TORONTO — All season long, Justin Smoak has liked where his swing is at. His plate discipline is on point, chasing less than he has at any other point in his career. Physically, he’s been feeling good, and there isn’t a significant difference in how opposing teams are pitching him.
Yet from April 10–25, as he grinded through a 5-for-41 stretch that included 10 walks and 12 strikeouts over 11 games, he found himself in a state hitters and coaches describe as caught in between at the plate, timing up neither the hard or soft stuff, flailing away ineffectively at both.
“I feel like a lot of times I get passive when I start walking a lot, instead of being on go,” says the Toronto Blue Jays first baseman. “When I’m on go, that’s when I lay off the tough ones, that’s when I take good swings. I might not hit it, but I put a good swing on a pitch I want to hit.
“I feel like in the past couple weeks I haven’t been on go.”
A pair of hits against Boston Red Sox ace Chris Sale on Thursday, including his third homer of the season and first since April 1, helped to start pushing Smoak back into go mode. Friday he was right there with a 4-for-4 night in a 6-4 loss to the Texas Rangers.
Smoak wanted to get back on the attack and he swung at the first pitch in three of his four at-bats, connecting in the fifth on a Mike Minor fastball into the left-field corner for a one-out double. His singles in the first and seventh came on changeups while another base hit in the third was on a slider. Each time he had a plan and wasted little time executing it.
“If you watch all the good hitters in this game, a lot of them are on go every pitch,” says Smoak. “A lot of the guys who have done really well for us early on, they’re all on go every pitch. Yeah, you’re going to take a pitch here and there, read situations, see what a guy has if you don’t know him, but then you’ve got to get back to, alright, it’s time to go.
“I probably need to be a little more aggressive.”
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His aggressiveness even extended into the basepaths, where he was thrown out in the first trying to score from first on a Kevin Pillar double and again in the third, trying to go first to third on a Yangervis Solarte single.
While Smoak has never been a free-swinger at the plate, he’d been especially patient so far this season, carrying the American League’s fifth-lowest swing percentage at 38.7 into Friday’s play, down about five per cent from his career norm of 43.4 per cent.
About 54 per cent of the pitches he’s seen this season have been hard, with the amount breaking balls thrown to him down about five per cent to 26 per cent, with a corresponding increase in changeups, up to 20 per cent.
The outcomes, however, had differed, as his line drive rate dropped from 21.2 to 15 per cent and his groundballs have increased to 43.3 from 34.3 per cent in 2017.
2017 (left) and 2018 (right) statistics courtesy of Baseball Savant.
“What happens is sometimes guys get in between fastball and curveball,” says hitting coach Brook Jacoby. “The intent every time they step up to the plate should be to attack the baseball until the eyes shut them down. If you’re tentative and passive, you’re not going to make good decisions up there. You need to be ready to swing the bat until your eyes shut you down.”
Counterintuitively, that’s why Smoak felt much better about this third at-bat against Sale on Thursday, a strikeout, than he did about the second, when he homered.
While the results matter in the moment, regaining comfort in his approach at the plate is more important over the long-term.
“I told somebody last night, in my third at-bat, that was the best I felt all year at the plate right-handed. I finally was feeling what I wanted to feel. Yeah I punched out, but that’s what I wanted to feel,” says Smoak. “In my second at-bat I got down 0-2 and he hung me a slider and I didn’t miss it.
“My third at-bat off him, I had some pitches that fouled off just off the barrel, and yeah I want those pitches back to do something with them, but at the same time, I felt the feeling I wanted to feel.”
Smoak carried that over to Friday and with the Blue Jays now having lost six of their past eight games, they can certainly use their all-star slugger back in form. Josh Donaldson threw to the bases Friday and barring setbacks, is nearing a rehab assignment and having their two big boppers slugging together could be the pick-me-up the team needs.
“I know my swing is good, it’s just all about getting in the box and being ready to hit and being aggressive,” says Smoak. “Be on time and be aggressive.”
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