It seems safe to say that most people expected Dominic Smith to be better than he was in 2021. Now, you may not have been as optimistic as me, but chances are you expected better than a .244/.304/.363 line in 493 PA. In his previous 396 PA, Smith put up a .299/.366/.571 triple-slash line. So, how did we get from the second set of numbers to the first?
The most obvious thing is that in the latter, more productive, triple-slash line, Smith had a .344 BABIP. The odds were stacked against him matching that in 2021. Indeed, Smith produced a .298 BABIP this past season, six points above the .292 MLB average. We should have expected something along the lines of the 55-point drop in batting average. But how do you explain the 153-point drop in ISO?
ISO, as you know, is SLG-AVG. In the latter set of numbers, Smith has a .571 SLG and a .299 AVG for a .272 ISO. If Smith would have duplicated this mark in 2021, he would have tied Jose Ramirez for the 10th-best mark in the majors. Perhaps we should have expected a drop from a .272 ISO, too. But my opinion is that expecting a drop of 153 points was not anything we should have expected.
Let’s look at his batted ball profile, to see if there are any glaring changes that might explain why Smith’s power numbers dropped so much.
| Period | GB/FB | LD% | GB% | FB% | HR/FB | Pull% | Center% | Oppo% | Soft% | Med% | Hard% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | 1.15 | 24.3 | 40.4 | 35.2 | 22.3 | 42.5 | 34.3 | 23.1 | 13.1 | 49.6 | 37.3 |
| 2021 | 1.07 | 26.2 | 38.2 | 35.6 | 9.1 | 36.8 | 40.6 | 22.6 | 12.1 | 52.9 | 35.0 |
The biggest thing is that while he hit virtually the same percentage of fly balls last year as in the previous two seasons, they simply did not leave the park at the same rate, with a HR/FB ratio less than half of what it was previously. Smith wasn’t pulling the ball as much as he did in the 2019-20 period and he had a slight drop in his Hard%, too. Interestingly, his LD% was up a bit. As line drives are the batted balls most likely to produce hits – and often XBH – it’s a tiny bit surprising that both his AVG and SLG dropped as much as they did.
And while it’s not present in the above chart, we should note that his K% was nearly unchanged in the two periods, up just 0.2% in 2021.
The FanGraphs splits tool allows us to combine his 2019-20 data into one “season” to compare his batted ball profile. However, we cannot do this with the splits tool for his plate discipline numbers. So, we’ll look at the last three years with the next comparison.
| Year | O-Swing% | Z-Swing% | Swing% | O-Contact% | Z-Contact% | Contact% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 30.4% | 68.2% | 48.5% | 59.5% | 83.1% | 75.4% |
| 2020 | 35.8% | 68.4% | 51.9% | 62.0% | 83.2% | 75.8% |
| 2021 | 33.1% | 70.8% | 51.8% | 55.8% | 83.3% | 74.5% |
The “O” and “Z” in the column headings refer to the strike zone, with “O” being outside of the strike zone and “Z” inside the strike zone. So, in 2021, Smith swung at 33.1% of pitches outside the strike zone.
Generally, we think of swinging at pitches inside the strike zone as the most beneficial way to approach an AB. And we see that Smith had his highest Z-Swing% last year. His Z-Contact% was basically the same that it always was. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help to clarify the issue very much, certainly not to the extent that his batted ball numbers did.
Statcast has some zone situations for us to look at in our quest to find what happened to Smith last year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide us exactly what we’re looking for, but we’ll use what we have. Here’s a chart showing Smith’s AVG on balls he swung at this past season.
At Smith’s Statcast page, you can hover over any of these little squares and see how many times he swung at pitches in this area. And while he came up 493 times last year and saw 1,850 pitches, there are so many squares that not any individual one has many pitches contained within its borders. While I did not click on anything close to every square, the most I saw was seven pitches. So, you need to focus on areas instead of any one particular square.
Conventional wisdom has lefties being low-ball hitters. But this chart shows Smith as being pretty bad at hitting the ball for AVG in both the bottom of the zone and pitches that were too low to be a strike. Additionally, Smith wasn’t very good at balls in the top half of the zone and higher, either.
You can be simplistic and say that Smith should tighten his strike zone, eliminate the top and the bottom, and he’ll go back to having success. But MLB pitchers generally try to avoid the middle of the zone. They’re working low and away or up and in for a reason – those are spots where hitters generally don’t fare well.
Watching games last year, it was readily apparent that Smith was struggling with high pitches. My hope is that the new regime will encourage Smith to lay off pitches that are a full baseball higher than his belly button. That’s going to result in pitches being called strikes in roughly the top quarter of the strike zone. But if you’re not swinging at that letter-high strike, you’re not swinging at that shoulder-high pitch, either. And that’s the tradeoff that Smith needs to make.
