The Mariners and infielder/outfielder Dylan Moore are in agreement on a three-year extension to avoid arbitration, reports Jeff Passan of ESPN. Moore will earn $8.875MM over the course of the pact, with escalators that could push his earnings beyond $9MM. There are no options in the deal. This deal buys out his two remaining arbitration seasons and one free agent year.
Moore, 30, has been a fixture of the Mariners for the past four seasons in a sort of Swiss army knife capacity, providing the club with a little bit of everything. He’s appeared in 381 games in that time, playing every position on the diamond except catcher, even including one inning on the mound in 2019. He’s probably stretched as a shortstop, since all three of Defensive Runs Saved, Outs Above Average and Ultimate Zone Rating all give him negative grades there, but they all like his work in the outfield and at second base, with his marks at other positions coming in around average.
He’s hit 35 home runs in his 1,073 plate appearances and also stolen 65 bases. His 30% strikeout rate is certainly on the high side, but he’s also drawn walks at a strong 10% rate and has a career batting line of .208/.317/.384. That production has amounted to a wRC+ of 100, indicating he’s been exactly league average at the plate for his career. That performance at the plate has been fairly inconsistent, with Moore hitting very well in 2020 but following it up with a rough showing the year after. His .255/.358/.496 batting line in the shortened season led to a 140 wRC+ but he hit just .181/.276/.334 in 2021 for a wRC+ of 74. It’s possible that a lot of bad luck was hounding him that year, as he had just a .229 batting average on balls in play, almost 100 points shy of the year prior. He put that misfortune behind him with a strong .224/.368/.385 line last year for a 126 wRC+.
Moore first qualified for arbitration a year ago and earned a salary of $1.35MM. For the upcoming season, he was projected to get a bump to $2MM by MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz but he and the club couldn’t come to an agreement prior to the filing deadline a few weeks ago. He submitted a figure of $2.25MM with the club filing at $1.9MM, though they’ve now agreed to a longer commitment instead of going to a hearing over that difference. Since he was a late bloomer, he didn’t make it to the big leagues until he was 26 and wasn’t slated to reach the open market until after his 32nd birthday, but he’s carved a role for himself in Seattle and found a way to lock in some sizeable earnings.
Moore underwent surgery in the offseason to address a core injury that he sustained at the end of last season. That procedure came with a 6-8 week recovery estimate, indicating Moore should be good to go for the upcoming season. Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto recently revealed that Moore might be slightly behind his teammates when Spring Training begins, but it doesn’t seem as though the club has any significant concerns about Moore’s health, given their investment in him.
He might not have a direct path to regular playing time at the moment, but given his ability to play just about anywhere, he will surely find a way in there as injuries and underperformance will inevitably crop up somewhere. The regular infield alignment for the M’s will likely have Ty France at first, Kolten Wong at second, J.P. Crawford at shortstop and Eugenio Suarez at third. The outfield mix includes Julio Rodríguez in center, with Teoscar Hernández, AJ Pollock, Jarred Kelenic and Taylor Trammell candidates for time in the corners or as the designated hitter. Tommy La Stella, Sam Haggerty and Moore should all be on the roster as well, filling in at various spots as needed.
Lots of good Mariners news today!
I like this guy. I’ll go on record with that right here.
I think his hitting will begin to come around in 2023.
Not that bold of a prediction considering he had a great hitting year in 2022! 126 wRC+ is nothing to sneeze at and he should’ve been given a lot more playing time given he was one of the best hitters on the team. Anyway, love to see him extended, he is so underrated with plus defense at almost every position.
Good guy to have, but turning 30 with declining defense makes him a small risk. Still, I’d rather have him than one or two guys the Mets will start the season with.
Great utility guy. Always valuable to have a player like him around.
No buzzs being blown today? Hmmmm
He isn’t worth that money. He can’t hit
His 122 OPS+ and 126 wRC+ say he hit better than the average major league hitter last year.
Analytics are for people who seldom watch baseball; anyone who actually watches M’s baseball regularly knows that Dylan Moore simply cannot hit.
Right — because of his batting average.
Cal Raleigh was 4th in RBI and 7th in Runs on the Mariners, but his batting average was only .211, so obviously he can’t hit either.
Makes you wonder where all those runs and RBI came from.
Isn’t the goal to get on base at a minimum? He does that very well. Just because someone does not hit for a high average does not mean they’re an overall bad hittwr…also nobody is saying Moore is Ted Williams. He’s about a league average hitter , solid baserunning and defender. That’s definitely worth a few million a year.
I have to agree, he’s a bad hitter. Not the batting average, that’s just the indicator. He has power and can run into it and he’s patient, but i
let’s just say if you need a clutch hit, he ain’t your guy. We cheer every time he gets a hit just because we are shocked it happened. It’s not a bad contract for this day and age for the team and for an older glove first guy, good for him to get some good life earnings out of this. It’s more money than I’ll ever see.
314/.415/.486 with a 162 wRc+
Those are his numbers in “High leverage” situations, he is the epitome of clutch.
