Is There Fire Where There's Smoak?

It might have escaped your attention that MLB bust Justin Smoak, a native of Goose Creek, SC, 20 miles from the source of these words, is enjoying a career 1/3rd of a year in his eighth season.

A spare part most of his career, he was one tooth in the gear the Blue Jays hoped would offset the power output of departed Edwin Encarnacion.

Now Smoak is doing it all by himself. A career .223 hitter, he's delivering .283/.348/.550 with 14 blasts and out-slugging not only Encarnacion (.230 with 10 homers) but also any version of Justin Smoak we've ever seen.

With an OPS 130 points higher than his next best season's, Smoak has, in just the first 50 games of 2017, doubled his lifetime WAR. And he's doing it in a different way than the rest of the sport.

The buzzword today in MLB is launch angle -- swing up so that when you make contact you have a chance at extra bases. It sacrifices some BA and OBP for power. But that was already Justin Smoak's career modus operandi, and while it's kept him in The Show, his sun may have been setting. What has changed for Smoak is the quantity of his upward contact: he's fanning three percent less than league average, compared to six percent more in his previous seven years.

That might not seem like much, but take my word for it, it's the difference between .223 and .283, between replacement-level player and starting first baseman. And the reason seems to be that he's laying off breaking balls outside the strike zone. It's a small adjustment, but the kind that has given us Eric Thames and Aaron Judge and, now, Justin Smoak. So while we're comparing 50 games to 3000 previous trips to the plate, it might be sustainable.

That would be Smoak without the mirrors, and that would be a nice career boost for a guy who seemed headed back to Goose Creek.

A Smoaking Gun and Other Stories

At the risk of putting too fine a point on a previous post -- aw hell, there's no risk: we're going to shave the nub to within a millimeter of its life -- Baseball Prospectus released their projections for MLB players today and here's what the Tarot cards suggest for Justin Smoak:

.224/.313/.371 with 14 HR in 470 plate appearances for the Mariners this season. With weak baserunning and slightly below average defense, Smoak grades out essentially to replacement-level at first base, even after factoring in the park he plays in.

In other words, you can pick up any old Tom, Dick or Justin Smoak off the waiver wire and expect about the same production.

Add in the missing 150 plate appearances, which suggest either an injury or a demotion; in either case his contribution during those 30 games is zero.

By comparison, to which the previous post alludes, Matt Wieters's forecast comes in at .259/.330/.422 with 19 HR in 588 plate appearances while dinging him slightly on defense behind the plate. Wieters is worth a pair of wins against replacement in this forecast, which makes him a solid regular but not a star.  

These are projections, not predictions, so even if Smoak breaks out and Wieters breaks down, the system can't be said to be "wrong." (In fact, the system includes the odds of breakout and collapse as well, but the math is obtuse.) It just means that players who have performed the way these two have at their ages in the past have tended to perform like the projection going forward.

According to BP's projection system, the top 10 players offensively in 2013 will be: 

• Albert Pujols
• Joey Votto
• Ryan Braun
• Miguel Cabrera
• Mike Trout
• Troy Tulowitzki
• Adrian Gonzalez
• Andrew McCutcheon
• Robinson Cano

It sees a big bounceback for Pujols, as does Bill James's system, and a massive dropoff for Mike Trout, who has nowhere to go but down after an historic first season. Of course, projection systems don't work well with guys like Trout because he doesn't really have an comparables to project him against.

It's also interesting to see the system projecting a return to stardom for Hanley Ramirez, whom it ranks as the 21st best offensive player. That is based on the Dodgers leaving him at short and giving Dee Gordon the seasoning he needs in Albuquerque.

The system also sees a return to relevance for newly shorn Tim Lincecum with a 3.10 ERA in 174 innings and a return to normalcy for Gio Gonzalez with a 3.67 ERA and the same value to his team as Milwaukee's Mike Fiers.

As for the unprojectable R.A. Dickey? Canada won't want to hear this. The system sees a 38-year-old moving to a tough division in the tougher league and projects 224 innings of a 4.41 ERA with a below .500 record. But then, R.A.'s beaten the odds before.

This is the kind of conjecture we have at our disposal as pitchers and catchers loosen up in Florida and Arizona.

Blowing Smoak at Reporters

Let's engage in a little hypothetical hijinks.

Let's suppose your friend complained to you that he didn't understand why Oriole backstop Matt Wieters is selected to the All-Star squad while Mariner first-sacker Justin Smoak is considered a flop. The two are contemporaries from the Charleston, SC area and former first round picks in the MLB draft. Consequently they get compared 'round these parts.

After all. your companion notes, Smoak's 162-game average for the first four years of his career is a .223 BA with 21 HR and 71 RBI. Wieters' performance during the same period is .260, 21 & 79. It's a red pubic hair's difference, right?

Knowing the progressive sort that you are, no doubt you would patiently explain to your unenlightened friend that Smoak has managed to stay on the field more than 130 games in a season just once while Wieters has done so three times. You would point out that Triple Crown stats were demonstrated 33 years ago to be woefully inadequate to the storytelling task and that the difference in OPS, .749-.683 in favor of Wieters, is not insubstantial. 

You would further mention that Smoak is a lumbering first baseman, the lowest form of defensive player this side of the DH, and Wieters is a Gold Glove catcher, the most grueling position on the field. More to the point, the two should be compared to hitters at opposite ends of the offensive spectrum -- Wieters to catchers and Smoak to first basemen. Viewed against their position-mates, Wieters has been worth eight-and-a-half wins compared to a replacement level catcher while Smoak IS a replacement level first baseman. 

And that's just the offensive side of the equation. Accounting for their glovework takes the former to 14.7 wins against replacement in four years and the latter down to 2.7 wins BELOW replacement. In other words, an All-Star and a bust.


Sadly, you were not around to apprise the author of this story in my local paper of such considerations. And so, a professional journalist, whose area of expertise is supposedly sports, managed to pen this stunning piece of ignorance. He will not be fired or reprimanded or even educated because no one at his paper has the slightest awareness that they are living in the Dark Ages. 

And none of his knowledge-challenged colleagues or editors will be fired, reprimanded or educated themselves because neither their colleagues at other newspapers in South Carolina, or in the Southeast, or nearly anywhere, nor their TV or radio counterparts, nor virtually anyone else who is considered a sports reporter or commentator or analyst has the slightest idea about the advances in their field since they stopped learning anything new back in 1974.

And so they continue to peck out tripe like this on their IBM Selectrics, completely oblivious to the development in the interim of the IBM Wheelwriter, word processor, personal computer,  smartphone and tablet. They are the Amish of journalism, refusing to adopt advancements of science and technology, continuing to view the game as their great-grandfathers did with horses and buggy metrics.

Thirty-three years since Bill James's first Baseball Abstract. It'll be 34 years in March.