Kyle Seager is stepping out of Robinson Cano’s shadow

Normally I would have written this type of article at Sodo Mojo, the Mariners FanSided site, seeing as it is about the Seattle Mariners. But I realized that the audience this piece needs to reach isn’t the hardcore Mariner fans. They, for the most part, know how good Seattle 3rd baseman Kyle Seager has been over the last few years.

Seager has flown under the radar — at least in terms of how great he is, to how good people think he is — for a couple reasons. One is that his traditional numbers don’t jump off the page. For his career, his batting average is at .264. He has been a 20 home run type guy. He drives in around 80-90 runs. On their own, those numbers are good, but not great.

The other major reason has to mainly do with the team he plays for. In 2012 and 2013, the Mariners were pretty much irrelevant, winning 75 and 71 games in each year respectively. Anything he did was all for naught in the end, and his team wasn’t going to get much media attention.

Now, his team is still a bit of a problem, but in a different way. No longer are the M’s irrelevant, as they are currently in the 2nd Wild Card spot as of writing this. But he does play on the same team as Robinson Cano, leaving Seager in his massive shadow. Seattle’s offense still isn’t great, so it makes some sense that any credit they do get will go to a proven star like Cano.

But it’s time all that changes. Seager’s more in-depth numbers have been great for basically his entire career, and he has taken an even bigger step forward this year. And one player can’t do it all on his own, so Seager deserves his share of the credit for the team’s surprise season.

Seager currently owns a .279/.347/.482 line, with 23 home runs, a 136 wRC+ and a 5.6 fWAR. For those unfamiliar with either of the latter two metrics, here are a couple excerpts from Fangraphs:

"Similar to OPS+, Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+) measures how a player’s wRC compares with league average after controlling for park effects.  League average for position players is 100, and every point above 100 is a percentage point above league average. (http://www.fangraphs.com/library/offense/wrc/)Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic….This value is expressed in a wins format, so we could say that Player X is worth +6.3 wins to their team while Player Y is only worth +3.5 wins.http://www.fangraphs.com/library/war/"

That means that Seager has been 33 percent better than league average at the plate, good for top 10 in the American League, and top 25 in all of baseball. His overall value, according to WAR, puts him 3rd in the AL and 5th in the majors. People may know Seager’s name, that he is a solid player, and that he was an All-Star due to injury. But I would be surprised if many people knew he was a top 10 player in the league.

Now to be fair, this is his first great year. He was a 11o wRC+, 3.5 fWAR type guy in his first two campaigns, and has ascended to a new level this season. He probably didn’t deserve massive praise then. But he certainly does now, and in my experience, he isn’t getting it.

As mentioned earlier, his traditional numbers still don’t exactly scream star on their own. But he compliments a solid average and good power with a fair share of walks and non-home run extra base hits, along with what seems to be good, if not great defense at the hot corner. Whether you use the eye test or the metrics, Seager is impressive in the field as well.

After two negative seasons by Defensive Runs Saved, he has a +9 mark this season, along with a +10 UZR (which was around 0 the last two seasons). And in watching him play, I certainly don’t see anything that tells me the metrics are incorrect, as he consistently makes good stops on hard hit balls, and is amazing at charging the ball and getting a good hop before making a strong, accurate throw to 1st base.

ZiPS projection system sees him finishing with a .276/.344/.470 (131 wRC+) and 6.1 fWAR, which will likely keep him firmly within the top 25 and top 10 he is sitting in now, respectively. While Cano is still a superior player, both in his production this year and in that he has sustained it longer, Seager isn’t all that far behind.

I believe that if Seager continues this kind of play into the future — and I see no reason why he won’t — then he will need to be mentioned right along with Robinson Cano, not after him, as if he is his little, yet talented, brother.

Most Mariner fans love Kyle Seager, and hold him as the crown jewel of the Mariner farm system. Justin Smoak, Jesus Montero, and until very recently Dustin Ackley, have all essentially busted, and the Mariners have failed to produce very many offensive contributors of their own. It’s time the rest of the baseball world takes note, and appreciates how good of a player Kyle Seager really is.