Justin Smoak Is Actually Good

Justin Smoak is having a moment. A well-deserved moment, at that. And I don't just mean that he seems to have suddenly transformed himself into a hitter capable of delivering on all the massive promise he showed early in his career. I also mean that observers throughout the game are truly taking notice.

On one hand, how could they not? Smoak's 150 wRC+ currently ranks as the 15th best in baseball (and first among AL first basemen). His 17 home runs have vaulted him ahead of early-season sensation Eric Thames, placing him just one behind the Yankees' much talked-about Aaron Judge. Crazier still, among the 28 players with 14 home runs or more, only Joey Votto, Freddie Freeman, and Mike Moustakas have struck out less.

On the other hand, it's been a very, very long time since this much positive has been written about Smoak. Probably not since he was dealt from the Rangers to Seattle—the city he and the Blue Jays will be visiting this weekend—as the key part of a package for Cliff Lee. In just one of what were countless examples from at the time, Jay Yencich of M's blog U.S.S. Mariner looked at Smoak as a potential solution at first base for the club, suggesting that "there's a good chance Smoak not only holds the position down, but becomes an all-star player in the Mark Teixeira mold for the next five+ years."

In the more recent past, however, the conversation about Smoak has looked a lot more like this. And that's one of the polite ones!

Among Jays fans, the vitriol has been free-flowing, especially in the aftermath of last year's deal. And rightly so! From July 16, the day news broke that he'd signed an extension with the Jays, until the end of the 2016 season, Smoak produced a pitiful 67 wRC+. His slash line over the season's final two-and-a-half months (.176/.263/.365) wouldn't be acceptable coming from the greatest defensive shortstop in the history of the game, let alone a supposed slugger at a position where the bar for offensive production is high.

He was awful. His playing time dwindled. His contract looked awful.

Worse, his contract was spun as "insurance" against the potential loss of Edwin Encarnacion and/or Jose Bautista. I eventually found myself able to rationalize that idea, explaining in a piece at Blue Jays Nation: "The Jays could have had a worse player for less, but you obviously don't want a worse player than Smoak. They could have had a better player for more, but they wouldn't have known how much better or how much more until free agency began—and the 'more' would have impacted what they could do elsewhere, while the 'better' might not have been better enough to justify the 'more.' Or they could have just re-signed a workable player in Justin Smoak for workable dollars and avoided having to try to thread that needle altogether."

I was, however, in the minority among Jays fans, the most irrational of whom saw Smoak's deal as incontrovertible proof that the club's new front office—who they were predisposed to hate after the untimely exit of Golden Boy Alex Anthopoulos in November of 2015—was hellbent on returning the Blue Jays to mediocrity as quickly as possible, and certainly not serious about re-signing either of their two beloved sluggers.

Now, of course, it turns out that none of us were right, and that Justin Smoak is actually good! From that realization has come a wave of media attention. It seems that everywhere I look there's a Smoak piece right now. Evidently memories of that potential Teixeira-like prospect die hard.

To name but a few, Jonah Keri has written something of a mea culpa for Sportsnet. Evan Davis of Fan Rag and Azam Farooqui of Beyond The Box Score have credibly opined that what Smoak has been doing might genuinely be for real. And in what's probably my favourite of the lot, Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs has given us There is an Urgent Need for a Justin Smoak Article, in which he simply, and visually, walks us through what has been so different about Smoak this season as compared to his recent past, and assesses whether or not those differences look sustainable.

Specifically, Sullivan zeroes in on Smoak's two-strike approach:

He also notes that Smoak been more disciplined, showing us a heatmap of his swings that highlights the fact that he's been able to keep from chasing pitches low and out of the zone. He rightly explains that it's still probably a bit too early to think that these are "forever" kinds of changes, warning that "the question is always whether a different approach can sustain, and as pressure mounts, some players slide back. Smoak has a long track record of poor two-strike hitting, and that isn't yet something we can ignore."

Even with questions still lingering, it's a glowing, and informative piece. What it underlines for me, though, is that, counter to much of the narrative we're hearing, the fans and the writers who were so thoroughly enraged and baffled by last summer's extension weren't necessarily wrong. Smoak had to completely transform himself as a hitter—and, in particular, as a two-strike hitter—in order to make the Blue Jays look so smart here.

At the time of the deal, GM Ross Atkins explained that the Blue Jays especially liked Smoak because of "his defence, the power, the plate discipline and the potential of there being more in there." It turns out that he was right—or, at least, that right now it looks as though he was—but that's hardly reason to give him, or any other GM, a free pass for making a questionable deal, or having a contract look like it's thoroughly blowing up in your face, as Smoak's deal very much did for almost an entire year.

There's no need to repent, Jays fans. You were right about the old version of Justin Smoak. And even better than that—now you can sit back and enjoy the new version as he has his moment.