Rockford's greatest baseball players: This Boylan grad bounced around the majors

Editor's note: This is another entry in the Rockford Register Star's exploration of the area's greatest athletes since the end of World War II. We have picked the greatest players in multiple sports like football and basketball. This is the seventh in our baseball series.

Hitting a baseball wasn’t enough for a young Jake Smolinski.

“When he was 10 years old, I bought him a thing called a SwingAway,” his dad, Mike Smolinski, said. “It got to the point where he had his swing down so well he had me put a blindfold on him and he would still be able to hit the ball.”

Simply catching the ball wasn’t enough either. As an 8-year-old, Jake would ask his dad to throw the ball to either side of him without warning.

“Everything had to be a little bit tougher,” his dad said. “He always had to do fantastic dives or a flip and roll.”

“I liked to push myself, challenge myself and be challenged," Jake said.

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Jake Smolinski would later be challenged by a string of injuries, but he overcame them enough to become the only NIC-10 position player to make the Major Leagues in the last 80 years and be named as the shortstop on our Rockford area all-time baseball time.

“You could put Jake at any position,” our all-time catcher Nick Shields said.

Indeed, Smolinski was also the star pitcher on Boylan’s state qualifying baseball team as a junior in 2006, played second and third base in the minor leagues and all three outfield spots for the Texas Rangers and Oakland A’s.

“Putting him at shortstop is a good place,” said former Boylan coach Paul Heitkamp, now the school’s athletic director. “He could have played any place for us, but I don’t now why I would have removed him from shortstop or the mound.”

MLBer has a football past

Smolinski was also a very good soccer player and wrestler when he was young, but gave up those sports in high school. Nothing, though, could make him give up football. Even when he took a pounding.

Or, more often, gave out a pounding. Smolinski led the conference in passing with 1,105 yards as a senior and also ranked 10th in rushing (540 yards) and fourth in rushing touchdowns (nine).

“I always think of Jake as a football player first because he was so physical,” said former Boylan football coach Dan Appino. “He was built like a running back. There were a couple of games where there would be a huge collision. Usually you’d see a defender getting up and hollering after a hit like that, but Jake would be the one hollering and yelling. That would fire the whole team up. He even threw a block on a reverse once and pancaked the defender on the play.”

As a junior, Smolinski got hit so hard in a loss to Naperville Nequa Valley he missed the next three weeks. Still, even with a bright baseball future looming — he is the highest drafted player in Rockford history as a second-round pick of the Washington Nationals, No. 70 overall — Smolinski didn't worry about getting hurt in football.

“I never thought twice about any of that,” Smolinski said. “I had a mentality from a young age that I wanted to be as tough as possible. Any game I was playing, no matter what sport it was, it was always important to me to have that type of mentality, that toughness, in both sports and in life.”

He shined on the diamond, too

The only thing Smolinski did to protect his baseball future is to stop being a starting pitcher after his junior season. As a junior, he hit .444 with 13 homers and was 8-0 as a pitcher with a 2.49 ERA and a team-high 68 strikeouts in 53 innings for a Boylan team that lost in the state quarterfinals. As a senior, he pitched only as Boylan’s closer.

His season ended with a 9-3 loss to Rock Falls in the sectional finals. But Smolinski went out in style, going 4-for-4 with a home run and a double against senior Seth Blair, who would go on to become the Pac-12 Pitcher of the Year at Arizona State and is still playing pro ball, pitching in Triple-A last season.

“That was a sad day, but looking back on it, it was a nice way to end my high school career,” Smolinski said, “to kind of turn the page and try an new chapter.”

“Those are the two best kids I ever saw compete against each other in a game,” Heitkamp said. “I don’t know who to compare Jake to because he is above everybody I’ve had. I had an umpire tell me once that, ‘I might not be in the right place because he hits the ball too hard. I might not be able to get out of the way.’ ”

For all the home runs Jake Smolinski hit, he was mostly known for hitting frighteningly hard line drives.

“He could square the balls up better than anybody else, even from a young age,” said Dan Scarpetta, a left-handed pitcher who was drafted in the third round by the Brewers in 1982 and coached Smolisnki as a 10- and 12-year-old on youth travel teams.

“He could obviously hit the ball out of the park, but he wasn’t a kid who was just bombs away," Scarpetta said. "He was a gap hitter who would hit line drives to right-center and left-center. But he hit the ball hard. And the biggest thing is he was able to square the ball up. A lot of kids miss and pop the ball up. He didn’t. His coordination was above everybody else.”

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His luck, though, wasn’t.

Bitten by the injury bug

Smolinski got off to a strong start, hitting .305 as an 18-year-old in Rookie League ball for the Gulf Coast Nationals. But he wrecked his knee at age 19. That was the first of four surgically repaired injuries he suffered. Later, he would have two screws put into a bone in his foot, two pins after he snapped his left thumb and shoulder surgery to fix a torn labrum.

“You would need a full page article just for the list of injuries,” Smolinski said. “It wa a big challenge getting back to a high level after those, but I never got down about injuries. That’s just part of the game.”

