Not every season’s success can be measured in pennants. A majority of teams each year have to attempt to chart their progress without the assistance of a postseason bracket. With the 2024 Texas Rangers increasingly unlikely to track the championship path of last year’s club, the focus must necessarily widen. What will this year’s team teach us about the Rangers’ future? Who has transformed his role in that future?
Though even this might admittedly count as a letdown given the stratospheric spring expectations for Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter, the most significant evolution of 2024 has sprung from the bat of Josh Smith. The 27-year-old multi-positional player acquired in the Joey Gallo trade has made a thunderous case that he, too, is a part of the core that will power good Rangers teams in the near future.
Filling in for Josh Jung at third base for most of the season, while also seeing time in left field and at his natural shortstop position, Smith has made a quantum leap. He’s batting .270/.360/.426 with 12 homers in 115 games—24 percent better than a league average hitter per the park-adjusted hitting metric wRC+—after coming into 2024 with a career .191 batting average in sporadic appearances across 163 major-league games.
His success in regular playing time has largely wiped away the memories of his sub-Mendoza line performance across 2022 and ’23, so much so that Smith had to remind MLB Network’s Brian Kenny that he did not hit right away in the big leagues. He will not have to remind the projection systems, which remain skeptical of his progress. When the slate is cleaned for 2025 and beyond, the identity of “the real Josh Smith” will no longer be in question, but his production will still require reinforcement.
Smith, an LSU product, was never going to muscle his way to the majors with brute physical tools. Instead, the 5-foot-10, 172-pound infielder rose through the prospect ranks on the strength of a disciplined approach and the stellar .421 minor-league on-base percentage it produced. Which makes it especially interesting that his most obvious adjustment in 2024 involved adopting something much closer to the Corey Seager approach — an attacking mode of pouncing on hittable pitches, no matter the count, that helped Seager win World Series MVP and get a plate discipline metric named after him.
Though Smith still swings less often than the average major leaguer, he is jumping on more strikes (and a few more balls) than he had been. Maybe most noticeably, he is hunting first-pitch strikes, and hitting them to the tune of a .439 batting average. Only nine players have tallied more first-pitch hits than Smith’s 29. (Fittingly, Seager and Marcus Semien are in that group).
This useful aggression creates a bit of a balancing act, though. Taking more chances to do damage is a smart move, but Smith lacks the raw power to make a living selling out for it. His average exit velocity ranks among the bottom 20 percent of MLB hitters. Among batters with at least 10 homers this year, only six have less average distance on their long balls.
You’ll recognize the contours of his extra-base hit spray chart.
That’s the foul-pole-targeting trademark of a modern category of hitters who pull the ball in the air as often as possible and maximize the results in those moments. The story of Smith’s breakout is a tale of allowing himself enough leeway to try on that style without losing himself.
When he pulls the ball in the air—which I’m defining as a launch angle of 5 degrees or more—Smith is running a .541 batting average and a 1.149 slugging percentage. When I tell you those highly profitable cut make up a quarter of his batted balls, you can do the math: it’s a recipe for success.
Whether he can continue to thread the needle is a more complicated question. The drop-off from his pull-side air-ball contact to that in any other direction is severe. He slugs only .397 when he goes straightaway or to the opposite field, well below the .510 MLB average lifted by that raft of hitters with more oomph.
But pulling the ball means committing to a swing early, which can compromise the strike zone judgment, which is still a bigger engine of his performance than power: Smith ranks 18th among qualified hitters in on-base percentage, but 71st in slugging. His strong numbers mean pitchers will work harder to challenge him, and indeed, his roughest patch after the All-Star break coincided with pitchers cutting his fastball diet and forcing him to adjust his balance.
At the bottom of that snowball effect, you find an occasional superstar such as Jose Ramirez, who has mastered the art of the pulled fly ball, along with a handful of practitioners who make it work juuust well enough, and a pile of players who can’t keep it up consistently enough to sustain even average bats.
Smith does inspire optimism for a few reasons. For one, his upper-echelon bat-to-ball skills should help him steer clear of the strikeout bugaboo that afflicts many hitters who have to work harder for power. More saliently, his aforementioned defensive aptitude will keep him afloat as long as the bat is within spitting distance of average. You don’t have to look far for examples of Smith-esque hitters who slipped markedly from exciting peaks while remaining valuable major-league contributors. Baltimore Orioles center fielder Cedric Mullins, for one, has never matched an eye-opening 2021 triple slash that will look vaguely familiar, yet he plays regularly for a top contender.
The odds are that Smith’s offensive numbers will recede, perhaps by quite a bit. After this star turn in which he has wedged himself into the picture alongside Seager and Semien, he (probably) won’t repeat as the second-best hitter in Texas next year. That, though, is more likely to represent a healthy sign that others have picked up the pace in the race toward another winning season, chasing Smith’s dogged sprint beyond expectations.
Author
