It All Hinges On Kyle Seager
To say that the success of a team is dependent on the performance of any single player is misleading. It’s just not true, and if you need a hyperreal recent example we just watched Steve Pearce pick up all of the Chris Davis slack, and then some. The Seattle Mariners can win it all without a big year from Kyle Seager. It’s just, uh, a lot less likely.
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Over the 2012 and 2013 seasons, Seager emerged as a bright spot on some non-competitive Mariners teams. Last year the organization turned it around on the field, and Seager was right there at the front of the pack. He took his offense to a new level while simultaneously enjoying a legitimate defensive breakout year. The result? 5.5 WAR, or, if you’d rather, 0.3 more than Robinson Cano.
Seager has been something of a star for a while now, but in 2014 he was just flat-out one of the best players in baseball. He’s the best position player to come out of the Mariners farm system in recent memory. His big year helped the Mariners emerge as one of the AL’s best last year. But that was then and this is now. The question isn’t “was last year good,” it’s “what does this year have in store?” Specifically, what is Kyle Seager’s 2015 going to look like?
We start with Seager’s FanGraphs page, as we usually do. Glancing at his stats, we see that there were precious few categories where 2014 did not represent a career high. Out of all his meaningful numbers, the only areas where he’d done better before are plate appearances and walk rate (and, by extension, OBP). Even so, he hit a lot and took plenty of walks. No real weaknesses and nothing but improvement.
Considering that we’re dealing with an established 27-year-old big leaguer, none of these numbers look like they should be primed for a big drop. His BABIP stayed the same. His power spiked, but only by 20 points of ISO. That’s a nice bump, but not a red flag. He was very much the same player he’d been before, just slightly better at most everything. Oh, and way better defensively.
This is what should catch your eye most about Seager’s 2014: his defense went from average to outstanding. If you’re just looking at a computer screen and thinking about how ridiculously hard it must be to statistically evaluate defense, this improvement might stand out in a flukey way. Maybe the metrics, however they work, were just stupid high on Seager for some weird nonsensical reason. Except we know that’s not true. Because we watch the games, we know that our eyes can confirm what the numbers say.
Seager was quicker and rangier last year. His defense was much-praised, and he even took home a somewhat unexpected Gold Glove. No, this isn’t a case of wild and crazy defensive metrics – this is a young player in his prime who put in a massive amount of work and, at the end of the day, found that he had something to show for it. There’s no reason to believe his defense will be anything close to average this year. He’s established himself at a higher level, and it doesn’t look like he’s going back to where he was before.
Let’s stick with that FanGraphs player page for a minute longer here. At the bottom there are projections, and those projections all agree: we shouldn’t expect Seager to be 2014 good again, but he’s likely to be better than he was before his biggest year yet. All major projections call for him to hit better than his career average, but lower than his 2014. And they all project a pretty big drop in his defense. Let’s talk about this.
It’s possible, if not likely, that Seager’s defensive gains in 2014 were a) unsustainable, b) exaggerated, or c) a little bit of both. It’s smart that projections wouldn’t expect him to sustain all of his gains, since most people don’t just repeat their career years over and over. But there’s reasons to believe that Seager’s not most players. There’s reason to believe he’s got a 4 WAR floor.
His age, for one. His improved physicality, for another. The margin for error created by his big offensive and defensive numbers, for yet another. Regress all of Seager’s stats and he still looks like a star. For Seager, beating the projections simply means having a season more like his 2014 than not. That’s easy to imagine, and if that happens, Seager’s again one of baseball’s very best players.
What if he’s still developing power? What if he really is an elite defender and not the above-average type that ZiPS and Steamer see him as? Seager’s never had a year where he ran an abnormally high BABIP. What if he does that in 2015? Can you imagine what Kyle Seager would be with an additional 30 points of average and OBP?
There are a lot of ways for Seager to repeat his overall 2014 performance. The beauty is that he only needs to take one of those roads, but even if he doesn’t, he’s unlikely to be less than a star. There’s even room for him to have serious struggles and still be an excellent player. What if his defense goes all the way back to fringe-average? Then he’s still got the bat. What if he struggles with balls in play? He’s still got a power stroke and a good eye. With so much going for him, it’s hard to imagine his season as anything but a success.
The Seattle Mariners need Kyle Seager to be successful if they’re to reach the postseason in 2015. Luckily for them the odds of another big year from Seager seem exceptionally high. He’s created quite the foundation for himself, yet still has room to grow. That’s why the team gave him $100 million, and that’s why he’s expected to lead this club somewhere where it hasn’t been in years.