Diamondbacks rookie Pavin Smith has gone from bust to perhaps the best in his 2017 draft class

High in the right-field seats at Chase Field, on one of the video ribbons that ring the stadium, is a collection of pixels dedicated to exit velocity. Conveniently located down the first-base line, it allows a batter to gauge how hard he hit the ball every time he puts one into play.

Diamondbacks rookie Pavin Smith likes that part of his home park. He looks up there often, probably because it regularly flatters him with compliments. “If it’s over 95, you’re good,” Smith said. That’s the threshold for a ball to be considered hard-hit, according to Statcast, and this year that screen has told Smith that he’s good on 49 percent of batted balls.

That rate ranks Smith in the 83rd percentile of all big-league hitters, though it might surprise many to see that Smith is among the best at putting a jolt in the ball. To this point, most Diamondbacks fans have known him as the No. 7 pick in the 2017 draft who hit the minor leagues and immediately and repeatedly failed to hit for power. Picking that high should guarantee a team a top-100 prospect, but Smith soon didn’t even rank among the top 10 in Arizona’s own system.

But a player who seemed to be a high-profile whiff now might be the jewel of his draft class. This year, the Diamondbacks have enjoyed fewer bright spots than can be found in Darth Vader’s laundry bin, but Smith is unambiguously one of them. Entering Sunday, he was batting .293/.348/.457. His OPS+ of 120 ranks second on the team among qualified hitters. (Ketel Marte, who owns a 178 OPS+, does not have enough plate appearances to qualify after a month-long stay on the injured list.)

What’s more is that Statcast’s batted-ball data suggests Smith should be doing even better. His expected batting average is 13 points higher than his actual mark. His expected slugging percentage outstrips the real one by nearly 50 points. Drafted as a first baseman, he’s successfully turned himself into a corner outfielder and sometimes center fielder. He is a legitimate candidate — though perhaps not the favorite — for National League Rookie of the Year.

That’s quite the transformation for a guy who slugged just .392 during his first full professional season three years ago. Less than a year after that disappointing season, Smith unlocked some power in his bat. The following year, he was in the big leagues as Arizona tied the bow on a lost 2020 season. And now, a player who was considered by some to be a potential bust has the second-highest bWAR of anyone taken in that draft’s first round.

The guy with the highest, Phillies outfielder Adam Haseley, has barely played in the big leagues this season. That leaves Smith — not former top prospect Jo Adell, not 2019 breakout hitter Keston Hiura, not Brendan McKay or Kyle Wright or Evan White — as the 2017 first-rounder making the biggest impact in the big leagues. And after suffering the slings and arrows of evaluators second-guessing his selection early in his career, Smith can’t deny the satisfaction that gives him.

“I can’t lie,” he said, “and say it doesn’t feel good to prove people wrong.”

It was June 12, 2017, and there was a debate in the Diamondbacks’ draft room.

It was a unique environment for everyone involved. The Diamondbacks were picking inside the top 10 for the second time in three years, but this time a different set of decision-makers would pull the trigger. New to the room were first-year general manager Mike Hazen and his assistant Amiel Sawdaye, who was in charge of amateur scouting. They’d inherited a scouting staff — and scouting director Deric Ladnier — from the previous regime.

Everyone was still getting the feel for each other, but while that happened, they had a draft pick to make. At No. 7, the debate came down to two hitters. One was Smith, a three-year standout at the University of Virginia. The other was Haseley, an outfielder who just so happened to be Smith’s teammate.

It was a tough call. Smith had been the more consistent performer, with a career .326 average and .918 OPS with Virginia, but Haseley had broken out in a big way. As a junior, the outfielder had batted .390 with a .491 on-base percentage and a .659 slugging percentage, all huge improvements on his previous seasons. Should the Diamondbacks take the breakout star who played a tougher defensive position or the metronomic Smith? The Diamondbacks opted for predictability.

“If you’ve seen a guy do it over a period of time versus one guy who really turned himself into a good player, there’s less questions about it,” Ladnier said. “That ultimately was the determining factor in why we ended up going that direction.”

Very quickly, it appeared to be the wrong call. Haseley was selected by the Phillies with the very next pick. Midway through the 2019 season, less than two years after being drafted, he was in the big leagues. That year, Haseley batted a respectable .266/.324/.396. The year before, Smith had posted a similar line, but it was much more concerning considering it came at High-A. And, at the time of Haseley’s call-up, Smith was mired in a miserable Double-A campaign.

Two months into his 2019 season, Smith was batting just .218 and slugging less than .400. “I was like, ‘Here we go again,’” Smith said. Roughly two years into his minor-league career, the weight of his struggles was getting to him. But then the hits started coming — he batted .292 that June — and the extra-base hits came after that. Over the final two months of that season, Smith batted .350/.419/.589. By the season’s end, his .835 OPS ranked third among players with at least 100 games played in the Southern League that year.

“From the middle of June on, I felt like myself again,” Smith said. “It was the first time since being drafted that I felt like, ‘This is who I am.’”

Maybe he wasn’t a bust after all.

In a normal world, those two months would have more clearly heralded what obviously was coming from Smith. He would have begun the 2020 season at Triple A, where he would have continued to showcase his newfound ability to hit the ball hard and for extra bases. But instead, the 2020 minor-league season was canceled because of the pandemic, and Smith plied his craft away from most interested eyes at Arizona’s alternate site.

But not all eyes. Diamondbacks farm director Josh Barfield jokes that he had to play so much during those alt-site games — due to a paucity of position players, coaches and even farm directors regularly had to take the field — that he was more Smith’s teammate than the man ultimately responsible for his development. Whatever he was, he had an up-close vantage point for Smith’s continued breakout.

