Dominic Smith is on quite a run. Through April 14, he has both a wOBA and xwOBA well in excess of .400… but let’s not kid ourselves, what I really mean here is that he is currently third among position players, and fifth in MLB, in WPA. When he hit that walkoff grand slam, it was a really cool moment, but it actually didn’t really matter WPA-wise given that there were none out and the walkoff run was on third. But last night, he amassed an insane 0.75 WPA, with 0.63 of that coming on his game-winning
double into the left-field gap that turned a 5-3 deficit into a 6-5 victory a few minutes later. Combine those heroics with him hitting basically everything from a right-hander, and, yeah. Quite a run.
Amazingly, through mid-April of 2021, appearing exclusively as a pinch-hitter, Pablo Sandoval also had quite a run for the Braves. He had a 371 wRC+ in ten PAs, with basically two gigantic hits — a game-winning homer in a tie game late in one, and then a seventh-inning game-turnaround homer (from a 3-2 deficit to a 5-3 lead) eight days later. His WPA through those first few weeks was above 1.00, basically the same as Smith has through the same place on the calendar.
And then, well, those early heroics kind of faded into obscurity. He finished April with a 199 wRC+ (still great, but not exactly the insane start he had), and then never rose above 100 for any subsequent month. He also got a lot less playing (pinch-hitting) time in June and July, and was basically an afterthought by the time the Braves traded him to Cleveland for eventual postseason hero Eddie Rosario. Whatever stories we tell ourselves about the 2021 season, whether about the playoff run, the Trade Deadline acquisitions, the way Ronald Acuña Jr. carried the team before going down with injury and not being on the field as things righted themselves down the stretch — they seem to have overridden Sandoval’s torrid start. The baseball season is long, so it makes sense…
…but you see where I’m going with this.
So, what do you think? Different role (main DH against right-handers versus main pinch-hitter in a ruleset that didn’t yet have the DH in the National League) taken into account, or not — do you think the legend of Dominic Smith, Braves Hero will only grow, or will it fade like Sandoval’s early-2021 start, in a way where he literally did not factor into the team’s eventual turnaround and postseason success?