Also, the hope is that by eliminating high pitches that Smith can better prepare for the low ones, too.
It seems that the vast majority of fans are ready to get rid of Smith after his poor season in 2021. My take is that Smith isn’t far removed from being an extremely worthwhile hitter and at his age, it’s a mistake to think he can’t move back heavily in that direction from what he put up last season. That doesn’t make Smith untouchable. Virtually everyone should be available in the right deal.
Instead, it’s to back away from the idea that Smith must be traded this offseason. To have on your roster a backup 1B/LF/DH at age 27 who put up a .616 SLG in 199 PA at age 25 seems like a good thing to me, especially with all of the injuries that the Mets typically have. While it’s not realistic to expect him to repeat a .616 SLG mark ever again, it’s probably not a given that he’s going to produce a .363 SLG going forward, either.
Especially if he lays off the high pitches.
I agree that Dom still has potential and could still help the team, but I would not mind seeing him traded to a team where he might play 130 games at 1B, hit .270 with OPS .750… which is where I think he belongs. A nice 6th hole hitter. The GM that sees this, should be willing to give us something worthwhile in return.
Brian, the Mets need to hire you to provide them with advice.
Thanks for the kind words!
They could have used me back in 2019 more so than now. Oh well…
I like Smith but the reality is that you generally must be prepared to give up talent in order to get talent in return. It wasn’t like he was a rookie in 2021 it is inconceivable that both he and McNeil simply forgot how to hit. The Mets lacked a hitting coach when they canned Chili and Rojas was not capable of making the necessary adjustments. We still need, in my estimation, a front line pitcher, a solid number two or number three to protect against our big two going down with injury. Stro would have nicely filled that spot but he chose to play elsewhere. We also need one more significant piece in the pen. Smith made himself a much better leftfielder over the course of last year and again given Nimmo’s history of getting injured there will be times that he could be plugged into the outfield. I’m not convinced that we need to move him in a trade but the reality is if we can plug those other holes then he, McNeil, or JD Davis need to find a new place to work.
As always, incredibly interesting research Brian. I think you offer some sound advice for Dom, and well, other Mets hitters, that love swinging at pitches at the letters. In reality this makes sense as eye-hand coordination improves with the ball more at eye level, but it is a temptress, because it’s eye-bat coordination that matters. In the split second to choose, those high fastballs look like a loaded 5 Guys cheeseburger coming at them only to realize the *bat* cannot get that high. For the past 2 seasons, I think the high fastball has been the go to undervalued out pitch (a thing Noah failed to learn), but now is it “overvalued” to the point that haters will adjust?
For Dom, his biggest issue I see is not rescuing his ‘21 results, although you’ve provided some strong guidance for his improvement, but whether Dom can be rescued from himself. The higher level systemic issue Dom has is that his productivity is in lock-step with his BABIP. As you noted, his best productivity came with an unrealistic BABIP of .370. But his situation is not a “onesy”. I plotted the following hitting metrics for each year: BA, BABIP, OPS, OPS+, and ISO. While there is some inherent circularity in the comparisons as they draw from the same data, what is clear is this, Dom’s production is exclusively linked with his BABIP. It tracks up and down with perfect prediction. I mentioned this in my November article, because it completely is the opposite of Pete Alonso who has terrific OPS and OPS+ numbers despite a humble and consistent (thus far) .270 BABIP. Whereas we can hope for Pete to “progress” to the MLB mean of bout .300 – and imagine his value if that happens, we can already see where Dom could sit in a “non-anomalously” low ISO season by looking at his 2018 season.
Like 2021, in 2018 Dom had bout a league average BABIP around 300. Maybe he can magically defeat that with an extended run above .300, but so far in 5 seasons there is no consistency in BABIP (or BA for that matter) which has scattered across .150 points, so banking on a sustained above average BABIP is not warranted. In 18, Dom had a .300 BABIP and produced a sub 100 OPS+
I’m intrigued by your “eye-bat coordination” idea. Not sure how you would test it but I’d love it if someone smarter than me did the work. For most hitters, the bat starts out at a high level. It doesn’t make sense to me that a pitch traveling at the same velocity would be easier to hit below the knees than at the letters. The bat has to travel a greater distance to hit the low pitch. It seems to me that there’s more chance to screw up the correct swing path needed to successfully hit the ball with the greater distance the bat has to travel.
Guess it could be that the bat is too heavy to keep parallel to the ground at letter height while swinging with the necessary velocity. If that’s the case – would a thinner bat be something players should consider? A quick search shows MLB rules dictate maximum length and thickness of the bat but nothing at the other end of things. With the cost of bats not being a major hindrance, would it be worthwhile to go to a thinner bat, even if you had to go thru five bats in a game? My understanding is that the value of “corking” your bat is not that cork (or super balls or whatever) make the ball go further – but rather that it made the bat lighter. Same thing with hollowing out the end of the bat.
