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?
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