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SO SAITH THE M'S: Kyle Seager is baseball's #1 most consistent hitter.
The argument is not super-sabermetric :- ) ... more in the mold of old-timey beat writers. But it's still a cool little article with some interesting takeaways.
It starts by cutting the MLB traveling squad down to the 31 batters who have 500+ BA's for the last five years in a row. (So although Giancarlo Stanton has averaged way over 500 AB's for his 8 seasons, he misses the cut for sitting out half a season once.) The M's site then trims the squad to the 12 such batters who have never been below 100 OPS+. And so on, down until there's one guy left, Kyle Seager.
I think of this approach as the "Dante Bichette" method, because guys used to use it (cherrypicked cutoff lines that Bichette barely crossed!) to prove that Bichette, an average player, was a top-50 alltimer. :- ) Any Denizen can smile at the problems with this type of approach, but there are still some neat things here. Did YOU know there were only 12 batters who hit 100 in full seasons the last five years? Takeaway: reliability is not as simple as we thought it was.
So take it easy on Jerry Dipoto for Mike Leake. The SP is yawn-inspiring, but he's also a machine.
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SO SAITH BASEBALLHQ: pay the full $20 on draft day
... okay, they've got him at $19, if you want to split hairs. They've got him at .260/.330/.465 -- and that's a Safeco .465 from a glove spot -- with a surprisingly solid 135-140'ish expected PX. xPX is that power index which is based on launch velocities and angles.
BaseballHQ's logic -- which is here for the Denizen to consume and to process as he wishes -- is that Seager chose to ride the Uppercut Wave with his 52% fly balls. This led to a drop in his theoretical "expected contact." It did however reinforce his surprisingly-upper crust Power Index, so "30 homers remain in play" even as .280 drops off the table. They finish with "he's amid peak-age plateau so you prretty much know what you're buying." At $20 roto, that's a high compliment.
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SO SAITH DR. DETECTO: this is a Mariners Hall of Famer
We don't think it will take a Trumpian back-pat to remind Denizens of the eternal SSI position on Kyle Seager: he is what he is. RELiability is a precious commodity in baseball; if James Paxton's torn fingernails annoy you, spend a moment wondering about what Kyle Seager's yoga routine must be. There are certain guys, Cal Ripken being the reductio ad absurdum, who simply have loose ligaments, limber muscles and one whale of a lot of pain tolerance.
Seager is not "exciting" in any way. Except to the accountants, because he has collected $28.0 to $43.6M in bases in each of the last five seasons.
"Baseball's most consistent hitter" is a bit a mischaracterization; that would be Jose Altuve or Mike Trout or somebody. "Consistent" has the connotation like, the guy gets in there and gets eight hits in a row. :- ) But Seager is most definitely one of baseball's most PREDICTABLE commodities. Predictable isn't all that much of a problem if the prediction is $35M in bases, plus or minus ten, twenty percent.
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UND TAKE ZIS MIT YOU, Dept.
Along with Seager's astounding arm accuracy -- if the 5-3 was a free throw, he'd be Steph Curry -- Seager's worth a good 0.5 WAR per year defensively.
You might not have noticed that K-Swag is very, very solid on every kind of pitch except slider. He covers the deeeeeeep part of the strike zone, the 96 MPH back of the plate, and he can re-set to re-launch for the 82 MPH changeup. Funny thing, though, you don't want him 1-2 against Chris Sale.
HQ is quite right about the fly ball percentage; he went from a historical 42% to a 52% figure that was second in baseball (!) to Joey Gallo. It's just that his HR's per fly ball went from three years' worth of 12-15% back down to 11%, most of which were in the second half (after we already had the impression he'd locked in a bad season). Seager is predictable, and his skills unchanged, but with his flyball approach in Safeco he only needs to stumble into a little luck for ... UP: 37 HR
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Whatever the case, this is a player who is unappreciated. Muchly. We're one broken shinbone away from appreciating that.
BABVA,
Dr D
