Baseball-Reference
You weren’t expecting to find Chuck Smith placed so highly in this countdown, were you?
Born in Memphis and raised in Cleveland, Smith took a circuitous route to the Marlins major league roster. We typically apply the “journeyman” label to ballplayers who frequently change teams once they reach the pros, but Smith was a cross-country traveler even before that. He attended high school in New York, then went the JuCo route (Central Arizona College) before arriving at Indiana State University.
More than 1,500 players were selected in the 1991 MLB Draft, but not Smith. He inked an amateur free agent deal with the Astros instead. He split his next seven seasons with the Astros and White Sox organizations, reaching as high as Triple-A. In 1998, the right-hander tried his luck overseas in the Mexican League and Chinese Professional Baseball League (Taiwan). Over the summer, he had an excellent stretch of starts with the indy ball Sioux Falls Canaries. The Rangers brought Smith back into affiliated ball for the 1999 season and the Marlins were encouraged/desperate enough by his performance to trade for him in June 2000—in exchange for outfielder/first baseman Brant Brown—and immediately elevate Smith to The Show.