I’ve been on our data provider (Sports Info Solutions, who provides stats to FanGraphs) about this issue for 3 days and I finally got to the bottom of it.
Holds are not an official stat (despite being on MLB.com), so there are not set rules on how to award a hold that are consistent between stats providers.
This is best explained by The Hardball Times:
The main remaining technicality that affects how holds are awarded is whether the game is official (i.e., has gone five innings) when a reliever enters. In theory, before that five-inning mark there cannot be a winning pitcher, so the question of saves and holds and blown saves is academic. This may seem to be a quibble, something that can be disregarded once a game has played out to official length, but the majority of sources disagree. BIS, STATS, Elias, and USA Today will not award a hold or a blown save to a pitcher who enters a game in the fifth inning or earlier. Baseball-Reference and MLB.com will, for both.
BIS is now Sports Info Solutions, and they do not award holds to pitchers who enter a baseball game before said game is official (i.e. before 5 innings are completed). The 7-inning doubleheader games this season also only go official once they have five complete innings played, so since Will Smith came in to the game in the 4th inning with 2 outs, Sports Info Solutions will not award him with a hold.
Despite any personal issue I may have with this interpretation of the hold, this is the scoring Ottoneu has used since the beginning and we are sticking with stats as provided by our stats provider. I will continue to work with them to understand if there is leeway for this in the future, especially for 7-inning games.
While this isn’t much consolation for teams who played Will Smith on the 9th, hopefully this makes sense and we all learned something new together. Thanks for bringing this to my attention and compelling me to learn more about how holds work.