The son of Irish imports Robert and Catherine (Gorman) Smith, Samuel J. Smith played about half a season with the Colonels in 1888 as a first baseman, having earned that shot with two good seasons at St. Joseph and Denver. At Denver, he hit .373 with a .509 slugging percentage. The nickname, Sky Rocket, must have been earned while playing in St. Joseph, as the earliest reference to it is with a Topeka newspaper in March, 1887, before he slugs baseballs in Colorado. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as well for Smith in the American Association where he hit .238, but he had some power and drew a good number of walks. So, while he actually hit better than league average, he was well off what the expectations might have been.

(That makes him the first player whose value was misunderstood because (a) playing in Colorado inflated his value and (b) people overvalued batting average as compared to slugging and on base percentages. I digress.)

By July he was released. (Smith is the one in top row, third from the left.) That said, his reputation allowed him to keep playing, albeit in lower and lower levels, for the next several years. The next four stops included Des Moines in the Western Association, Seattle (Pacific Northwest League), Walla Walla (Pacific Interstate League) and Phillipsburg (Montana State League). If you land in the Montana State League playing in Philipsburg in 1892, you are a long way from the National League.

(I’m not knocking Philipsburg. It’s beautiful there – and while you can’t find many diamonds, you CAN find emeralds.)

A tall, rangy guy, Smith became a firefighter in St. Louis after baseball until his untimely death on April 26, 1916 at age 48 (or 53 – see below). According to his Missouri Death Certificate, he died of uremia associated with kidney failure and cirrhosis of the liver. His remains, and those of his wife, Mary (Mamie) Brockhoff, are buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis in unmarked graves. (Oddly, his obit in the St. Louis Star says his wife was the former Mary (Mamie) Reed (nee Maguire) and the two had only married about 4 weeks earlier.

More importantly, I’m not convinced that Smith was born in 1868 or in Baltimore, as his Baseball-Reference page suggests. According to the 1870 US Census, Samuel was the fourth of seven children born to the Smith family and all seven kids were born in Missouri. In the 1880 US Census, Sam is working as a blacksmith and listed as 17 years old. That means March 19 might be his birthday, but he was born in 1863 and not 1868.

Notes:

“Base Hits,” The Daily Commonwealth (Topeka, KS), March 23, 1887: 3.
“Ball Notes,” Daily Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, NE), October 20, 1887: 2.
“Marriage Licenses,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 31, 1916: 21.
“Smith,” St. Louis Star, April 27, 1916: 11.