Reggie Smith — The Hall of Fame Outsiders, No. 29 (2024)

This offseason, leading right up to the 2021 Baseball Hall of Fame announcement, we’re counting down the100 greatest eligible players not in the Hall of Fame and ranking them in the order in which I would vote them in. Each player will receive a Hall of Fame plaque based on the pithy ones that the Hall used to use back at the start. We continue our essay series with No. 29, Reggie Smith.

Carl Reginald (Reggie) Smith
Boston—St. Louis—Los Angeles—San Francisco, 1966-1982

A quiet but powerful switch-hitter who could do everything on a baseball diamond. Showed up as a rookie in Boston and was immediately a key contributor to the Impossible Dream Red Sox. Was a consistent force throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. Upon retirement, he was second all-time among switch-hitters in home runs, behind only Mickey Mantle.

There were two Reggies, born about a year apart, they grew to about the same size, each was blessed with speed and strength and impossibly strong throwing arms. They were both multi-sport stars in high school, particularly gifted at football, but they both eventually settled on baseball. One Reggie — Reggie Jackson — went to college where he became a sensation and eventually the second pick in a new thing called baseball’s amateur draft.

The other Reggie — Reggie Smith — taught himself to switch-hit, signed with the Boston Red Sox out of high school before there was a draft and displayed his massive talents in the minor leagues. He beat his fellow Reggie to the big leagues by a year.

Reggie Smith played a pivotal role for the Red Sox in his rookie year, 1967, a year that will live forever in Boston lore. That was the year of the Impossible Dream Red Sox who won the pennant and, in just about every way, reignited New England’s passion for baseball. Before that team sparked imaginations, Boston baseball was close to flatlining. Boston had finished near the bottom of the league in attendance, ahead only of moribund franchises in Kansas City and Washington. Owner Tom Yawkey was hinting that if he didn’t get a new ballpark to replace Fenway, he might move the team.

But the ’67 Red Sox launched an entirely new era of Boston baseball. The team went from ninth place in ’66 to the pennant in ’67. Yaz had a season for the ages. And Smith as a rookie provided a little bit of everything, he cracked 15 homers, he stole 16 bases, he played glorious center-field defense, he hit a pivotal homer in the World Series — the future of Reggie Smith in Boston seemed unlimited.

That very year, Reggie Jackson came up for the Kansas City Athletics. He had a different approach. He swung for the fences on every pitch. In his first full year, 1968, he struck out 171 times, which was almost unheard of — the all-time record was 175. But Jackson was defiant and undeterred. He wasn’t playing anybody else’s game. He had come to the big leagues to become the game’s biggest star. In 1969, he hit 47 home runs, led the league in runs and slugging, and was on his way to a life of candy bars, Broadway lights and October heroics.

And what of Reggie Smith?

He quietly went about his pursuit of excellence. He led the league in doubles and won a Gold Glove in ’68. He hit .309 with 25 homers in ’69. In ’70, he hit .300 again and scored 109 runs. In ’71 he hit 30 homers, led the league in doubles again and also total bases. All the while, he was a superb outfielder and a dynamic base runner.

But he was desperately unhappy. He was a Black man in Boston barely a decade after the team was the last team in baseball to desegregate. He was a Black man in Boston when the city was being ripped apart by race, this during the busing wars.

“Is Boston a racist city?” a reporter asked him in ’73.

“Yes,” he said plainly. And he continued. “I know people are going to say I’m a super-sensitive Black man, that I’m a hard person to get along with, that I hate White people. Those people don’t know me.”

They didn’t know him. And, as far as Reggie Smith could tell, they did not want to know him. He lacked the bravado, the performer’s timing, the titanic home runs of the other Reggie. Everybody kept waiting for him to become someone else.

“I just got awfully tired of people saying that I never lived up to my potential,” he said angrily after he finally got out of town in a trade to St. Louis. “Everybody expected me to be a Willie Mays or a Hank Aaron. Why couldn’t I just be Reggie Smith?”

Why indeed? There are some players who are cursed this way, who inexplicably inspire people to see what they are not instead of what they are. “Potential,” he once told a friend and teammate named John Curtis, “is the worst word in the English language.”

All the way, he kept hitting, kept running down fly balls, kept flashing that once-in-a-generation arm. While the other Reggie was so mercurial and kept alternating breathtaking seasons with great seasons with good seasons, Reggie Smith was a metronome, doing the same stuff every year: he hit .300, he hit 20 homers, he walked about as much as he struck out, he played excellent defense. He did that in St. Louis, putting up two All-Star seasons.

Then he did it in Los Angeles. He had his best season in 1977 with the Dodgers; he hit .307/.427/.576 with 32 homers, 104 runs scored, 87 RBIs. He led the Dodgers to the pennant and a matchup with, yes, the other Reggie and the Yankees. Reggie Smith was awfully good in that series. He doubled and homered in Game 2 off Catfish Hunter. He homered again in the elimination Game 5. And he homered again in Game 6 to give the Dodgers a lead.

But, alas, nobody could outshine Reggie Jackson when the lights were brightest. Jackson hit three home runs in Game 6 and the Yankees won the World Series.

Smith was terrific again in ’78, hitting .295/.382/.559 with 29 homers and 93 RBIs. In August of that year, Dodgers star pitcher Don Sutton said publicly that it was Smith, not matinee idol Steve Garvey, who was the team’s true star and leader. Sutton and Garvey got into a locker room fight over the comment.

The Dodgers went back to the World Series to face the other Reggie’s Yankees. This time around, Reggie Smith could only manage five hits and one homer in the six games. And once again, Mr. October reigned.

Reggie Smith was never really healthy after that season. He was really good in part-time work his final season in San Francisco; he hit .284/.364/.470 with 18 homers in 106 games. The Yomiuri Giants then offered him close to a million dollars and he went to play in Japan for two years. He returned home and coached for a while, but has spent most of the 25 or so years since coaching kids, doing charity work and trying to get more Black players into professional baseball.

When you add it all up, what do you have? From a Hall of Fame case perspective, Smith was a seven-time All-Star. He posted right around 65 career WAR, which is in Hall of Fame range. His JAWS score — which combines his peak and career value — places him in the same world as other Hall of Fame right fielders like Dave Winfield and Vlad Guerrero.

But with a guy like Reggie Smith, you have to take it all in — the difficulty of being a Black man in Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his refusal to back down from what he believed, his complete disinterest in flashiness which caused so many people to overlook him, his quiet insistence on doing all the little things well. All of it adds up.

In the end, Reggie Jackson was the star, and he received 93.6 percent of the vote his first year on the ballot. Reggie Smith was underappreciated and underrated, and he received just three votes his only year on the ballot, and I’m not sure his case will ever be heard again. They are just very different Reggies.

(Photo of Reggie Smith: SPX / Diamond Images via Getty Images)