Is now a good time for a Dominic Smith appreciation post? I mean, the sky is blue, isn’t it?

The first baseman/left fielder put together a terrific 2020 campaign for the New York Mets. He landed among the league leaders in a number of offensive categories as he slashed .316/.377/.616 with 10 home runs, 42 RBI, 27 runs scored, and a 165 wRC+ through 199 plate appearances.

And now that the offseason has arrived for most MLB teams, the recognition for Smith’s efforts have already begun rolling in. The 25-year-old has received the honor of being one of 14 finalists (seven from each league) for the Hank Aaron award:

With this in mind, I found four different statistics from Dom’s 2020 breakout campaign that jumped off the page.

The Multi-Hit Games

At certain points throughout 2020, didn’t it feel like the Mets didn’t play a game without Smith recording at least two hits before the final out was made? Well, that’s because this wasn’t far off from the truth.

In the 50 games Smith suited up for this past season, he enjoyed a multi-hit effort 15 different times. This included three games of at least three hits, and each of these occurrences happened after August 10th. So, in reality, it took Smith just 39 games to reach this number. If we look back at what he did between his debut in 2017 and the finish of the 2019 campaign, he recorded just 26 multi-hit efforts over the span of 194 games played.

Looking at this in the form of percentages makes it a little more eye-popping, too. From 2017-19, Smith enjoyed a multi-hit game about 13.4% of the time he took the field. In 2020, that percentage more than doubled to 30.0%.

The Increased Power

Using ISO as the barometer shows us that Smith enjoyed a power surge in 2020. Between each year of his big-league career thus far, he’s accumulated between 149 and 199 plate appearances in a single season. Since 2017, his yearly ISO has looked like this: .198, .196, .243, and .299. If we use the same two periods of time to compare against one another, though (2017-19 vs. 2020), it’ll be just as eye-popping.

Here’s how Smith’s doubles, homers, and RBI have progressed:

The 25-year-old can thank his performance on fly balls for this noticeable lift in power numbers. When singling out this specific batted-ball event in 2020, 11 of Smith’s doubles, all 10 of his homers, and 26 of his 42 RBI came in that situation.

Although his fly-ball rate dropped from 2019 (37.1%) to 2020 (33.3%), he experienced some career-high numbers in other areas. His wRC+ on fly balls rose from 248 to 419, while his soft-hit rate (18.4% to 6.7%) and hard-hit rate (32.7% to 60.0%) each improved dramatically.

The fWAR

After two years of producing below replacement level for the Mets in 2017 and 2018, Smith put together his first positive performance through 89 games played in 2019. But still, Smith’s career fWAR heading into 2020 was -0.3 through 194 games played.

This past year, though, he finished behind only Michael Conforto on the Mets’ position player leaderboard with a 1.8 fWAR. So, in the matter of just 199 plate appearances, he managed to shift his career fWAR from -0.3 to 1.5. That also includes more than doubling his 2019 output (0.8) in nearly an identical number of plate appearances (197 in ’19, 199 in ’20).

Making the Most of His Opportunities

Smith had a knack for finding his way onto league leaderboards despite not getting quite as many opportunities as those surrounding him. Sure, he still qualified for the batting title with those 199 plate appearances, but if he started or at least got into another five or six games, who knows how much different things could be looking right now.

One stat that gets lots of attention is RBI, and it’s more like a team statistic because it’s hard to drive many runs in if no teammates are on base when you come to the plate. The Mets were second in baseball with a team on-base percentage of .348, and while they had a problem getting many of those runners to score, Smith wasn’t part of that group.

He slashed .333/.379/.596 with runners in scoring position, which came out to a 156 wRC+. His season-long total of 42 RBI was one of the 10 highest numbers in baseball. However, if we look at the 14 players who drove in that many runs in 2020, Smith was literally the only one with fewer than 200 plate appearances.

In fact, only two of the other 13 players in this group — Kyle Tucker and Eddie Rosario — accumulated fewer than 240 plate appearances (228 and 231, respectively).

Any way you slice it, Smith put together a memorable season despite the limited number of games played. He’s gone from seemingly being an afterthought to part of what’s already an impressive young core, and it’ll be fun to see how he can build on this performance in 2021.