“After every swing, we would play ‘guess the exit velo,’” Barfield said, “and he was consistently the leader day in and day out.”

Smith spent the summer wowing Diamondbacks evaluators with his ability to hit advanced pitching and with his ability to play the outfield, the result of an offseason spent coaxing more speed and agility out of his body. He was called up midway through September, played just as much outfield as first base and posted a 99 OPS+, not too shabby a showing for your first taste of the big leagues.

But Smith has been far more than not too shabby in 2021. He might be the team’s most consistent hitter. Though his OPS has fluctuated from the low .700s to the low .800s, Smith’s batted-ball data suggests he’s been unlucky. Though he’s displayed some to-be-expected rough edges in the outfield and on the bases, Smith has never looked outclassed at the plate. Smith hasn’t worked counts as much as he did in the minors, but he also rarely swings and misses. His whiff rate of 11 percent is the best on the team. He has yet to hit a stretch in which he looked or felt like he couldn’t get a hit. The longest such slump he can think of this year lasted three or four games.

“I haven’t felt like I’ve been overmatched,” Smith said, half-jokingly making an exception for Jacob deGrom. “I feel like I’ve had a chance.”

But the Diamondbacks always felt Smith knew how to hit. As a junior at Virginia, he notably recorded more home runs (13) than strikeouts (12), a ratio that said far more about his plate discipline than his ability to hit the ball out of the park. It was the power they hoped was in there. Drafting him was a calculated bet, relying on the well-worn baseball wisdom that advanced hitters often tap into their power late.

Still, Ladnier acknowledges grappling with some uncertainty while the organization waited for that power to show up. “Any time a player struggles and you’ve invested the type of money that we’ve invested in the person,” Ladnier said, referencing Smith’s $5 million bonus, “there’s always going to be some sort of self-doubt — not his doubt, but our doubt.”

These days, when Smith connects on a ball, there’s no doubt.

The subject of his power at the plate, even as he’s regularly exhibiting it, still seems to rankle Smith. He knows his lack of home runs in the minors was a mark held against him by evaluators, especially the types who put together top prospect lists. The power is here now — that hard-hit rate doesn’t lie — but Smith insists that no major change to his swing or approach has led to it.

“I really haven’t tried to do anything differently, no matter what anyone says,” Smith said during a group video interview. “I know a lot of you guys like to write about it, but it’s not something that I tend to worry about too often.”

Diamondbacks evaluators tell a slightly different story. Smith hasn’t changed his swing as much as he has matured as a hitter. In the minors, Barfield said, Smith would too often shoot the ball the other way and sacrifice the chance to do real damage. That’s a sign of a skilled hitter — Smith has the highest contact rate on the team this year — but someone of Smith’s defensive profile needed to get more out of each batted ball. “He was defaulting to trying to carve the ball to right field,” Barfield said of Smith, who bats left-handed. He needed to be driving it to the gaps.

Smith also would point to general maturity as a hitter as an explanation for his breakout, but in a different way. The difference between his 2018 struggles and now is that he has a quieter mind at the plate, less focused on each mechanical component of his swing. He was like a first-time driver trying to back out onto a busy street — concerned about being in the right gear and which way to turn the wheel while also identifying the right instant to pull into traffic. “It’s hard to think about if I want to swing and how I want to swing at the same time,” Smith said. “I just went to more look at the ball and try to put the barrel on it.”

What’s clear, no matter what tweaks he made or if he made them at all, is that Smith wants to hit the ball hard. It’s why he glances up at his exit velocity in the stadium. It’s why he’s at peace with a long out he made off Dodgers reliever Joe Kelly last month; at 102.6 mph and with a 31-degree launch angle, it “was expected to be a homer,” Smith said. He loves Statcast’s expected numbers. They help him focus on the controllable process — hit balls hard — over the less-controllable results.

“All I care about right now is my hard-hit percentage,” Smith said. “If you hit the ball hard enough, you’re going to find holes eventually. It’s the law of averages.”

That wouldn’t leave much left in his care reserves for disproving the doubters, but there’s some pleasure in that, too. “I definitely saw a lot of articles that said the D-backs shouldn’t have drafted me,” Smith said. “It’s cool to see some of the same guys that didn’t like me do now.” The transformation between then and now was relatively quick, requiring just three years and less than 300 games in the minors. If anything, Smith’s career to this point is a lesson in the unreliability of knee-jerk evaluations.

But Smith knows there’s still a lot to prove. He’d like to hit more homers — who wouldn’t? — and has his eyes set on the left-field fence. “I hit it to the wall in left-center. I just can’t get it over right now,” he said. ”That’s another thing I’m working on.” He also knows staying in the majors is harder than making it there.

Perhaps because he dropped off top prospect lists — and because he plays for a losing team that struggles for national attention even in the best of times — he remains largely anonymous. “I can admit,” said outfielder Josh Reddick, who joined the team in May, “that I had no clue who Pavin Smith was when I got here.”

But Reddick knows now. He’s impressed with the rookie’s zone control and approach, with his cool-headedness in tough moments and his veteran mien. There may not be much good about the 2021 season for the Diamondbacks, but Smith’s performance more than qualifies. He looks like a big-league regular — one who hits the ball hard, and hits it hard often — which is exactly what you expect out of the seventh pick in the draft.

“It took a little while,” Barfield said, “but once he figured that out, he showed us why he was taken that high.”

(Photo: Norm Hall / Getty Images)