“He is probably the biggest story in baseball right now, though not that many people are on to it.”~ Braves manager Russ Nixon (1989)
Great seasons typically stand out in our minds because, well… because they’re great. Joe DiMaggio’s 1941 season. Roger Maris in 1961. Koufax in ’65. Twenty years later, Dwight Gooden’s phenomenal 1985 season. Barry Bonds and his ridiculously great season in 2004. But every once in a while we encounter a season that, while may not be record-setting nor completely dominating, is still judged to be great. Look no further than Lonnie Smith’s 1989 season, when he was arguably- at least according to the advanced metrics- the best all-around player in baseball.
You remember Lonnie, don’t you? Perhaps if I said “skates”- a nickname he abhors- it might ring a bell.
Of course you older fans remember Smith. The 5 stolen bases in a single game. His second-place finish in the 1982 NL MVP race. The cocaine addiction. The plot to murder his GM. Three-time World Series champion with three different teams. Tackling the Phillie Phanatic because the mascot mimicked his footwork, spraining both of the ankles of the person inside the costume. Home runs in 3 consecutive World Series games.
For Braves fans- and perhaps most baseball fans- Lonnie is probably most infamously known for the base running blunder in the top of the 8th of game 7 of 1991 World Series. The gaffe is widely thought, right or wrong, to have cost the team the World Championship. Which is a shame because the team might not have even made it to the Fall Classic if not for Smith, who filled in- and thrived- at the lead-off spot for the suspended Otis Nixon (who, ironically, was suspended 60 games that September for testing positive for cocaine).
For all that we remember about Lonnie, there is one thing that most of us have forgotten: that 1989 season, in which he was named The Sporting News Comeback Player of the Year. It was one of those seasons where the stars aligned for the man whom no other team wanted a year earlier. He once again became an offensive threat, clubbing a career-high 21 homers, driving in 79 RBI (also a career high), drawing 76 walks, along with 34 doubles and 25 stolen bases, not to mention leading the National League in on-base percentage (.415) and in average with runners in scoring position (.427). And if all that weren’t enough, Smith, whose reputation on defense to that point in his career was “liability”, scored an astounding (for him, at least) 2.1 dWAR and 23 defensive runs saved. Perhaps it was only a season that could be fully appreciated through the lenses of modern analytics.
To put Smith’s 1989 season in perspective, his 8.8 WAR was the seventh highest single season output by a position player during the decade. The six above him? All future Hall of Famers. The host of one YouTube channel (Jon Bois) stated that had Smith played a full 162-game schedule that season at the same production level of the 134 games he appeared in, he would have finished with a 10.6 WAR, which would have come in at the highest for a position player during the decade (the highest was Robin Yount’s 10.5 during the 1982 season). How he came to that number, I haven’t a clue; but it certainly is conceivable.
Was Smith’s season ridiculously good, or does it show how ridiculous advanced metrics can be? Take a look at Hank Aaron’s Baseball Reference page and you will see that The Hammer only had two seasons (9.4 in 1961 and 9.1 in 1963) that scored a higher WAR than Lonnie’s 1989 season. And not to take anything away from Smith’s great 1989 season, but would you really rather have 1989 Lonnie over 15 of Henry’s 17 “All-Star-level” seasons?