Kudos to the good Doctor!
Double kudos because he included this line, "The most valuable commodity to any team, including the Yankees and Red Sox, are young club-controls players who can be major pieces of a pennant puzzle."
Why? Because they don't have a glut of them and they do have a glut of huge salaries. A Seager availability would have the Yankees wetting themselves. He wouldn't cost anything, so not playing ARod wouldn't make much difference.
But the Yankees probably don't give up the bonking RF that everybody seems to think the M's must have.
I'm a big Seager fan for all the reasons the Doc said, but mostly because he has a swing that punishes any park AND he's a huge gamer.
But you don't just say he untouchable simply because he's your best player. If Seager is a 115-120 player next year (giving him some improvement) the only question to ask is really "What are the odds that we get 100 out of a Franklin or a Liddi or a retread or a Romero, etc?" If those adds appoach some degree of relative certainty, then you're only talking 20 OPS pts AND you still get the (more expensive) piece you just swapped Seager out for.
Of course, if we just go with Franklin at SS we get them both!
The advantage of the Seager swap is that he may be more valuable than a speculative Franklin. You have to add less to get the same return, maybe.
Seager for Gordon doesn't happen. But Seager and something nice, but not shiny nice, probably gets you in the ballpark.
I like him a lot. He's not untouchable.
Anybody consider if he can play LF for us?
moe
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Q. Whew. So Kyle Seager needs to get the powerflush, but fast.
A. Reasons to keep Kyle Seager do exist, if you strain your eyes hard enough. Starting with the fact that he was a rookie who posted 3.6 WAR, at a scarce position, and provided $15.5M in net profit value to the Mariners in 2012.
PROPS to a potential $50-75M in net performance profit over the next five years. You could always trade him at the deadline in 2017, and rent Michael Pineda for the World Series run.
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Q. You argued that he has no upside. Do you believe that he has no upside?
A. No. I think there's an upside scenario.
On the road in 2012, he hit .293/.324/.511. That's on the road - as a rookie. Under normal circumstances, hitters produce significantly better at home than their road numbers show.
PROPS to the damage done last year, actual countable bases that is, outside Safeco.
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Q. How could a .500 SLG be anywhere in his future?
A. He hit 15 homers on the road, and his HRTracker numbers were pretty solid - 401 feet average, 103.3 MPH off the bat. You saw them. Seager doesn't go 450 feet on you, but he does go a nice steady 390, 400, 410. He takes a mean cut at the ball and when he squares it he gets a consistent trajectory, a consistent vector and consistent length.
For those new to the board, Bill James used a profound understanding of hitting to guide Theo Epstein into the decision to commit to Dustin Pedroia. All of the same logic applies to Seager but more so.
It's quite possible that Seager merely needs to relax at Safeco in order to bring his stats up there. Late last year, he seemed to do that. If in 2013 his teammates are KO'ing pitchers at Safeco, that will relax him more.
PROPS to Seager's KBIZLT swing, his contact rate, his flyball rate and his pull rate.
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Q. In the SLOPS section you "argued" that his AVG has been .259 and that it may cap at .280. You argued that or believe that?
A. Seager's AVG will naturally improve if his EYE does. His EYE has been kinda weak, 49 K's vs 159 BB's to date and it didn't improve last September, 5:21.
But there's something about Seager's EYE - couldn't tell you what it is precisely - that makes me wonder if he isn't going to pull a Carlos Beltran in that department. Beltran came up sooner than expected, posted a 46:123 EYE and was way below 0.50 for three years ... but before long was walking 90 times a year.
Very easy to see the same for Kyle. He can tell a ball from a strike, doesn't fish at sliders. He can stay back on an offspeed pitch. The low BB's just seem to be a respect issue at the moment, and the fact that he's kind of up too soon.
The EYE rises, then the AVG rises, and you could visualize a .300/.380/.480 Seager.
PROPS to Seager's management of the strike zone, whether or not it showed up in the numbers at first blush.
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Q. Does Dr. D put a thumb on the scale for Seager's RBI thingy?
A. He's a tough player. He does not get fazed by better players, and does not get fazed by bad situations. He's a gamer. There've been a whale of a lot of Mariners who weren't.
PROPS to gamers in the city of Brett Tomkos and Danny Tartabulls.
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Q. What's that John Benson rule again?
A. I love these setup questions designed to lead right where I wanna go. Should we insert a joke about the White House press corps here? ..... naaaaahhhh...
;- ) Simmer down, kids. This isn't the humorless blog. Third door on the left.
Benson won a bunch of fantasy baseball championships, back in the day, by emphasizing Second Half Performances more than other people did. "Remember," John would say, "A player IS what he was WHEN WE LAST SAW HIM." Those being his last 2-3 month's worth of performances.
Seager -- who went through a slowdown his second time around the league -- seemed to solve it his third time round. His September splits, in 130+ AB's, were .298/.336/.496. Granted, there's a little BABIP in there, but a .330 BABIP the way Seager lets the bat fly, the way he pulls the ball, is hardly asterisk-worth.
