Give Into Your Marinerism: Compairing Smoak vs. Montero

When I first came into the military, I came in with a few guys that were very much like me. We were loud, we were nerdy and we were headed into the computer career field. We went to basic training together, we went to technical school together and then we went to our first duty station together.

Initially we all went into the same shop –helpdesk– and then moved into different positions from there. I went to Information Protection; my buddies went into Network Infrastructure and Network Messaging.

Considering how the military works, I’m sure at that time the bosses collectively got together and chose who they wanted to head to their shop and who needed stick at help desk or even move out of the career field. I’m sure that when it came to our trio at one time our bosses even compared us to one another.

Now, while we all had similar personalities, obviously our minds all worked differently. We all had different areas of strengths, as well as, different areas in which were weaknesses.

Justin Smoak and Jesus Montero will forever be associated with each from a Seattle Mariner fan perspective. This is of course assuming Justin Smoak doesn’t continue getting better and stays basically what he is and that is a potential above average first basemen. Should he become what was originally thought of, a perennial all-star, he’ll most likely shake the Montero comparison.

The thing is here in Seattle we often dwell on the waht could have been moments –so long as they are positive– with Danny Tartabull, Omar Vizquel, Jose Cruz Jr, Jason Varitek, Brian Fuetes, Matt Thorton, Shin Soo Choo, ect. Though we are quick to forget about those that didn’t quite turn out such as Ken Phelps, Erik Hanson, Marc Newfield, Roger Salkeld, Chris Widger, Jose Paniuaga, ect.

I thought it was interesting being that both are now bonafied major leaguers they both have season long projections, which I thought “hey I should put it into an excel spreadsheet and compare the two and the projection systems used. This suddenly became an overwhelming task and I really didn’t want as much time into this as it suddenly demanded, so I just headed over to Fangraphs and used the Bill James and Fans Projection.

Here is how they turned out:

Funny thing is both have their strengths and weaknesses and while Montero is obviously the better hitter, Smoak gets the slight nudge in total WAR, presumably for his defense.

Something also to consider is that each report is done with the assumption of each playing in their respective parks. One can only wonder if Montero would have such lofty projections if he played in Seattle, vice versa with Smoak, would his projections be so conservative if he was playing in the band box down in Texas.

Just some interesting things to munch on during Christmas Eve.