When you look at players who have had a very good career but are not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, most of them have some reason for why they aren’t in the Hall of Fame. However, the top three reasons are that they’re a suspected PED user, they have other “character clause” issues, or they were someone that was undervalued at the time that they played but modern statistics show that they were better than people thought.
Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers legend Reggie Smith falls into the latter category the most but, in reality, he wasn’t underrated as much as Hall of Fame voters just didn’t look at what they had available to them back in the late 1980s. That coupled with the modern stats show that Reggie Smith is perhaps, the most underrated outfielder in recent MLB history.
Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers legend Reggie Smith should have been in the Baseball Hall of Fame long ago
Reggie Smith spent 17 seasons in the majors from 1966 through 1982, spending eight seasons with the Boston Red Sox and six with the Los Angeles Dodgers and he had a career that should have put him in the Hall of Fame more than 30 years ago.
Smith is a career .287/.366/.489 hitter with 314 homers, 1092 RBI, a career OPS+ of 137, and an rWAR of 64.6. In his career, he was a seven-time All-Star, a Gold Glove winner, and he received MVP votes in seven seasons, including back-to-back fourth-place finishes for the Dodgers in 1977 and 1978, when the Dodgers went to the World Series.
He started his career off with the Red Sox but after the 1973 season, he was traded to St. Louis.