Dominic Smith is in the driver\u2019s seat to make the Opening Day roster. The subtractions of Ha-Seong Kim and Jurickson Profar make it all but a certainty. Mark Bowman feels that Smith is your designated hitter versus right handed pitching coming out of the gate. It\u2019s difficult to argue that point, so I\u2019m going to get used to this idea and dig deeper to see what he can bring. I may have more of a deep dive soon, but the first thing that caught my eye were Dominic\u2019s comps from Baseball Savant. The Braves\u2019 former catcher\u2019s 2019 season was listed there.<\/p>\n
There are some parallels between the two. Travis had a .745 OPS in 2019 versus .750 for Smith\u2019s 2025 season. Travis had 2.79 strikeouts per walk and Smith was at 2.65. Smith had a 111 wRC+ against Travis\u2019s 100. So you don\u2019t have to squint too hard on the overall numbers. But after that, the numbers diverge.<\/p>\n
Dominic\u2019s splits make the case for his contribution as a Braves. He had a 119 wRC+ versus righties last season and a 100 wRC+ for his career. So as long as that\u2019s all the Braves are asking him to do, it will be fine. I think I would rather have 2019 Travis d\u2019Arnaud to start this season. This would allow decent hitting from the catcher spot and allow Baldwin to play as a DH more. But for now, Dominic Smith with his similar numbers from the DH spot should be fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dominic Smith is in the driver\u2019s seat to make the Opening Day roster. The subtractions of Ha-Seong Kim…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2394],"tags":[191,46,73299,4166,5,192,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-611896","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-atlanta-braves-discussion","11":"tag-atlantabraves","12":"tag-baseball","13":"tag-braves","14":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116188769695589694","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}