So I dunno. You could deal Seager and then find that NEXT YEAR, in Miami or some place, he's outplaying Ryan Zimmerman (.290/.350/.480) and he's got five years of club control left.
PROPS for Seager's sprint to the finish line.
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Q. Where does that leave us? Trade Seager: Props or Slops?
A. You're as equipped as Dr. D is to analyze it. There will be some GM's this winter who are very bullish on Kyle Seager, especially having seen his late adjustments and home runs down the stretch. The most valuable commodity to any team, including the Yankees and Red Sox, are young club-controls players who can be major pieces of a pennant puzzle. Bill James, as VP of the Red Sox, doesn't value Y2 4-WAR players any less than you do.
While you bring that up: the Yankees themselves might be an ideal destination for Seager, assuming that ARod's in-game broadie stalking gets him flushed out of the Bronx.
Are you more bullish on Kyle Seager's future than other GM's will be this winter? Huh.
PROPS to Jack Zduriencik for trans-warping Kyle Seager into Safeco and its starting lineup as soon as he did.
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Comments
Seager is a converted second baseman. That's his natural position. How much better does his bat look there? Am I alone in wondering if it wasn't a big mistake moving him to third for the Ackley experiment?
I'm all for trading either one of Ackley or Seager because I see them both as second basemen. BUT, if it's Seager you plan on trading then I think you should move him to second for a while first to showcase him where he would have maximum value to other GMs.
At some point, the team has to stop trying to play the "what if" game with the prospect of the moment and put some real baseball players on the field. Seagar has cleared the MLB hurdle - I would be very reluctant to trade him away now. He's a combination of certainty at 3B, Ackley insurance, rawhide mentality and cheap to boot.
An MLB-average season as a rookie is pretty good. Not spectacular but pretty good. And pretty good is pretty valuable on a team like this, with multiple holes.
That's exactly what I was thinking, though there is no need to showcase him there. Any GM may have already seen him there last year (18 games). One won't think twice about having his bat there over 3B. Anybody need a good hitting 2B?
It's true that the Safeco fence move will hurt Seager by increasing the offensive environment to whatever degree it does. But I do NOT want Seager traded. I'm calling my shot, mark it down: the instant Seager joins a team with a stadium that doesn't suppress fly ball BABIP, whether it be the 2013 Mariners in warmer weather or the 2013 Diamondbacks in Arizona, he will go from being a borderline top 10 3B (which he is) to a borderline top 5 3B.
The 2012 Safeco effect wasn't about the park being too big, it was about the unusually cold weather and the crosswind keeping balls up in the air for a long period of time. Why do you think it is that home runs didn't seem particularly affected, but doubles and triples went down the tubes? Check out the team-by-team Fangraphs leaderboards for BABIP on fly balls and you'll immediately see the Mariners, dead last. And dead last by an incredible margin. The Mariners' fly ball BABIP was .082. The second lowest fly ball BABIP since 2003 was .098. If Kyle Seager were an entire team, he would have had the second lowest fly ball BABIP of any team since 2003... second only to the 2012 Mariners.
We all know about Road Seager (.315 BABIP, .219 ISO) and Home Seager (.256 BABIP, .102 ISO), right? There's evidence to suggest Road Seager is a lot more real than Home Seager. A rough calculation of Seager's xBABIP (batted ball percentage for a certain batted ball type times league average BABIP on that batted ball type) puts him at about .290, and remember that number is low because of the Mariners' extreme outlier BABIP this year. .290 is only slightly above Seager's actual BABIP, so his AVG wouldn't increase much, but look at the splits. Seager got good luck on ground balls, average luck on line drives, and godawful luck on fly balls. Do we really think that a guy who pulls the ball in the air as often and as hard as Seager, without massive HR power, is going to run a low fly ball BABIP? Fly balls are where his ISO comes from... adjust the BABIP luck to normal in all three categories, and Seager's looking at a .50 jump in OPS and a 10-point jump in OPS+.
So we've got a borderline top 5 3B at age 24 locked up until 2018, and because of this year's Safeco effect he's undervalued by all of the other teams out there. And we're going to trade that? Franklin's still a prospect. Maybe he succeeds, maybe he busts, we don't know. As a result, maybe another team overvalues him, maybe another team undervalues him, and we don't really have the data to determine which. But we do kno that at least the Mariners media and the Fangraphs sabermetrician crew universally undervalue Kyle Seager, and I think it's a good bet that many other teams undervalue him too.
In summary: I am almost certain that any Seager trade must bring back more value than most people think is fair in order to actually be fair. What do people think is fair value, for a 24-year-old top ten 3B paid the minimum with six years of team control left? And you have to get more than that back? If we want to look good on a Seager trade, he better be bringing back Giancarlo Stanton... is he really going to do that, in a trade?
3.6 WAR his rookie year and he still hasn't settled in yet defensively at 3B, with FB BABIP upside.
Seager was underrated as a prospect, and now underrated as an MLB asset IMO.
The Ms need to be dealing, but they should be dealing their glimmer prospects for impact young talent . What would Walker+Hultzen+? get you on the market?