Look Here For Your Justin Smoak Optimism
I’ll admit from the top that this is just an experiment. But anyway, I won’t waste your time. Justin Smoak is 30 years old. He’s coming off a 90 wRC+ and a WAR of -0.1. He already has seven seasons of big-league experience, and in precisely zero of those has he measured in at even one win above replacement. Relative to what he was as a prospect, he’s been extremely disappointing. Last July, weirdly, the Blue Jays signed Smoak to a multi-year contract extension. Here’s a clip from his player page:
RotoWire News: Smoak, who was previously presumed to be in line for a platoon role, is the Jays’ preferred everyday first baseman, Shi Davidi of Sportsnet reports. (2/19/2017)
Strange! But maybe…not so strange? Stick with me. As a hitter, your primary skills involve how often you make contact, how hard you make contact, and where the ball goes after contact. I’ve messed around before with pitch comps, looking for similar pitches based on velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. In this somewhat similar experiment, I’ve looked for similar hitters to Smoak based on 2016’s exit velocities, launch angles, and contact rates. Same methodology and everything — it’s all based around z-scores. In the big table below, the most similar hitters to Smoak last season, based on this method. I’ve included everyone with a combined comp score of 2.0 or lower.
| Player | 2016 EV | 2016 LA | 2016 Contact% | Comp Score | 2016 wRC+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Justin Smoak | 89.6 | 17.7 | 72.1% | — | 90 |
| Freddie Freeman | 89.4 | 17.3 | 72.5% | 0.3 | 152 |
| Mark Trumbo | 89.8 | 16.3 | 72.3% | 0.5 | 123 |
| Nick Castellanos | 88.5 | 17.3 | 72.8% | 0.7 | 119 |
| Justin Upton | 88.3 | 16.1 | 71.7% | 1.0 | 105 |
| J.D. Martinez | 89.6 | 13.8 | 72.8% | 1.1 | 142 |
| Trevor Story | 88.0 | 16.2 | 72.7% | 1.1 | 120 |
| Ryan Howard | 90.5 | 17.2 | 67.2% | 1.3 | 83 |
| Joc Pederson | 88.9 | 15.5 | 75.1% | 1.4 | 129 |
| Miguel Sano | 90.0 | 17.1 | 65.7% | 1.4 | 107 |
| Randal Grichuk | 87.4 | 15.6 | 72.0% | 1.4 | 102 |
| Evan Longoria | 87.5 | 17.0 | 75.3% | 1.6 | 123 |
| Khris Davis | 89.4 | 14.1 | 68.3% | 1.6 | 123 |
| Chris Davis | 88.5 | 18.2 | 65.7% | 1.7 | 111 |
| Kris Bryant | 86.6 | 19.8 | 73.0% | 1.9 | 149 |
| Chris Carter | 88.7 | 18.8 | 64.7% | 1.9 | 112 |
| Pedro Alvarez | 88.3 | 13.3 | 70.3% | 2.0 | 117 |
The single best comparison to Smoak: Freeman, who was and is one of the best players on the Braves. You’ll notice there are but two below-average wRC+ marks out of 17. The overall average wRC+ in this group is 118. The median is 119. Last season, Jose Bautista’s wRC+ for the Blue Jays was 122.
I’ve never looked at players quite like this before, so don’t take this to mean more than it does. It seems, at least, modestly encouraging — Smoak’s exit-velocity numbers were quite good, and he didn’t struggle at all to generate lift. Maybe there’s just something about his approach that holds him back, but then, maybe he’s better than he looked. Given that he’s a slow-footed first baseman, he’s never going to top a WAR leaderboard. Yet perhaps the Blue Jays correctly identified that there’s upside still in there. The track record is what it is, but I can’t very well look at that table and dismiss it.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
This is the perfect, perfect preseason article. Jeff Sullivan purging angst from last year, promoting hope for the next.
The big difference between batters and pitchers when using this type of analysis is that pitchers have a small spread on their velocity and spin rates, whereas hitters will have a very wide range of LA/EV. E.g. a pitcher doesn’t sometimes throw their fastball 85mph, and other times 95mph. There’s very low variance within an individual’s sample. So a straight average is adequate to measure an individual.
For batters, I don’t think “average” accurately captures their profile.
There’s probably a much better math way to do this, but even just calculating z-scores for the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile of each of those stats would be interesting to me!