The biggest one was the knee injury.

“I had full knee reconstruction after getting taken out at second base,” he said. “My ACL, MCL, meniscus, it was all pretty much gone. That was the biggest one to bounce back from. That took a year or two.”

He was traded by Washington to Miami after that year. He rose as high as Triple-A with the Marlins, hitting .258 with nine home runs and 31 RBIs in 95 games in 2013. He was a free agent after that season and decided to move on, signing with Texas. That year, at age 25, six years after he blew out his knee, he was called up to the big club in July, becoming the first NIC-10 hitter in the Major Leagues in 77 years.

And he arrived with a bang, knocking out eight hits in his first four games to set a Texas Rangers record.

“Once you get there, it’s just a dream come true,” Smolinski said. “But staying there is a whole other thing. I was so happy to fulfill that dream, but I really did want to stay and I knew I had to perform. Once I got there, I got on a roll. It was a time in my career where things were really clicking.”

But things were soon hurting again. The streak ended when Smolinski took a fastball off his fingers and had to sit out a game or two. Then he was soon hurt again. He wound up playing only 24 games for Texas that year, hitting .349 with three home runs, 12 RBIs and what would turn out to be a career-high .903 on-base plus slugging percentage.

Getting his chance in the majors

That would be the first of five straight seasons where Smolinski bounced between the Major Leagues and the minors. His biggest chances came that first year with Texas and with Oakland at age 27 in 2016, but both chances were interrupted by injuries. He did play 99 games with Oakland in 2016, when the A’s moved him from left and right field and tried to make him their regular starting center fielder. He hit .238 with 7 homers and 27 RBI.

“That was a big time in my career to play every day,” Smolinski said. “Thinking back to the days with the SwingAway in the basement every day to becoming an every day Major League center fielder, it is hard to put into words. It was such a thrill.”

Smolinski played briefly with Oakland the next two years, then had one final season in the minors before retiring in the winter of 2020. He may have played longer if teams had tried to platoon him. He hit left-handed pitchers at a near-All-Star level, compiling a career .282 batting average with a .825 OPS against lefties, but hit only .204 with a .552 OPS vs. right-handers. And he batted more against right-handers (363 at-bats) than lefties (245).

“I did bring value to the team in that sense for sure,” Smolinski said. “And I did platoon sometimes against lefties, but as a player I could never think that way. I had to prepare myself every day to play the best I could and try to put that on the field. That’s all you can do as a player.”

Smolinski had one of his best minor league seasons in his last year. He was hitting .270 with a career-high 12 homers and 46 RBI in only 67 games with the Class AAA Durham Bulls when he left the Tampa Bay Rays organization to finish his career in Korea.

“I had always wanted to play overseas at some point in my career and I had the opportunity to finish out the last three months in Korea,” Smolinski said. “It was a great experience. Having a translator and being in a totally different culture was pretty wild, but the baseball was really good and the fans are incredible. Every player has his own song that the fans sing. I am so thankful I had the opportunity to play there.”

He had the opportunity to play again in 2020. The Mets invited him to camp. Smolinski said no. He is now retired at age 33, living in Lubec, Maine, a town of 1,237 people that is the most eastern point in the United States.

“The Mets offer came late, only a few days before spring training,” Smolinski said. “At that point I was wrapping my mind around being done.

“I live now on the Gold Coast of Maine. It is beautiful. So much forest. A cold, rocky coastline. Small-town living. Great trails. Great wildlife. I had enough of city life. I wanted to get away. I love it here. It’s beautiful. I’ve gotten into sea food and fishing. That’s a big industry here. That’s something I want to get into at some point, being a fisherman.”

Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at mtrowbridge@rrstar.com and follow him on Twitter at @MattTrowbridge. Sign up for the Rockford High School newsletter at rrstar.com.

About this series

The Rockford Register Star has been writing about the greatest area athletes in various sports since the end of World War II. Previously, we have picked the greatest players in football, boys basketball, girls basketball, boys tennis, girls tennis, boys golf and girls golf, as well as greatest games in football, boys basketball and girls basketball.

Their entire careers, spanning from high school to the pros, is considered, but only players from schools that are in the newspaper's current coverage area are considered, so players such as catcher Gene Lamont of Kirkland and pitcher Seth Blair of Rock Falls were not eligible. For baseball, we picked nine position players and four pitchers. All players were picked by sportswriter Matt Trowbridge with input from NIC-10 History Blog author Alex Gary and local coaches. Players who were used at several positions during their career were placed where they fit best on this team. One player will be revealed each day.

Pitcher: Drew Dickinson, Freeport

Pitcher: Dan Scarpetta, Auburn

Catcher: Nick Shields, Harlem

First base: Matt Dettman, Auburn

Second base: Sean Lyons, Byron

Third base: Andrew Wilhite, Stillman Valley

Shortstop: Jake Smolinski, Boylan

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Rockford's greatest baseball players: Jake Smolinski hit blind folded