On the contrary, he could have just been fapping over the 80 grades he was seeing put on Estrada's changeup.
If someone tells you a SP has a 50 FB, 80 CH, fringe-average CU, and plus command, generally that = a quality SP. He'd also had some success in the past.
So it could have been a thoroughly scouting based acquisition, for all we know.
He did say publicly that getting Smoak was pretty much all on the analytics guys.