Former Demon basketball player Lee Arthur Smith (1975-77) is major league baseball’s all-time saves leader, with 478, but that mark is apparently about to fall.
San Diego Padres relief ace Trevor Hoffman notched save No. 474 Thursday afternoon and the NSU sports information office got its first call from a sportswriter asking for help locating the man the rest of the country knows as Lee Smith.
He still lives in his hometown of Castor but stays active in professional baseball. He worked with the South African team in this spring’s World Baseball Championships and has been a roving minor league instructor.
Bruce Sutter, the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs bullpen ace who was inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame in July, made no bones about it – he told every media outlet he could that Lee Smith deserves a spot in Cooperstown, too.
Perhaps Hoffman eclipsing Smith’s magnificent mark, carved out during a 19-year MLB career mostly with the Cubs and Cardinals, among eight teams, will boost Lee’s chances for induction in Cooperstown in the next few years. He picked up voting support this year, BTW.
The Demons’ current major leaguer, pitcher Brian Lawrence, had a big part in many of Hoffman’s saves since 2001 until this season. Lawrence won 49 games for San Diego from 2001-05, and was their No. 1 starter for two seasons.
B-Law has been on the shelf this season after major shoulder surgery in February. He was injured on the opening day of spring training, tearing the labrum in his right (throwing) shoulder at the Washington Nationals’ camp after being traded there by the Padres in the off-season.
The 30-year-old East Texan, a 17th-round Padres draft pick after his senior season at NSU in 1998, told the Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star last week his “arm feels great” and he’s “not far off” and could be ready for an October game “but I don’t think we’re trying to get to that.”
Brian, whose No. 27 NSU jersey was retired in January 2005, will be in an option year and is expected to be released by the Nats, but could be resigned at a lower salary than the $5.7 million option listed in his contract. He says he hopes to stay with the team because he feels good about the direction they’re going. He dresses out with the Nats every day and makes most road trips. He’s been living in the Washington area, not back in his off-season home in southern California.
He says “the ball is coming out of my hand better than it has in three years and I am not even 100 percent yet.” He is confident he will be much better than he was in his last two years with the Padres, when he says he “just thought I was getting older” but now thinks there was “probably something wrong in there.”
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