Mets360 - The remarkable obsession with the feeble Mallex Smith

 

By Brian Joura December 8, 2020

Anything can happen in baseball. The 1969 Mets, who won 73 games the year before, finished the regular season with 100 wins. It would be 17 years before the Mets won 100 games again. If starting in the year 1970 you bet on the Mets winning 100 games, you would have collected just twice in the last 51 years. It’s hard to win 100 games and wagering on a team to win that many is simply a bad bet.

Every year in baseball we see multiple things that come out of left field, things that defy the odds. Michael Conforto posting a .412 BABIP in 2020 is just one of those examples. That total would have been more than three standard deviations from the 2019 BABIP mean for qualified hitters. On the surface that might not mean anything to you – just know that it’s incredibly rare. The bottom line is that like the Mets and 100 wins, you don’t want to make any wagers on Conforto repeating that feat going forward.

Which brings us to Mallex Smith.

In 2019, Smith had the most PA he’s ever had in the majors (566) and he finished with a 73 OPS+. Do you have any idea how horrible that is? If you’ve been a Mets fan for a while, no doubt you’re familiar with rotten offensive players. You watched 2018 Amed Rosario and 2002 Roger Cedeno and 1998 Carlos Baerga and 1980 Frank Taveras and 1974 Felix Millan and 1967 Bud Harrelson – so you know rotten when you see it. Smith was worse than all of those.

There have been 226 seasons in Mets history where a player has accumulated enough PA to qualify for the batting title. Only 12 times – five percent – has someone put up an OPS+ worse than Smith in 2019. And four of those were by Rey Ordonez and three by Doug Flynn. This is the type of offensive player we are talking about with Smith.

And last year, Smith put up a (-1) OPS+ in 47 PA. That means in his 613 most-recent PA, Smith has posted a 68 OPS+. Yowza, that’s not good. In his first two years in the majors, Smith put up an 83 and an 87 OPS+. He’s been consistently not worth a roster spot.

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