Let Me Take You On A Night Ride: Appreciating Kyle Seager

Sometimes it's easy to look past the good things right in front of you. 2014 Robinson Cano and 2015 Nelson Cruz have been incredibly valuable, launching home runs and bringing name recognition to our little baseball outpost in the Pacific Northwest. They've been important pieces and have helped to elevate the play around them (well, maybe not lately). But it would be a shame to overlook the man in the Hot Corner. Somehow, despite a 2014 All-Star selection and a Gold Glove, Kyle Seager still seems under-appreciated. And the thing about Kyle? He's just gotten better every year.

His wRC+ for 2015 has taken a hit because of a yucky June, but he still leads the AL West in WAR at his position, and ranks 6th overall in the AL. Kyle (along with Brad Miller) is just a tick behind Nelson Cruz for Mariner position player WAR leader. But where Cruz's value comes exclusively from his bat, Kyle shows offensive and defensive value. From the five spot (he's hit there 82% of the season), his 38 RBI is second most among Mariners players, where Kyle no doubt benefits from the presence of Cruz. He's on pace to just about match his home run total from last year. Who could forget when he won a game against the Rays, and then won it again after Rodney shot himself in the foot with his arrow?

The 2014 Mariners went the whole season without a grand slam. 2015 Kyle Seager has two. There's something perfect about the first home-grown Mariners position player All-Star since Alex Rodriguez snapping that streak.

Whether it's having a hitter like Cruz ahead of him, or continued growth in his approach, Kyle's plate discipline is improved as well. His K rate is down to 13.8% from 18% in 2014. Using FanGraphs plate discipline data, we can tell he's seeing more pitches in the zone (Pitches in Zone%) and making more contact both in the zone and out of it (O-Contact% and Z-Contact%). And not only is he improving relative to his own 2014 performance, but he's also outperforming league average. Of course, plate discipline is only useful in context. Kyle's June overall contact numbers aren't significantly different than May, but his hard hit % declined from 36.3% to 29.3%, which might go part of the way to explaining his offensive woes. Kyle Seager is good at baseball. And if his hard contact numbers come back a bit, hopefully we will see him, and the rest of the Mariners, put June in their rearview.

Kyle's run is even more impressive when you consider the company he is keeping. Including Miguel Cabrera in this FanGraphs WAR grid is a little disingenuous since Miggy trotted on over to first base, but since his debut, he's posted higher and higher WAR and thrown his weight around with some pretty impressive hitters.

That a Mariners position play could develop into an even average major league hitter has seemed unfathomable at times over the last few years (See: Ackley, Dustin; Zunino, Mike; Jones, James, etc, etc, etc). What has been remarkable about Kyle is his constancy. His everyday play has been anything but everyday; it has ranged from pretty good to great, with long stretches hitting the higher notes of All-Star worthy. And when I say everyday, I mean it: until he was scratched June 18th with food poisoning, he had played in 192 consecutive games. his consecutive-games played streak at 192.

Last summer, Michael Baumann wrote a great profile on Kyle, tracing his rise from a player less highly touted than his younger, good-faced brother, to understudy to Dustin Ackley at UNC, and finally to third round pick for the Mariners. Baumann noted:

He's also finally escaping the shadows: Ackley's shadow, his brother's shadow, and the obscurity of playing for an often bad team whose games don't start until 10 p.m. on the East Coast.

The Mariners aren't a particularly good baseball team right now, particularly on offense, but they haven't been nearly as god-awful as they could have been without Kyle Seager. Even as he sunk into the morass of June (a wRC+ of 78 is... well, it's less than a wRC+ plus of 141), he still launched a couple of homeruns, including his second grand slam of the year, and flashed fantastic defense. He even saved a child's life.

It's becoming apparent that if the Mariners don't right the ship soon, the season that started with so much fanfare, that inspired talk of post-seasons and championships and playoff baseball in Seattle not in the usual hushed  whispers of lifers but instead boldly declared on magazine covers and MLB Network panel shows, that potentially magical season will soon settle into the daily grind of baseball that just doesn't matter anymore. A lot of things have to break the Mariners' way to avoid that fate. Iwakuma needs to come back as his old self. Cano needs to have more days like he did San Diego and fewer days like he did all the days before that. The bottom of the order needs to be able to hit the ball even a little bit. Rivals need to scuttle and we need to string together some wins. But perhaps most simply, our rock at the Hot Corner needs swing the bat like he did in May. Seager just needs to do what he's done every year since entering the League: keep playing better and better baseball. Based on everything we've seen so far, there's no reason to think he won't. Because getting better is simply Seager.