How’s his pop-up rate?
Maybe he blisters pop-ups and gently lofts flyballs? 😉
Smoak ’em if you got ’em.
where there’s smoak there’s fire.
smoak on the water, a fire in the sky.
-do you smoak after sex?
-i dunno i never checked.
He can’t hit breaking balls whatsoever and he’s an easy shift candidate because he’s a dead pull hitter on grounders.
Like Pedro Alvarez!
I wish Smoak could hit sliders and curveballs like Alvarez.
Smoak: http://www.brooksbaseball.net/h_tabs.php?player=475253&gFilt=&time=month&minmax=ci&var=ra&s_type=16&startDate=03/30/2007&endDate=03/06/2017&balls=-1&strikes=-1&b_hand=-1
Alvarez: http://www.brooksbaseball.net/h_tabs.php?player=476883&gFilt=&time=month&minmax=ci&var=ra&s_type=16&startDate=03/30/2007&endDate=03/06/2017&balls=-1&strikes=-1&b_hand=-1
Whoa….
Either this is huge for Smoak, or a hole in the side of the ship we’re all riding with regard to this analysis. Or, less dramatically, this particular combo of stats.
Let’s look at some other recent statcast analysis.
AL 1B contact quality report (http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2016-hitter-contact-quality-report-al-first-base-and-dh/) has this summary: “I nominate Justin Smoak‘s 27.3% liner rate for Fluke Statistic of the Year. Despite that outlandish number, Smoak’s Adjusted Production checks in at only 96. His K rate is real, and really high, and his fly-ball rate is likely to regress downward a bit. All of this points to potentially significant near-term decline.”
But Perpetua’s xStats says he deserved MUCH better results. 2015: .376 xOBA vs.331 wOBA. 2016: .333 xOBA vs .309 wOBA.
I’m thinking this might be a matter of spin off the bat. Smoak has always seemed to have warning track power, and my gut says he’s always hit a very catch-able type of fly ball.
The 33% K rate is pretty alarming for a guy with good but not great power.
Yeah that’s what it comes down to. Even if you buy the batted ball info he has to actually hit the ball. Too many of his ABs end in Ks for him to take advantage of this. He’s got one of the highest K% in this group.
It’s almost as if contact rate was used to measure the ability to “actually hit the ball.”
One crude measure: SLG% on contact. All 2016 batters with 300 PA, Smoak ranks 75 out of 268. Everyone else on that table above ranks in the top 41. Near Smaok: Cano, Myers, Lucroy, Beltran, Grossman, Flowers, Pearce, Kipnis.
The K rate is part of the problem, but there’s more going on.
Yep. That’s “good not great” power.
Pump some curveballs at Smoak and watch him flail like a baby deer on ice. Potential neutralized.
his 1st and 2nd half splits in k%/bb% were dramatic – a change in approach is highly probable
What? He had a 12%/32% BB%/K% rate in the first half, vs. 11%/35% in the second half. If anything, he became slightly worse over the course of the season.
Last year vs RHP he struck out 37.8(!)% of the time.
Are these exit velocities the raw values from Statcast or have they been run through Jeff Zimmerman’s correction equation based on number of batted balls missing? That could be something driving the differences potentially.
Or you could just take a look at this: http://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=smoak-001jus
He only slugged over .500 once in his minor league career in a stop over 66 PA’s and that was in the PCL (although in fairness Tacoma is a massive pitcher’s park). And he was just barely over with a BABIP of .376 (coincidentally enough, his career high). The only reason he’s been giving opportunities is because he excelled with aluminum bats but that has nothing to do with his ability to hit at the professional level.
I hope he does well just so every Jays fan on the internet can stop relating him to everything bad at every possible opportunity. It’s amusing enough, but as a Jays fan, I’ve had enough of Smoak in more than one way.
Yep, a little spit and polish, and this Justin Smoak bandwagon is good as new.
Hilarious! Can’t wait for next week’s: “Look Here for Your Jeff Clement Optimism.”
Stop trying to make Smoak happen.
Lol
Jeff, if you happen to see comments to your old articles – you’re a genius. Only guy I’ve seen with anything positive to say about Smoaky before this season (including myself, and I watch him everyday). Let’s see if your comps method proves useful for identifying more diamonds in the rough!