Ben Williamson has only been on the Seattle Mariners’ roster for three weeks, but it seems like a lot longer than that.
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That’s owed to how well Williamson has done so far in at the big league level, belying his full pro experience of 166 games – including in the minors – that just recently passed what covers a full MLB season.
The 24-year-old third baseman has fit right in with the Mariners, hitting .242 with a home run and three doubles in 16 games – and that’s only after a few hitless games over the last week drove his average down from .310 through his first 11 contests.
Williamson is also a very capable third baseman defensively, to the point that it’s not rare to read his name and the words “Gold Glove potential” next to each other.
Mariners rookie Ben Williamson makes jaw-dropping catch
Maturity seems to an important element of Williamson’s personality, and his even-keel nature was on display right from the moment that the Mariners picked him in the third round of the 2023 MLB Draft out of Virginia’s College of William and Mary.
On an episode of The Wheelhouse podcast released on Saturday, Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto detailed the humorous conversation that Mariners director of amateur scouting Scott Hunter had on a video call with Williamson to tell him he had been taken with one of the last picks on the first night of that draft.
Here’s a summation of how Dipoto said the conversation went, with Williamson speaking in a hushed tone while sitting in the dark while the Mariners’ draft room was abuzz following three first-round picks.
• Scott Hunter: “Ben, its Scott Hunter with the Seattle Mariners. Congratulations. Have you talked to your agent?”
• Ben Williamson: “No.”
• Hunter: “We just took you in the second round. Are you watching the draft?”
• Williamson: “No.”
• Hunter: “Are you sitting in the dark?”
• Williamson: “Yeah, yeah, I’m at my parents’ – they’re upstairs sleeping.”
• Hunter: “You might want to go wake them up.”
• Williamson: “No, they’ve got work in the morning.”
Well, they do say in sports to act live you’re been there before.
While the Mariners were the team to take Williamson with the 57th overall pick, his status as a college senior who could be signed “under slot” – less than the assigned bonus for their slot in the draft – apparently made him a popular name around the league.
“We got a lot of angry texts after we popped him in the second round,” Dipoto said, “because there were a number of teams that that had their sights set on him in order to do creative things in the draft. … We actually had him in a pretty prominent place on our board, and hopefully time tells us that we had him in the right place, but we had some people in the room arguing that they thought he was a first-round talent on his own (who) just so happened to be a senior.”
At home among the big leaguers
Dipoto pointed to a few other things that speak to why Williamson was able to hit the ground running with the Mariners after getting called up with just 14 games at Triple-A under his belt.
“Since the day he stepped out on a field (after signing with the Mariners)… he has been one of the most consistent people that we’ve had in our organization,” Dipoto said. “He’s thoughtful, he puts in the work. If he’s not out on the field or in the cages, he’s in the weight room. He’s an awesome teammate.
“We saw it in spring training – he had a really good spring, and he just absorbed as much as he could.”
What the Mariners saw from Williamson this spring included him running in a different kind of circle than most players with his level of experience tend to.
“Every minute that he could, he was always hovering around the veteran hitters, trying to pull whatever he could from them,” Dipoto continued. “And more often with guys who are in their first big league camp or they’re coming in (from the minors), they’ll pool up with the other guys who are in their circumstance. And Ben didn’t do that in the spring.
“He spent a lot of time around J.P. (Crawford), he spent a lot of time around the veteran hitters… And it gave him a level of comfort when he got his call up.”
Click here for the full episode of The Wheelhouse with Jerry Dipoto.
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