Projecting Dominic Smith
With Jay Bruce on his way to Cleveland, the Mets have called up Dominic Smith to play first base for the remainder of the year. The Mets took Smith with the 11th overall pick out of high school back in 2013. He was hitting a smooth .330/.386/.519 at Triple-A this year, although those numbers were certainly helped by the PCL and his home ballpark in Las Vegas.
When taken in the context of his league and ballpark, Smith’s .188 ISO isn’t all that impressive. And while he’s hit for a high average, it hasn’t been due to his making a lot of contact as evidenced by his 17% strikeout rate. Instead, he’s gotten there by way of a .380 BABIP. In sum, Smith is a first baseman with unremarkable power and contact skills. That isn’t to say Smith isn’t an interesting prospect. While his 2017 performance is suspect, his 2016 numbers were much more promising. He made a lot of contact in Double-A last year while also hitting for decent power in a non-PCL environment. It’s also important to remember that Smith just turned 22, making him quite young for Triple-A. And finally, both the metrics and lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen view Smith as an above-average defensive first baseman, which takes a bit of pressure off of his bat.
My KATOH system pegs Smith for 6.0 WAR over his first six seasons by the stats-only method and 5.6 WAR by KATOH+, which incorporates his No. 50 rank on Baseball America’s midseason list. Those marks place him 52nd and 68th, respectively, among prospects.
To put some faces to Smith’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps. I calculated a Mahalanobis distance between Smith’s 2017 performance and every season since 1991. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. Please note that the Mahalanobis analysis is separate from KATOH. KATOH relies on macro-level trends, rather than comps. The fates of a few statistically similar players shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions about a prospect’s future. For this reason, I recommend using a player’s KATOH forecast to assess his future potential. The comps give us some interesting names that sometimes feel spot-on, but they’re mostly just there for fun.
| Rank | Name | KATOH+ Proj. WAR | Actual WAR |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dernell Stenson | 5.2 | 0.5 |
| 2 | Adrian Gonzalez | 3.0 | 19.1 |
| 3 | Mario Valdez | 3.3 | 0.1 |
| 4 | Casey Kotchman | 4.4 | 6.7 |
| 5 | Dernell Stenson | 3.2 | 0.5 |
| 6 | Kevin Witt | 2.8 | 0.0 |
| 7 | Derrek Lee | 6.9 | 11.5 |
| 8 | Steve Cox | 4.7 | 1.4 |
| 9 | David Ortiz | 4.2 | 14.8 |
| 10 | Chris Carter | 8.4 | 0.0 |
Smith is a good prospect, but it isn’t entirely clear that he’s ready for the show just yet. Despite his gaudy stat line, his performance has been more good than great after accounting for his environment. Steamer sees him as a 89 wRC+ hitter right now, which is awfully light for a first baseman. But seeing how the Mets aren’t competing this year, they have little to lose by giving Smith 50 games to show what he can do.
Chris works in economic development by day, but spends most of his nights thinking about baseball. He writes for Pinstripe Pundits, FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. He's also on the twitter machine: @_chris_mitchell None of the views expressed in his articles reflect those of his daytime employer.
Looks like there’s a paste from an older article–“Hoskins” before the chart.
Stenson listed twice? Looks like Dominic is doomed from the start. That comp isn’t even fair!
Same guy with two different WAR figures….?
I’m reading this article and as a Met fan all I can say is I’m disgusted. Their scouts draft him in round one and this guy goes out there and makes a fool out of himself by only hitting at every level and in AAA cant even get above the Ted Williams line? How is he even a prospect if he only hit 330,and not. 400? Last I checked watching a guy play, and play superb defense and only hitting in the mid 300s doesn’t make you a prospect. A 900 ops? Pffffft. His BABIP tells the entire story. Only BABIP.
Yes, I understand this is a parody, but it’s not funny
Not even a good attempt really.
According to this rudimentary projection system that only scouts the stat line, he will be a very bad first baseman. Mets fans should be incredibly worried.
Is this like a “tree in the forest” thing? If a prospect plays but is not watched, is he a prospect?
This rant is hilarious. You might not like people saying “a .380 BABIP isn’t sustainable”, but, um, it isn’t. You mention Ted Williams. Teddy Ballgame’s career BABIP was .328. He never once had a BABIP of .380 in a single full season, not even 1941 when he hit .406 (.378 BABIP that year). And Williams was facing actual major league pitchers. Smith has been facing minor league pitchers in the most hitter friendly league in baseball. His home ballpark is at 2,000′ elevation and half of his road games are in ballparks over 3,700′ feet (road trips this year to El Paso, SLC, Reno, CO Springs and Albuquerque, all of which are over 3,700′)
Look, I don’t know if Smith is going to be a good player and I’m not rooting against him. He’s a 22 yo kid putting up decent numbers in AAA which is a good sign since most of the league is older than him. However, he is not going to run a .380 BABIP in the majors for any extended period of time and if you start lopping off 50 or 80 points from his BABIP (and by extension his BA/OBP/SLG), his numbers get pretty meh pretty quick.
And all of this while playing a position where he absolutely has to hit to have any value. Plus the .180 ISO, in the PCL, isn’t exactly ideal for a 1B either.
I’m a Mets fan as well, and I completely agree with the general outlook of the article. Given his age, defense, and apparently growing power stroke (factoring in Las Vegas, which really increases babip and extra base hits much more than actual home runs to be fair), there’s room in his growth to be a good player. That said, his minor league numbers definitely don’t scream can’t miss.
Iso probably is the closest thing to a telling offensive stat in Vegas, and while 188 isn’t bad, it definitely doesn’t blow you away. For reference, when Conforto got sent down there for 33 games in 2016 he posted a 305 iso. THAT’S what elite hitting prospects do in Vegas.
I am not a big believer that Dom Smith will hit enough to be a successful big league first baseman BUT isn’t a 17% contact rate above average in the current hitting climate? Maybe the Joey Gallos of the world have just hurt my ability to gauge what a lot of contact actually looks like…
Isn’t K rate the wrong stat to use for “contact” anyhow? What happened to, like, whiff rate?
Couple of takeaways and additional things to consider:
1) D Smith has always been younger than average and this season was more than 4 years younger than the average PCL player.
2) In both 2013 and 2014, D Smith spent the entire year learning to hit the other way and was actually dinged if he pulled a ball. This wound up lowering his slugging percentage and batting average in the short term, but raised it longer-term.
3) A “gym rat” this graduate of MLB’s RBI system used to bike an hour each way to and from the hitting academy and then take 2 hours of batting practice.
4) That work ethic while young manifested itself this part offseason when he trained with a Major League trainer to add muscle to his core and lower his body fat ratio.
5) An article this year on sister site HBT noted/documented that in Vegas it is more the ground ball hitters who benefit as the infield is rock hard. The higher, thinner air is offset by the bigger outfield and all games being played at night to avoid the 105+ degree heat during day games.
I would consider his floor Rico Brogna and his ceiling John Olerud.
Uh, for a “gym rat” the guy sure looks like he could stand to lose 15 pounds from his, to put it gently, core. I’m not a subscriber to all the good-body-bad-body stuff around prospects but Dom Smith does not look to me like an athlete who’s going to age well.
This all seems optimistic to the point of wishful delusion to me.