It Should Be When Not If Regarding A Kyle Seager Contract Extension

And that when should be today. The Seattle Mariners third baseman deserves a contract extension and at the same time the Mariners want to keep his services at the hot corner. So there shouldn’t be any holdup in keeping Kyle Seager a Seattle Mariner longterm.

After a solid 2013 season on offense that saw Kyle Seager’s offensive numbers plummet in the last months of the season, 2014 was yet another resurgence.

In 159 games played– the most of any Mariner in 2014– Kyle Seager posted the following line on offense:

.268/.334/.454, 25 HR, 96 RBI, 4 3B, 27 2B, 52 BB, 118 SO.

Seager’s defense cannot be ignored either: for the first time in his Major League career he posted a positive defensive WAR at 1.7, good for top-5 in the American League.

In most offensive categories it was either Robinson Cano or Kyle Seager leading for the Mariner… and Cano is getting paid $24 million a season to do it.

So where then is Kyle Seager’s paycheck?

Mariners President Kevin Mather says the Mariners have money to spend in 2o15 and that the payroll can increase. Some percentage of that newly approved cashflow needs to be spent on keeping Kyle Seager a Mariner long-term.

Per baseball-reference, Seager is arbitration eligible in 2015. The soonest he could be a free agent is 2018. He’s only 26 years old, and his value seems to be trending up. This is an opportunity for the Mariners to give him a contract that extends him through his arbitration years and through his younger seasons. Seager will be happier to be making money he deserves, and the Mariners would be happier because they’d have both second base and third base locked up long-term.

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Kyle Seager will be 27 by the start of the 2015 season, and if I were the higher-ups in the Seattle Mariner organization I would offer him a 5-year/$50 million contract. If he wanted more stability, I would go so far as to give 6-years/$54 million.

Such contracts would guarantee Kyle Seager money through his age-31 or age-32 seasons. If he budgeted well? That’d be enough to last his lifetime.

Of the young Mariners called up over the last few seasons Kyle Seager has been the only one to really stick thus far. Dustin Ackley may, and I say may, be emerging, Justin Smoak is a lost cause in the Mariners organization, and Michael Saunders is so injured on and off he’s unreliable.

Seattle Mariner fans love Kyle Seager: he’s energetic, he’s fun to watch, and he’s one of the best offensive and defensive third basemen in baseball.

Give the kid a contract! So we can continue watching him bat behind Cano for the foreseeable future.

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