Guardians have built a reputation of being one of the best pitching factories in the major leagues. Closer Cade Smith, yet another their success story, will now get to travel from that assembly line floor to the All-Star Game in Philadelphia.

Smith was one of three Guardians players selected to the 2026 MLB All-Star Game, along with second baseman Travis Bazzana and starting pitcher Parker Messick. All three were voted in by their peers via the players' vote.

"I think it's a huge honor, and I'm looking forward to really soaking it in and just enjoying the experience," Smith said. "There's a lot of really great baseball players at this level and I have a lot of respect for a lot of them, even the ones on the other team, so it's really cool to have that reputation."  (Ryan Lewis - Akron Beacon Journal)

TRANSACTIONS

Cade has an average 95 mph FASTBALL, that he pairs with a SLIDER and a CHANGEUP. 

Smith has a big, powerful build and a fastball to match. He relies heavily on the pitch, which averages about 95 mph and gets a lot of swings and misses, both in and out of the zone. The pitch plays up further thanks to the excellent extension he gets in his delivery. His slider is his best secondary offering. It’s more of a fringy offering that doesn’t miss nearly as many bats, but it’s enough to keep batters honest. He also mixes in an occasional below-average changeup and pitches with average control. (Teddy Cahill - BA Prospect Handbook - Spring 2024)

2024 Pitch Usage/Avg. Velo: 4-seam Fastball 69% - 96.1 mph; Slider 10.4% - 82.2 mph; Split 20.6% - 86.6 mph.

2021 Season: He made his pro debut in Single-A, where he struck out a ridiculous 38% of hitters over 30 appearances, earning a promotion to High-A, where he made three scoreless appearances.

2022 Season: Posted a 4-2 mark with 13 saves and a 2.93 ERA in 44 relief outings (61.IP, 38H, 20ER, 99SO, 14.5 K/9, .178 average) between Akron and Columbus, leading organizational pitchers in saves (13) and was second in relief SO (99).

He owns a two-year professional ERA of 3.36 in 77 relief outings (39 ER/104 IP). The Abbotsford East, British Columbia native was signed by Cleveland as a non-drafted free agent in June 2020, out of the University of Hawaii. (The 2020 draft was just five rounds.)

2023 Season: Before the season started, Smith was given an opportunity to represent Team Canada in the 2023 World Baseball Classic. He made just one appearance, allowing a pair of runs while striking out one batter in an inning. That batter was Mets star Pete Alonso (while throwing to fellow Guardian Bo Naylor).

Smith began the 2023 season at Double-A and quickly showcased his best control for any extended period of time, dropping his walk rate to a career-low 9.8% while also dropping his ERA to 2.86 and his FIP to 2.73, which earned him a promotion to Triple-A Columbus.

Smith spent a majority of his season in Columbus, where he struck out 66 batters in 40.2 innings pitched, an impressive 37.1%. He was plagued by the long ball, however, allowing 1.33 bombs per nine innings pitched, the first time he’d ever been over 0.41 since his first pro season.

He was added to Cleveland’s 40-man roster in advance of November’s 2023 Rule 5 Draft.

Smith sits in the mid to upper 90s with his fastball, which is his best pitch. He also features a split-change, a cutter and a slider, with the split-change being the best of the secondary offerings. (Brian Hemminger - Feb 27, 2024) 

Smith is a robotic rookie who has totaled more strikeouts than any Cleveland reliever in a quarter-century in the 2024 season. (Meisel - Sep 19, 2024 - The Athletic)

2024 Season: He not only won a spot on the active roster since day one, but he became one of the most dominant relievers in the league as a rookie.

Now, he has entered a group of incredibly talented first-year pitchers who have achieved some amazing numbers.

“Since 1947, just six MLB pitchers have thrown 100+ strikeouts with a sub-2 ERA in a season as a rookie: CADE SMITH (2024), Paul Skenes (2024), Seunghwan Oh (2016), Dellin Betances (2014), Mark Eichhorn (1986), Bob Lee (1964),” Guardians stats expert Luke Potosky posted on X.

These stats and facts help us dimension Smith’s dominant season in history.

He posted a 1.91 ERA in 75.1 frames, with 103 strikeouts to boot.

His 0.90 WHIP was magnificent, and only one hitter homered off him.

Maybe the most encouraging stat on Smith’s profile is the fact that only 2 of 36 inherited runners went on to score. It shows he can really thrive as the team’s fireman. (Andres Chavez - Sept. 30, 2024)

2025 Season: The Guardians made it to the postseason despite ongoing concerns about their bullpen depth in late July. Days before the trade deadline, MLB suspended closer Emmanuel Clase in connection with a gambling investigation.

The decision forced Cleveland to move forward without their primary closer and without any form of roster compensation. Cade Smith took over the role after an initial stretch of inconsistency and has since emerged as the likely full-time closer heading into next season.

His performance has been backed by advanced metrics that place him among the best relievers in baseball over the past two seasons.

Shortly after the announcement, Guardians Prospective highlighted that Smith had posted the highest fWAR among all MLB relievers for the second consecutive year. Smith finished the 2025 season with a 2.7 fWAR, narrowly edging Chapman’s 2.6 mark. He recorded the same 2.7 fWAR in 2024, finishing just ahead of Griffin Jax in that category.

 When combining both seasons, Smith led all relievers with a 5.4 fWAR total while Mason Miller ranks second at 4.4. Those numbers reflect sustained excellence across multiple high-leverage situations over two full campaigns.

Smith carried a 3.00 ERA through 72 innings this past season. His performance improved after taking over as the primary closer, posting a 2.96 ERA with 13 saves across 27 1/3 innings in that role.

He generated 1.1 fWAR during that period, the highest mark among all relievers since assuming closing duties.

Cleveland’s bullpen ranked second in ERA since Clase’s suspension. Smith’s work anchoring the ninth inning had been central to that stability.

Combined with a rotation that delivered a near-historic run, the Guardians positioned themselves firmly in the postseason race largely due to Smith’s contributions. (Nov 15, 2025 - Yagya Bhargava - Guardians Nation)