Smith Jr. shows off fun side in game
Players tournament gives fans a deeper look at OF
As the son of a major leaguer, Dwight Smith Jr. was raised on the idea that professional baseball is a job that requires a lot of work and dedication to succeed.
His participation in the MLB Players League, in which one member of each club played as his respective team in a round-robin tournament in the video game “MLB The Show,” allowed Orioles fans to see more than was evident in a 2019 season in which he was trying to keep a big league job for the first time.
“They pretty much saw my more relaxed side and my competitive side at the same time,” Smith said Wednesday. “When I’m at the game, I’m all business, but when I’m off the field I’m a totally different person — I’m more relaxed, more chill, just having fun. But when I’m playing the game, I just flip that switch.
They saw two different sides of me.”
For Smith, who made the playoffs as the fifth seed and was awarded the Manager of the Year award for bringing the Orioles to the postseason, there was. He and his sister would do elaborate pregame handshakes, and his trash talk caught on with fans who watched and chatted along during the month-long tournament.
He co-opted teammate Trey Mancini’s nickname to welcome foes to the “boomboom room” and enjoyed a bit of fan involvement when he asked them who he should pinch-hit in a situation. They chose first baseman Chris Davis, and he hit a home run.
“Playing on that side of it was pretty cool, playing a video game virtually and giving the fans something to talk about and something to cheer for,” he said. “It was one of the coolest things I’ve done.”
Smith said that his time since spring training was shut down in mid-March has largely been spent with his family in Peachtree City, Georgia, and centered around his training. Even without a firm date to return to action, he’s adopting the mindset of staying ready in terms of his workouts and baseball preparation.
“I’m really just hanging around with my family,” he said. “We’ve been doing a lot of stuff together, like watching movies, playing board games, doing all those type of family things. Then, I’ll just go outside. Really, my workouts get me through the day, because by the time I’m done working out, I just want to sit down, relax, read a book, maybe sleep or something like that.
“That’s pretty much [it], not much I’m really doing besides that. I’m doing a couple podcasts here and there. I do some DJing with some music, stuff like that. Anything that can pass by the time, I’m pretty much doing.”
Smith said that he previously liked to create music, though the computer he used to make mixes got a virus and put an end to that. He’s picking that back up though, he said, and noted that his sister made him a TikTok to get him involved in that viral video craze.
For all of the family time he’s having and personality he’s showing, however, Smith knows that there’s a serious component to the coronavirus pandemic and the possibility of baseball returning in it.
“There’s definitely concerns about that, because we want to make sure it’s 100% safe when they give us the go — or if they do — to restart back up again,” Smith said. “We don’t want to contract that virus and then pass it around to others amongst ourselves and get other people sick, and just continue the pandemic. We want to stop that as much as we can.”