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The extreme volatility of Smith’s BABIP, combined with his relatively small (still) MLB sample makes me unsure what his true talent in the category really is. With Alonso, given his extra PA and more stable yearly BABIPs – I feel pretty safe saying that it would be a huge outlier if he posted a .315 BABIP. I’m not ready to say that about Smith. Still, to me the wildcard is Smith’s power output. His .119 ISO last year is flukier than his .368 BABIP in 2020. Before last year, Smith’s worst ISO was the .196 mark he put up in 2018.
If we gave him that 2018 ISO last year, giving it to him with extra doubles and triples so the BABIP remains the same, he would have posted a .744 OPS. Now, that’s not starting 1B material. But it’s a triple-digit OPS+ – Villar had a 102 OPS+ with an OPS six points lower – and my guess is that people wouldn’t be horrified by that type of production.
It’s not completely unreasonable to believe that Smith’s true talent level is somewhere around a .310 BABIP and a .220 ISO. In 728 PA before last year Smith had a .304 BABIP and a .236 ISO. Last year there was a player with a .216 ISO and a .313 BABIP — Kris Bryant.
That doesn’t mean that Smith = 2021 Bryant. But he’s shown us enough to say there’s a good hitter in there somewhere and I just don’t believe we should be so eager to get rid of that.
A couple thoughts.
1. Alonso is never gonna have a .315 BABIP, and I did not mean to imply that. He has a very consistent about .275 BABIP, but what if he crept that up 10 points? He’d be looking at OPS+ >150 and OPS in the .950 to 1.000 range. That seems doable as he matures as a hitter. I will talk about this a little more for my January article that reviews his 2021 HRs.
2. You hit it on the head about Dom and which I tried to articulate: his BABIP is extremely volatile, but worse it tracks exclusively with hitting success. His hitting value is linked to BABIP, which itself swings crazily, and only generates high value when BABIP is unrealistically well above MLB average. What is interesting is that Dom’s 5 year average is .301, spot on for MLB, so it gives some guidance about what his output will be. In the 2 years his BABIP was essentially .300, he posted a consistent 84 and 85 OPS+, .670 OPS, and negative bWAR. So let’s imagine he gets a bump over that, the thing is he basically become a .700 slugging, 100 OPS+, 0.5 bWAR player. That adds up to bench level. If the main thing is that he needs more PAs to smooth out the volatility, the question is whom to you rob them from. I would argue it is folly to put in Dom at 1B and risk losing his baked in 130 OPS+. Like it or not, with the present OF configuration he won’t get playing time there, and he’s a terrible outfielder. That leaves DH, should that come to pass. Seems like a big experiment to potentially squander DH to hit a guy 7th or 8th in my eyes.
Maybe Dom defeats the system and manages to turn into Justin Turner or Daniel Murphy by playing every day – but odds reside against that. In any event, we have a first baseman that is throwing up monster numbers and peripheral metrics suggests he is more likely to improve, such that Dom will never catch him, particularly as his premium years are now.
I don’t have any problem with someone who feels it’s unlikely that Smith is a worthwhile starter, when you factor in offense, defense and baserunning.
I think our greatest disagreement is on what his upside his, his 95 percentile outcome. When he had a .616 SLG in 2020 – which might be his 99.9 percentile outcome – he had a 168 OPS+, which is 21 points of OPS+ higher than Alonso’s best season. Maybe he never approaches that again. I certainly wouldn’t wager on that .616 SLG happening again. But I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen, either.
Yes, there are all kinds of warning signs and flashing neon lights around that. Small sample, Covid year, unsustainable BABIP – to name three red flags. One would be a fool to expect a .616 SLG from Smith going forward.
But it seems significant that over the 2020-21 period, only two players on the Mets have posted a .600 SLG over a 50-game period. Smith’s .616 in 2020 and Alonso’s .605 mark from 7/19-9/9 in 2021. Conforto didn’t do it in 2020 with a BABIP 40-something points higher than Smith. Maybe in 2022 Lindor and Marte put up numbers like that over a 50-game span, we see Smith struggle again and we trade him for some used fax paper.
Until that happens, I’m not giving him away so we can put Albert Almora or Billy Hamilton or Mallex Smith on the roster because they can run and allegedly play defense. If someone offers a pitcher to slot ahead of Taijuan Walker, I’d trade Smith. Otherwise, I’d give him a chance to show that 2021 was the fluke, not 2020, even if the season starts in a reserve role.
It is reasonable to hope that Dom will hit better.
I can’t say you are wrong.
Honestly, I don’t know. I thought he was terrible for a long time, then he wasn’t. and then I believed, and then he was more terrible than ever.
