Add new comment

One way I love to evaluate players is to see where they sit among their peers in the league. I got to ESPN or MLB.com and use the sortable stats feature, sort by AL and position.
The logic is that building a winning roster requires your players to outplay their peers - at least at some positions. Too many players below the league median (7th or 8th in the AL) isn't going to cut it.
Right now Smoak is 5th among AL 1st basemen in OBP but 15th in SLG and 14th in OPS.
Obviously his performance is well below the median 1B at this point. Even getting his OBP & SLG to .400 wouldn't do much more for his standing. That would only move him up to 4th in OBP and still leave him 15th in SLG.
The AL median SLG for 1B is right about .500 and the median OPS is around .850.
In other words, Smoak has a long way to go to be in the middle of the pack offensively as an AL 1B. If the OBP were to settle in around .375, he'd need to slug .480 to be a middle of the pack player at 1B. Hard to envision at this point...