Dominic Smith will not let the past six months define his baseball career, both on and off the field.
He isn’t dismayed by his lack of playing time in September. After standout performances the past two seasons, Smith has started just two games this month. He’s batting .244 with a .667 OPS in 139 games this season. He’s also experiencing a power outage, going 47 games since his last home run on July 21.
It’s not the year Smith envisioned after slugging .616, fourth-best in the National League, in 2020’s pandemic-shortened season. This year, he battled minor injuries and played through them. He started 108 games in left field, by far the most he’s played at the position in his professional career. For a natural first baseman, playing left field for 66% of the season has been a grind. He also saw nearly all of his teammates miss ample playing time on the injured list while he tried to forge ahead.
“We’ve been getting punched in the face all year,” Smith said.
Smith’s -0.4 fWAR is indicative of that sentiment. He’s struggled at the plate all year — dropping to the 41st percentile for average exit velocity and 34th in barrel rate. His wOBA plummeted from an excellent .412, top 3% in the league, in 2020 to an awful .291, bottom 10% in the league, in 2021.
His future with the Mets is muddy after parts of five major-league seasons that have led to a 1.2 fWAR. With Pete Alonso stationed at first base for years to come, Smith’s down year at the plate no longer warrants his playing time in left field, which is why he’s been the Mets top pinch-hitter off the bench to end the 2021 season. Smith, though, is taking his rough year in stride. He said this season has been a learning experience, and the 26-year-old ballplayer thinks it will help him become stronger and more resilient.
“Whatever happened this year is not going to define me as a player, as a person,” Smith told the Daily News. “I know I still have a lot of years in this game. I have a lot of years to improve and get better. I’m obviously going to take that challenge like I’ve taken every challenge and just work. That’s all you can do. There’s a lot of things I want to work on. I don’t worry about my future. I just take it day by day. I live in the present.”
Smith doesn’t like to worry about things that are out of his control, with the sport’s business element chief among them. Spending time stressing out over whether he will remain in the big leagues next year or play for a different team is not a part of Smith’s outlook.
“My career, my numbers, will hopefully improve and that’ll take care of itself,” he said. “But it’s just about the impact I leave with my teammates and coaches and being a good teammate and a good person who your teammates like to have around. Somebody that your teammates can count on and depend on and just somebody you’d like to hang around with.”
To that end, Smith will continue embracing the philanthropic attitude that he learned from his parents. Smith, the Mets’ 2013 first-round draft pick, grew up in poverty in South Central Los Angeles. His dad owned a dog kennel until he lost that job while Smith was in high school. His mom was a cook. Smith’s parents would take in inner-city kids, teenagers around 13 or 14 years old, who were kicked out by their families and lived on the street. Smith’s family would take care of 4-5 kids in a small two-bedroom house, and he loved helping them out.
Smith doesn’t often open up about his humble beginnings or put a spotlight on the work he continues to do through this nonprofit organization, BaseballGenerations, which provides baseball instruction to prepare young players, both mentally and physically.
“We do so many things for the homeless and kids who don’t have the same opportunities that everybody has,” he said. “It’s something that I’m passionate about, but I just do it out of my heart. I don’t like to be out there doing it for show, I do it because I know what it means to me.
“I know where I come from. I know that there’s so many people that helped me get to this position. So I feel like it’s my job to help the kids in a younger generation that’s coming up under me, to get them to be the next president of the United States, or the next doctor, or the next firefighter. It’s not always about baseball, but it’s about letting them know they can be anybody they put their minds to.
“Sometimes that can be very far away when you live in an inner-city, when you live in poverty and when you’re dealing with all these other justice and social matters, because it’s definitely not fair. But it’s something that we have to maneuver through and figure out how to overcome it. And there’s ways we can. And I want to educate them on how to overcome it and how to beat the stigmatism and just bet on themselves.”
Smith knows his 2021, on the field, doesn’t represent who he is as a player. While Smith plans to work hard this offseason to bounce back from what he hopes is his worst career year, he’ll find solace in helping inner-city kids in his hometown reach their potential — just like him.