After 2020, I thought he might be better Pete. I wanted to see them both show up in 2021 and show something. Pete did; Dom didn’t.
He lost me last season.
Maybe he proves me wrong. Maybe he hits like Manny Ramirez. But I just don’t see it.
This dialogue about eye-bat coordination reminds me of something Tim McCarver used to say all the time…you have a round bat and a round ball and they goal is to hit is square. There is a very big difference between hitting a baseball and hitting a baseball “square”, or with authority. That is a very violent act. It requires not only contact, but power, most of it coming from the core body and precise timing of aligning the movement of all those parts perfectly at the point of impact. This essentially takes a lifetime training. That training and muscle memory is based on practiced swings from the knees to the belt or thereabouts. Even though that distance may in fact be farther, the polished professional swing act is much better trained for that point of contact. It appears that the arms lag on high heaters, as they break from the overall swing timing. This gets into physics and stuff way beyond my anecdotal observations as a baseball fan, but the lure and inability to do damage on high fastballs has been a part of baseball for most if not all of its history.
Is the BABIP issue correctable for Dom? Perhaps, but I agree with others that the best teams to take a shot at that correction are teams that can commit to him as a starting 1B for 2022. As such, it does make sense to look to deal him to one of those teams, so long as the return is close to adequate value.
I can’t explain it, but it’s easier to get around on low pitches that high ones. Every hitter knows it.
To me, Smith’s BABIP seems like it could link up with the shifts he faces and his (off and on) ability to go the other way.
I’ve seen him roll a lot of weak grounders into the empty spaces. It’s frustrating that he doesn’t use that skill more often — though it’s very possible, when reading about the Mets (cough, cough) “organizational hitting philosophy”, that he isn’t encouraged to do so. It might even be frowned upon.
Watching Conforto, Smith, and McNeil continually pull grounders into the shift all season was a disheartening experience. That’ll kill a BABIP.
Ugh x2. The end of this was lost twice in uploading.
His 2018 season is a benchmark for BABIP league avg, and accounts for the anomalously low 21 numbers. Adjusted to 2018, Smith is still sub 100 OPS+ guy. He will not displace Pete at 1B to make Pete a DH. Dom is not an OF and Pete has logged 94% + games played, leaving Dom for mop up or end of game defensive specialist, if a guy that does not see regular game-speed action can be considered a specialist. That leaves Dom getting AB from DH. If he can be traded for a needed piece, he should be.
Dom has career 104 OPS+ and his age makes his some what valuable. Alsonso blocking at 1B. Cano the blocking him at DH. Dom is a very below average LF. Your arguments above also support your final conclusion in your last line.
Last year he had almost 500 plate appearances which is by far the most he’s had in any season thus far in his major league career. That probably meant he saw more left-handers which might have negatively impacted his cumulative stats. Smith was also part of the overall team funk parade last year but he willingly took to the outfield in order to help the team.
Overall, the experience gained from those plate appearances as well as having faced more left-handers could help him in 2022. Maybe he faces more right-handers and plays more DH.
He is only 26 (27 in June) so I’m very much in favor of holding on for at least one more year.
They should replace Dom with a more useful player.
Someone who can field. Run the bases. Fill in if somebody gets injured. Provide a jolt of energy. That kind of thing.
Will Dom ever hit like Manny Ramirez? If not, he has no value. None. I don’t expect him to have any value on the market, either. But that’s no reason to keep carrying him.
Here’s a number: Dom’s WAR last season according to Baseball Reference was -0.7.
He can’t play the outfield at all. He’s unable to go and get the ball. He’s a massive negative out there, and it matters.
If the idea is that this is a team “built to win,” taking a flyer on a guy like Dom Smith — who was brutal all of last season — who maybe might possibly hit next season — sure seems like a risky way to do it. Sure, he’s only 26. Maybe last year was a fluke. Maybe it happens for him. I’m okay if that “if” happens somewhere else.
The 77-85 Mets need to upgrade, not cross their fingers.
Last season’s lethargic group needs a transfusion.
Good luck, Dom. You seem like a nice guy. Try and get some rest. You look sleepy.
We teach young hitters to “look down” in the strike zone. Be ready to cover the pitch below the waist. For several reasons:
1. Umpires don’t see them as well and tend to call them strikes.
2. Low pitches are hit while still in the crouch and are easier to make contact with.
3. Contact below the waist generally involves the legs and makes more solid contact from a more compact base..
4.. Higher pitches are tougher to hit and focusing down in the zone makes recognizing higher pitches easier, easier to lay off.
5. It is infinitely easier moving up into the zone to hit a higher strike than dropping down to hit a low strike.
Looking down in the strike zone makes a hitter see pitches better, make better contact, and be more selective.