Seattle Mariners: What Kyle Seager Needs to Disprove

You’ve heard about it. Whether a curse or poor player development, there’s something in the Mariners clubhouse water. Since Bill Bavasi took over as general manager, the team has struggled to find a good player from within.

We get so excited about the newest Mariners prospect. We hold this hope that he will become a rising phenom and draw everyone out to the ballpark. But unfortunately, the amount of successful homegrown Mariners has been dark in recent years.

Just with Mariner hitters, can you name one homegrown guy who met expectations? Dustin Ackley. Nick Franklin. Brad Miller. Mike Zunino. All are fairly recent call-ups and none achieved as hoped for with the big league club. It makes you wonder if the Mariners lack that swagger a team should have in terms of grooming a player. Now all four aforementioned guys had their moments as Mariners but not nearly enough to survive in the pros.

With Zunino, the concern was calling him up too early. With Ackley, you wondered what the Mariners missed in getting such a high draft pick wrong. And both Miller and Franklin battled more for the Mendoza line than for top Mariner young guy.

For Kyle Seager, he needs to be an exception to the 2010’s epidemic of homegrown Mariners. For a while, he looked as if he would be. For once a Mariner straight from the farm was putting together solid seasons. His season batting average gradually rose from .258 to .268 his first four seasons. He was a 2014 All-Star and finished 12th in MVP voting two years later. And for once in a long while, a guy from our system hit 30 home runs along with over 90 RBI’s in two seasons.

But for whatever reason Kyle has struggled to get any rhythm going the last two seasons. In that span, he’s posted a .235 batting average as well as a career high in strikeouts (138) last year. Not counting pitchers or Ichiro’s brief Japan tenure, Kyle is the only homegrown Mariner of all the current first-string position players. He also had the most disappointing season of any starter last year.

So Seager needs to break this annoying pattern of Mariner prospects coming up with lots of hype and never panning out. He needs to help the team break away from a consistently mediocre farm system.

He needs to remind people that “the Mariners way” doesn’t always equal underachiever, counterexamples being an Edgar or Griffey. Let’s hope this is just a setback for Kyle Seager because, for his first five seasons, he was fun to watch.