Black MLB Players #18: Dom Smith
Background + Path To The MLB
Dominic Smith is a twenty-five year old first baseman/leftfielder from Los Angeles, California who plays for the New York Mets. Dominic Smith grew up playing baseball in Southern California, one of the most talented regions for high school baseball in the whole world. Dominic Smith credits the MLB’s programs for getting more inner city kids involved in the sport of baseball: Urban Youth Academy and Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, as the main reasons he plays the sports. These two programs have chapters in major and mid sized metropolitan areas across the United States, and exist because of the decline in Black American youth participating in the sport of baseball, which has lead to the birth of the narrative that baseball is no longer a “black sport”.
Dominic Smith played high school baseball at Junipero Sierra High School in Gardena, California. He was primarily a first baseman, but logged time in the outfield and also pitched, reaching up to 92 mph with his fastball. He led Junipero Sierra to a state championship in baseball his senior year of high school in 2013, and also committed to play Division I baseball at The University of Southern California. He was ranked as a top 5 high school baseball player in the United States by Perfect Game, and the best baseball player in California. Smith was seen as a premier baseball talent coming out of high school, and was a consensus first round pick in mock drafts and big boards by many reputed sources. Dominic Smith was drafted with the 11th overall pick in the 2013 MLB Draft by the New York Mets, and forewent his commitment to USC after signing with the Mets to play pro baseball, receiving a $2.6 million dollar signing bonus in the process.
Dominic Smith’s path to the majors had its ups and downs, but he performed well throughout his minor league career. He performed as advertised in the MiLB, showing that he can hit for contact and power from the left side of the plate, and he was also projected as an above average defender at first base, his primary defensive position. Smith statistically performed around thirty percent better than his peers offensively at five of the levels he played in the minor leagues, which is great, especially for a first baseman, where most of the value of the position is focused around the offensive contributions a 1B can make. In 625 MiLB games, Smith put up a .295/.360/.425 slashline, showing his ability to make contact and get on base at an above average clip, along with flashes of power here and there.
Smith made his MLB debut on August 11th, 2017, at the age of 22 years old. He has not found a full time role with the New York Mets for a multitude of reasons that include injury, roster construction, and a diagnosis of sleep apnea. Despite these factors, Smith has improved every year at the MLB level since his debut in 2017, and the Mets organization has acknowledged this by giving him more plate appearances each year. From 2017 to 2020, Smith’s year by year OPS(On Base % + Slugging %) went from .658 in 2017 to .675 in 2018 to .881 in 2019, and in 50 out of the 60 games he played in the shortened 2020 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he put up a .993 OPS. Dominic Smith was lauded for his ability to hit coming out of high school and in the minor leagues, and his steady improvement from an offensive standpoint at the MLB level displays his skillset and work ethic. The chart below shows Dominic Smith’s weighted runs created plus for his career, a metric that measures a player’s offensive performance.
The MLB official glossary defines (wRC+) as:
wRC+ takes the statistic Runs Created and adjusts that number to account for important external factors — like ballpark or era. It’s adjusted, so a wRC+ of 100 is league average and 150 would be 50 percent above league average.
For example, a player who plays his home games at hitter-friendly Coors Field will have a lower wRC+ than a player who posts identical stats at pitcher-friendly Oakland Coliseum.
wRC+ quantifies run creation and normalizes it, so we can compare players who play in different ballparks and even different eras.
http://m.mlb.com/glossary is a great way to learn about standard and advanced baseball statistics, in order to better understand the game of baseball and be able to contextualize the different facets(hitting, defense, base-running, pitching, etc.) to reach your own conclusions about individual players and the teams they play for.
DO NOT believe casual fans, clueless announcers, and retired baseball players who consistently preach that advanced stats are ruining the game, as most(damn near all) of them have skewed, biased, and uneducated perspectives. Baseball organizations utilize advanced stats at varying degrees depending on organization philosophy, and advanced stats have such a huge presence in the game of baseball because they fucking work. Now I will get off my soapbox, so you can finish reading about the actual subject of this article: Dominic Smith.
Player Profile
Dominic Smith bats and throws left handed, and he is 6'0'’, weighing 240 pounds. A large majority of Smith’s perceived and literal value lies in his ability to contribute offensively, based on his skillset and the positions that he regularly plays. His purpose is to get on base and drive in runs, and Smith is more than capable of that. He has upper tier bat speed, routinely making hard contact at the plate, and good things happen often for baseball players that consistently hit the baseball hard. Smith has average strikeout and walk rates for a modern MLB hitter, and his approach has resulted in batted balls that go predominantly to his pull side and up the middle. He also frequently hits line drives, around 25% of the time. This results in a high expected batting average(xBA), a metric created by Statcast: “a state-of-the-art tracking technology that allows for the collection and analysis of a massive amount of baseball data”, per the MLB official glossary. Dominic Smith has the tools and patterns/habits to be an above average hitter.
From a defensive standpoint, he is a ballerina around the first base bag. He has terrific hands and excellent footwork, to go with great baseball instincts. He also has an advantage at playing 1B since he is left handed, and this supplements his defensive prowess. Despite being athletic for a very large person, he is not and will not ever be an above average baserunner, and will not wow you in the outfield. Despite his best position being first base, due to the roster construction of the New York Mets and the existence of Pete Alonso, he will see most of his time in left field. He has experience in the outfield going back to his high school days, but Smith will most likely be a net negative consistently and a slightly below outfield defender at best.
Conclusion
Dominic Smith offers youth and the tools to be an above average contributor to a MLB lineup. Despite not getting an opportunity to be a full time player until the shortened 2020 season, the Mets knew they had a talented player and gave Smith time to develop and learn the ropes. Going into the 2020 offseason, Smith will be a great trade chip as teams are always looking for young, cheap, and controllable talent to add to their MLB rosters, and the Mets will be looking to make big splashes on the free agency and trade markets because of the new owner Steve Cohen’s itch to bring the team back to competitive relevancy. Dominic Smith checks all of those boxes, as he will not reach free agency until 2025, which makes him a wanted commodity amongst baseball organizations. Smith can hit, will bust his ass on defense and on the bases, and has a great personality.
Sources:
https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/dominic-smith-642086
