My, how quickly things are changing this baseball offseason.
Less than 24 hours after coming to terms with Marcus Semien, the Texas Rangers shook up their lineup even further, adding Corey Seager to their middle infield mix on a reported 10-year, $325 million contract. It's the type of move hinted at last night when Semien arrived, and as I described then, this does change things more positively for Semien, as well as for the Rangers' offense and team outlook as a whole.
Seager will almost certainly take over at shortstop, with Semien remaining at second base, his position in Toronto. Any way you slice it, the team is in excellent defensive shape with Semien having won a Gold Glove at his new position this past season and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, the team's 2021 shortstop, having won a Gold Glove at third base, his probable 2022 position, in 2020.
There's not even the worry of losing position flexibility in fantasy, as Semien's 21 shortstop appearances last season keeps him dual-eligible, and Kiner-Falefa stands to regain third base after 10 games in 2022. And if the team wanted to dabble with Seager at third base, that'd only benefit his flexibility. It's a good year to speculate on ground-balling Rangers pitchers, when their nightly matchups fall into the right alignment.
That said, even with Seager's addition piggybacking Semien's, the Rangers' offense still has its holes, and the team is still in rebuild mode. These are as much 2023-24 moves as they are for the upcoming season, and the team looks precariously weak at catcher and in two of the three outfield spots.
Semien and Seager will almost certainly bat 1-2, or at worst first-and-third, and they'll boost each other in terms of runs and RBIs, but there's really no doubt that the pieces around them in the order aren't the equivalent of their previous supporting casts with the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers.
Seager's contract itself might spoil what could've been a fantasy surprise: He's one of the more beneath-the-radar pure superstars in the game, and before the signing, perhaps the only reason we didn't regard him one is his injury history. He missed 239 games combined while making three trips to the injured list in the past four seasons, including for 2018 Tommy John surgery and a hand fracture last year. Combine Seager's 2020-21, however, and he played 147 games, batting .306 with 31 home runs, 98 RBIs and 92 runs scored, adding a .270/.361/.591 slash line, 10 homers, 26 RBIs and 25 runs scored in the 30 postseason games that followed those campaigns.
The Statcast metrics said Seager's regular-season contributions were entirely legitimate, and in fact might've understated his raw ability, as his .306 expected batting average was the game's third-best (behind Freddie Freeman's .325 and Juan Soto's .311) and his .405 expected wOBA was eighth-best. He's on a short list of players with elite quality of contact.
Can Seager finally stay healthy for a full 162 games, realizing his full potential? Perhaps, and that's more of an obstacle to his becoming a building-block piece in fantasy than his landing in Texas. A healthy Seager is probably a top-25 player or something close to it, a valuation comp to Alex Bregman at this time from last offseason.
Bregman fits because he's a bit overrated from a pure power perspective, and by going from Los Angeles to Texas, Seager does take a park-factors hit in that department, at least going by the three-year Bill James Handbook numbers (126 for Dodger Stadium, 92 for Globe Life Field). This looks very much like a roughly-.300-hitting, 25-homer type rather than something much better, but also one extremely likely to hit those projections targets with any luck in the health department.
Bearing in mind that injury risk, however, and the same counting-numbers/turn-the-lineup-over limitations I cited in Sunday's Semien writeup, Seager will probably be on the outside of the fantasy top 50 overall looking in, come draft season. I'd like to take him within that group -- and maybe I will in the end -- but his track record says it's wiser not to pay that huge premium.
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November 30, 2021 at 05:55AM
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Fantasy baseball - How Corey Seager's fantasy value changes in Texas - ESPN
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