Bringing prospects up to the big leagues can be tricky, something fans of the Seattle Mariners are well aware of.
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Sure, the M’s have Cal Raleigh now as their franchise cornerstone catcher, but there remains the memory of Mike Zunino, a former first-round pick who continued to look lost at the plate to the point that he was still bouncing between Seattle and Triple-A Tacoma three years after his MLB debut.
Or what about the different directions the careers of Julio Rodríguez and Jarred Kelenic, once thought to be the two keys to the Mariners’ future, have gone?
While Rodríguez is a two-time All-Star with three straight 20-homer, 20-steal seasons to open his career, Kelenic was optioned to Triple-A by the Atlanta Braves on Monday, over a year after Seattle dealt him away and nearly four years after he made his major league debut for the Mariners at T-Mobile Park.
If there are right ways and wrong ways to debut prospects, the Mariners seem to have learned from previous failures.
This season, two of Seattle’s recent draft picks have made their MLB debuts. And in both cases, it’s gone pretty well.
The most recent was pitcher Logan Evans, who debuted Sunday with five strong innings against Miami. While it may not have been planned with All-Star Logan Gilbert landing on the injured list earlier in the weekend, it was a soft landing for Evans at T-Mobile Park against a 12-15 Marlins team headed nowhere. What better way for the 2023 12th-round MLB Draft pick to get his feet wet in the bigs?
As good as Evans’ first outing went, there’s another case of a successful M’s debut this year that stands out even more.
Picking the right spot
Third baseman Ben Williamson, a second-round pick by the Mariners in 2023, is off to an incredible start. In 11 games, he’s hitting .310 (13 for 42) with a home run, two doubles, 10 runs scored and seven RBIs. He also sports a nice .356 on-base percentage and .784 OPS.
What makes that all the more impressive is Williamson is known as a glove-first player who plays elite defense at the hot corner but doesn’t have a great track record at the plate – especially when it comes to hitting for extra bases. In 150 career games in the minor leagues, he posted a .389 slugging mark.
The Mariners got something right with Williamson, which is how they introduced him.
Williamson got the call to Seattle after just 14 games with Tacoma on Sunday, April 13. But he didn’t play right away in the finale of a homestand against the Texas Rangers. Instead, he watched a series-clinching 3-1 victory from the dugout. And then when the Mariners went to Cincinnati two days later to begin a road trip that had stops at three hitter-friendly ballparks, Williamson was in the lineup, picking up a hit and scoring a run in his first trip to the plate.
Williamson just kept it going, logging at least one hit in seven of the nine games on the trip – including a 2-for-6 effort with his first MLB home run in an extra-innings win at Toronto on April 19, and a 3-for-5 showing on April 23 to help the M’s beat the Red Sox 8-5 at Fenway Park. And then when the M’s came home, he picked up three more hits in two games, giving him a five-game hitting streak.
It was a savvy decision by the Mariners to shield Williamson from the pitfalls of their home ballpark right away, allowing him a better chance at building up confidence early.
T-Mobile Park is the toughest place to hit in baseball, with its 90 park factor (league average is 100, so that means it’s 10% harder to hit at T-Mobile Park than the average stadium) sitting six whole points lower than the next-worst MLB stadium. It’s the hardest park to score runs in… and the hardest park to get a hit in… and the easiest park for pitchers to strike out hitters in.
But by the time Williamson stepped to the plate for the first time in Seattle, he already had 10 hits to his credit in the big leagues. That helps – a lot.
Now let’s compare Williamson’s start to Kelenic’s in 2021 with the Mariners.
His first six games in the big leagues were at home. After those six games, he was 5 for 28 for a .179 average and .590 OPS. His next six games were at San Diego and Oakland, two more pitcher-friendly parks that deal with the marine air that is known to suppress offense. After that road trip, Kelenic’s numbers were even worse – 8 for 51 for a .157 average and .532 OPS. And the slide just continued until he sat at a .099 average and .358 OPS after 31 big league games.
That is a rough introduction to the big leagues. It clearly shook the confidence of a former top-ranked prospect who had rarely struggled in his baseball career to that point, and it’s possible those confidence issues are still at play now as Kelenic heads back to the minors as a 25 year old with a .167 average this season.
Now, Williamson isn’t the same player Kelenic was expected to be, nor was his experience prior to being called up anywhere near the same.
He’s been to college, whereas Kelenic went pro straight out of high school. And as Seattle’s No. 13 prospect per MLB.com, he certainly didn’t have the weighty expectations Kelenic did when he joined the Mariners.
Additionally, Williamson debuted in the big leagues at 24 years old, not 21. To hammer the difference home, Williamson is less than 16 months younger than Kelenic, but debuted four years after him. I mean, we’re talking about a player who got his first major league hit on the same road trip that Rodríguez got his 500th, and Rodríguez is two months younger than Williamson. There’s a lot of inherit maturity coming with that age.
The point is that Williamson has had a much softer landing in the big leagues than some other Mariners hitters have. And while a lot of the reasons for that are circumstantial, at least one big part of it seems to be by design.
With the benefit of hindsight, we know Kelenic needed all the help he could get, and he really didn’t have that luxury with the way his MLB career started. But Williamson did, and you might expect that the seven Mariners hitters currently ranked among MLB’s top 100 prospects also will when they ultimately reach the majors.
If so, they’re going to be better off for it.
Seattle Mariners coverage
• After three DFAs, Mariners finally lose veteran pitcher
• Three observations as Mariners win sixth straight series
• M’s rookie Logan Evans shines in big league debut
• Mariners place ace Logan Gilbert on 15-day IL
• Seven Seattle Mariners injury updates, including Brash and Robles
