MLB Trade Rumors confirmed it Wednesday night: the Diamondbacks have outrighted first baseman Pavin Smith off the 40-man roster. It's the next domino after Arizona designated him for assignment on July 9, and it means Smith cleared waivers without another club taking a flier on him.
MLB Trade Rumors broke the news of the outright assignment.
This one stings a little more than a typical roster-clearing move because of who Smith is to this organization. Arizona took him 7th overall out of Virginia back in 2017, betting on his pure-hitter reputation as the first-round pick of the current baseball ops regime. He debuted in 2020, logged a full 145-game season in 2021, and stuck around the org for parts of six seasons.
The numbers just cratered this year. Smith was hitting .141 with a .428 OPS when the DFA came down, a brutal line that made the move feel inevitable rather than shocking. He leaves Arizona with a career .241/.325/.394 slash over 1,629 plate appearances -- a solid if unspectacular body of work that never quite matched the hype of a top-10 pick.
Now the ball is in Smith's court. Because he's got between 3 and 5 years of service time, he has the right to reject the outright assignment and become a free agent, but doing so means forfeiting the roughly $900K left on his $2.25M salary this season. The expectation is he accepts the assignment and heads to Triple-A Reno to try to rebuild value, rather than walk away from guaranteed money on a .141 batting average.
For Arizona, it's a minor procedural move buried in the middle of trade-deadline season, but symbolically it's the finish line for a former cornerstone prospect who never fully broke through. The Diamondbacks clear a 40-man spot right as the roster crunch of deadline dealing ramps up -- worth watching whether that spot gets used for a trade addition in the coming days.