The 1976-77 season for the Northwestern State Demons wasn't anything special. They finished 17-9, paced by Billy Reynolds, who averaged 26.4 points and 12.1 rebounds per game. Dan Bell, Lester Elie and Lester Davis all chipped in double-digit point contributions on a nightly basis. And then there was a 6-foot-5 forward who chipped in 3.4 points and 1.9 rebounds per game.
Want to guess which player was the future Hall of Famer?
That aforementioned 6-foot-5 forward was Lee Arthur Smith, whose college basketball career wasn't anything special. But his professional career was something else — quite literally, as it was in another sport — as he became the seven-time All-Star closer for the Cubs, Red Sox, Cardinals and other clubs, dominating batters and helping to set the standard for what a shutdown closer should look like.
But just because he abandoned his basketball career doesn't mean that he stopped playing entirely. He shared his story with Jim Duquette and Bobby Evans on Jomboy Media's "GM Files" podcast.
"I actually played high school and college basketball against Robert Parish, because he's from Shreveport, Louisiana," Smith said. "But you know, it's just something to break up that monotony of, okay, I gotta go to the ballpark today, we gotta see these guys... until halfway through the ninth inning."
Smith said it was one of his "releases" from the pressure and focus he always had to devote to baseball en route to becoming an unhittable force on the mound. But it doesn't sound as though he was just casually putting up shots as a nice stress reliever. After all, you can't exactly take it easy when you're playing with, oh, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird.
"I liked playing a lot more with Michael because he passed more than Larry did," Smith said with a laugh. "...You just think about the names that we're talking about, these guys right there. But I think the one dude that really drove us all out there was Danny Ainge, because he had the Lee Smith going. He couldn't guess which one he wanted to do."
Smith, of course, is referring to the fact that before Ainge became an All-Star in the NBA and a two-time NBA champion with the Celtics, he was a two-sport athlete who actually began his professional career as a baseball player. In three seasons with the Toronto Blue Jays (1979 to 1981), Ainge compiled an unimpressive stat line of 146 hits, two home runs and a .220/.264/.269 slash line. NBA career averages of 11.5 points, 4.0 assists and .469/.378/.846 shooting splits are a lot prettier to look at, don't you think?
We wonder what sort of stats we could have seen from Smith had he pursued an NBA career, though that never really seemed to be in the cards.
"All I wanted out of life was [to] be a high school basketball coach. That's what I wanted, that was my dream," Smith told the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2019. "I want to go to school, get an education, come back and coach basketball at the school that I went to. And this baseball thing just sort of got threw in my life."
"He loved basketball more than baseball," said Tynes Hildebrand, then Smith's head coach at NSU. "He had trouble understanding how valuable he was for baseball and that his future was in baseball. If he had devoted his career to basketball, he would have been one of Northwestern State's all-time greats. Same with baseball. If he had played here, he would have been the greatest baseball player in school history."
Of course, both Ainge and Smith ended up making the right decision, with the former enjoying a sustained career as an NBA executive after his playing days and the latter getting his call to Cooperstown as a member of the Class of 2019.
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