I just did a profile of Chino in my Eclipse League Thread, so thought I'd best add him here as well.
Here's what I say in that other post to save you hunting it down.
Few ballplayers, if any, have fascinated me in the way
Charles "Chino" Smith has in the short time since I became aware of his existence. The Babe, simply for his prodigiousness, has always been my favourite. Of the current crop, Juan Soto, who I could watch for hours. In fact, the closest comparison would perhaps not be a baseball player at all, but rather Muhammad Ali, although Chino isn't quite in his league with regard to my respect and admiration. Not yet, anyway.
Perhaps it is the paucity of information about Chino that fascinates me; perhaps it's the content of the little that does exist. I don't know; nor, frankly, do I really care.
He was just 5'6", but carried himself as if a foot taller. Jim Riley says this of him:
This compact dynamo who, according to Satchel Paige, was one of the two greatest hitters in the Negro Leagues, was a scrapper, arousing the fans and intimidating pitchers as he shot through the world of black baseball like a meteor, with a career as brief as it was bright.
He adds:
A line-drive hitter whose lined shots to all parts of the ballpark looked like frozen ropes, he [...] hit everything thrown at him and respected no pitcher. Sometimes he would spit at a pitcher's best offerings as [they] came across the plate, taking two strikes, before lining a base hit back through the middle. Supremely confident at the plate, the little slugger had no weakness.
Now I know most of these types of stories have been embellished beyond recognition, so let's have a look at him from a statistical perspective.
For reasons I shall get to in a little while, Smith played just 7 seasons in the various NeLs between 1925 and 1931. Seamheads lists his career slash line as 398/485/659 over 945 ABs, with 82 doubles, 21 triples and 41 HR. They have allocated him an OPS+ of 179 and 14.3 WAR.
Eric Chalek's MLEs - my secondary statistical source for NeLers - has him at 332/399/560, with 43.3 WAR or better than 6 per season.
The tricky part of assessing Chino is threefold. As no lesser source than Strat-o-Matic put it thus in the handbook to their
Negro League All-Stars pack:
Number one, not only was he a Hall of Fame candidate in 2006, everybody who ever played against the man said he was one of the two or three greatest hitters they ever saw. [...] Number two, he played in an extremely hitter-friendly home ballpark in New York, which skewered his performance. And number three, he died of Yellow Fever when he was only 30-years-old.
Yes, tragically his career ended almost before it had begun.
SoM used his Cuban League stats to settle on their ratings for him. I just stuck with my own methodology and am OK with how it turned out. Perhaps I have inflated his ratings somewhat, but who knows - he could have got even better and maybe I have in fact sold him short.