Seth Smith: Man of Many Splits

By this point in the season, I think it's been made pretty apparent that I'm a giant fan of our own LF Seth Smith. I find his playing time to be incredibly lacking, considering his general batting efficiency, his fielding, and the fact that I hear he also can fly and does charity work for puppies with cancer in his spare time.

Seriously, though, his statistical breakdown is really interesting, considering the deficiencies he's supposed to have and the actual numbers he puts up, both home and away.

For starters, let's take a look at my favorite stat, IsoD (OBP - AVG) which, as we all know by now, is a measure of how well a player is able to take walks. The general idea of OBP, again, as we all know, is how often a player DOESN'T make an out. Right now, Smith is amongst the leaders in both categories for the Rockies.

* indicates LHB, # indicates Switch

The other number I love to see is that high IsoP (SLG-AVG), and it warms the cockles of my evil heart to see Seth Smith amongst the leaders in that category as well. However, whenever we see a player OPSing over .900, especially a Rockies batter, it can't be real, it's all Coors Field, he's actually terrible on the road, blah blah blah.         

Join me after the jump and we'll see what Seth Smith has to say about this.

When you talk Home/Away splits, Seth Smith has this to say:

Oh.

That wasn't expected.

Before we automatically burn him at the stake for being a Coors Hitter (TM), let's break down some more numbers. Because that's what we do here in Counting Rocks.

Well I'll be buggered. Will you take a look at that? Those Iso's are remarkable similar, home and road!

What this is telling me is that Smith is surprisingly consistent between home/road - in terms of his batting style. He's walking a very similar amount, when he makes contact, it goes a similar distance (if you'll give him the benefit of a bit of a Coors SLG bonus), he's just having trouble getting the actual hits.

Granted, it's a small-ish sample size, but something's clearly up. Smith is currently batting with a LD% of 23.6%, a whole .02% lower than his career line. He's clearly making solid contact when he makes it, so let's check out BABIP and see what secrets that can reveal for us.

Well, just looking at those home/road splits, it's pretty apparent that neither BABIP is really sustainable. Smith sported a .349 BABIP in the minors, which indicates that his home split might not be TOO unreal, but it more points to the fact that he just can't find a hole when he's on the road.

His 2008 numbers show an exact opposite split:

So given that Smith's splits have flip-flopped between the two seasons, I'm not ready to brand him a home or road hitter. Or really anything other than a very, very patient hitter.

The funniest split to look at this season is the only one that everyone seems to be behind: Seth Smith can't hit lefties. Well, can he?

An OPS of 1.583? And you people say this guy can't hit lefties? Looks to me like OWNS lefties!

(What do you mean 12 PA isn't statistically significant? Go away, I'm proving a point here.)

Well I'm clearly joking around about the LHP splits, but the Home/Road splits are...well, completely weird. They're both very AVG-driven, and that road BABIP is bound to come up. This isn't the case where he's magically slugging .200 higher in Coors than on the road and that fills out his entire OPS split, he's clearly batting pretty similarly both places. My thought? Give the guy more playing time. There's no way a guy with those peripheral numbers is seriously a .216 hitter outside of Coors Field.

So to conclude, Seth Smith is a very interesting batter. Fangraphs lists him as just shy of a win above replacement (which would more than likely be higher if he had full-time ABs), but his .409 wOBA puts him tied for 5^th with Adam Dunn in MLB LFs (4^th in the NL).

You ask me what I think about Seth Smith? He's badass.