Add new comment

1
Taro's picture

Theres a few reasons I'm not quite as high on Smoak's upside as others. For one his swing is not particularly quick. Granted hes made some neccesarry adjustments to compensate such as fixing the the loading flaw and hitting the other way (though hes pulling more recently).
Second his pitch recognition skills (or eye) are merely average. He is patient, but he is patient in that he avoids hitting both strikes and balls and actually is slightly below-average in O-Swing%. Combine with his contact ability being below-average and his "hit" tool is slightly below-average IMO. He will make up his OBP with BBs, but it hurts his SLG potential. Which bring you to his power, which is very good but not elite. He doesn't have Branyan-type lighttower pop. His ceiling is closer to the high 20s unless he runs very high FB-rates (which he never really has and would further damage his hit ability).
Overall its a toolset that suggest a good hitter in the making, but not an elite one.

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd><p><br>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

shout_filter

  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.