Corey Seager: View from Short

What I was going to write for Seager’s birthday tribute was that he’s the best shortstop I’ve seen play live (excepting when I saw Cal Ripken Jr. for two games of a double header when I was 8 and Dad and I drove up to Baltimore.) No wonder he was Rookie of the Year and no wonder he’s been an allstar for two years. There’s a reason that he’s in the majors and that I had to dance around third base with Candy Crawdad during the 7^th inning stretches. (They told me that “job” went to the best looking dude on the team. Candy doesn’t step out with just anyone. Since I was always getting shit for my looks, they made sure I’d get stuck being Candy’s dance partner. You try dancing with someone who’s got claws where her hands should be lol.)

BTW…if you want to know what my dance partner looked like, here’s a picture of Candy Crawdad:

(In case you were wondering, Monica is hotter.  So’s Joyce for that matter.  And, dang, so is the Candy who gave me those lap dances on Valentine’s Day.)

But back to Corey…who I never plan to waltz around third base with.

It probably sounds kinda obnoxious for me to write that you have to be a shortstop to appreciate the kind of shortstop Seager is – since any baseball illiterate dumbass (BID if you want to text that lol) watching him can tell how good he is. But I think there are things that you see when you’ve played short that a lot of people don’t see. Little things. Playing shortstop means making spur of the moment decisions…without stopping to think. I know you can say that it’s “instinct” or “baseball IQ”, but, really, it’s that Corey Seager can catch, think and throw better and faster than nearly anyone on Earth.

Seager is officially 6’4”, which means that he sometimes just has to put his glove hand up in the air to make a catch. Cal Ripken Jr. was like that. (At 5’11”, I wasn’t.) They’re always saying that he’s too tall for short, but he’s so dang good at the position…so where’s the problem?

Hitting? Look at the numbers: he batted .308 in 2016 and .295 in 2017. (Let’s just pass on looking at this year.) Look at the two Silver Slugger awards. If it doesn’t make your head hurt, look at Fangraphs.com and you’ll see that he ranked first among all shortstops for Wins above Replacement. Those stats kinda make him the best shortstop in MLB.

Awesome player. Seems like a nice guy you’d want to have a beer with, too. Sucks like hell that he has to have surgery and is out for the season. It sucks for a team that has depended on him for two years, although I have plenty of faith in Chris Taylor and Kiké Hernandez at short. It sucks for the fans who were depending on him as a piece of what we still hope is a World Series puzzle.

And it must so suck for him. The surgery was Friday, and the reports are that it went very well.  That’s great news.  Now I wish him plenty of patience for what we all know is a long road back.

And I’m really looking forward to seeing him back on the field.