@mlb fan- not much of an MLB fan, huh?
bob9988- maybe, you cheer every time he gets a hit because you’re surprised, but don’t speak for all of us. Considering he’s a better batter than league average (numbers don’t lie, sorry), most M’s fans are smart enough to know he can be counted on.
And Dylan Moore didn’t have those runs and RBI’s….
I’m sorry, but if the numbers say he’s better than league average, the numbers do lie…as a batter, I would take more than half of MLB players over him.
It was an overpay. I doubt any other team would have paid him that much. I groaned every time he came up to bat last year.
martevious- No, they don’t. Numbers are facts. You can’t argue with facts. Well you can, but that makes you ignorant. The fact is, baseball is a pitcher’s game right now. Go watch other teams, look at their hitters’ stats, and tell me how Moore’s 2021 wasn’t better than half of the league.
P.S. runs scored is a stupid measuring stick for production. It’s not his fault his teammates didn’t knock him home.
MLB Fan- are analytics also for people who don’t value a multi-position athlete that gives you above avg defense at 7 different positions? 7!!!
Adam Duvall hit .213 last yr with an OPS+ of 87. He’s hit higher than a .237 BA once in 5 yrs. He’s projected to have a .225 BA in 2023 yet BOS paid $7M for the 33y old.
Jeimer Candelario got a 1 yr deal for $5M. Adam Frazier got $8M after a 0.69 WAR and a .612 OPS season
How is D-Mo’s $3M AAV an overpay considering the going rate in FA for someone with his versatility and defense? Plus he has only played a total of 381 games in MLB, he is arguably yet to even hit his ceiling.
@myaccount2
“Stupid” is taking it a bit too far. There are players who score from 1st on doubles, who go first to third, who stretch singles into doubles, who can tag up when others can’t. Those players have a greater set of run scoring tools. wRC+ does not account for most of this.
Right, but all you need to do is look at Moore’s baserunning metrics and sprint speed to know he’s a near-elite baserunner.
So an inability to move on the basepaths was not the factor hindering him from scoring runs, it was the Mariners being pretty bad as a team at hitting with RISP (they were also bad at moving guys up, IIRC).
If only you understood that analytics are comprised of things like batting average, slugging, walks…
@Fink Ployed
if analytics are driving decisions (and I know they are) how is it that there were any games at all in which Kelenic started in LF and Moore was on the bench? There is no way the upgrade in defense overcame the disparity in offense. Just doesn’t make sense.
I don’t follow the M’s, WW, but my distant impression as a Yankee fan is that Kelenic was a highly touted prospect. Consulting the record, I find that in 2019, when Moore broke camp with the M’s, Kelenic was their #1 position player prospect, while Moore wasn’t in their top 30. It’s common for a team to give more rope to a top prospect than to a guy who’d been picked up as a cheap free agent after not being retained by his previous team.
I do understand the perspective of M’s fans who think Moore is a bad hitter. There’s more than one way to look at it. The strikeouts are maddening, I get that. I’m reminded of Gallo, sans the power. Joey was highly productive as a Ranger, but the whiffs were not what the doctor ordered when he came to the Bronx to join other high-strikeout sluggers.
But Joey’s wRC+ also tanked in the Bronx. He wasn’t productive in any sense. Even his walks declined and his defense suffered.
Moore, on the other hand, had a healthy wRC+ last year, bolstered by a high OBP. Counting all players with at least 250 PA (Moore had 255), he ranked 20th in OBP, between Mike Trout and Brandon Nimmo. He’s stolen double-digit bases every year in his major league career, and his defensive versatility is valuable to the club. For what he offers, the contract seems reasonable to me.
Awesome take @Fink Ployed. I think Gallo was just a victim of NY. Everyone knows Ed Whitson and Sonny Gray, but the media/fans can get to hitters too. Many jumped on the anti Gallo bandwagon. Kelenic probably did get more chances that a lesser touted prospect would have. According to the M’s they broke down his swing and made adjustments this winter. I think they would have been better off hiring former college pitchers that can throw sliders and curves and just have him face live pitching throwing sliders and curves only hundreds / thousands of times.
Good luck finding a player who can field at so many positions, run the bases this well, and jack some dingers to boot for 3/9. Very valuable utility player.
Good OBP player, even if his BA is unsightly. Good speed, can play a few positions. Seems more than worth $3MM a year.
A walking machine. Good for him to sign a contract that will leave him with a few million dollars in his bank account if he is smart with his money. Properly invested, he could retire modestly or skim off a bit to supplement his salary in his post-MLB career.
Unless he spends like the proverbial drunken sailor or gets swindled in catastrophically bad investments, $9 million is more than enough to keep him exceptionally comfortable for the rest of his life.
No doubt but he also only takes home 4-5 of that 9 mil aswell
Probably at the high end of that, Murph. If he can get by on a few hundred thou a year, he should have a $3-$4 mill. nestegg.
I don’t believe the State of Washington has income tax, Texas doesn’t either, so he doesn’t pay state income tax on about 100 games a year. Must hate traveling to Oakland and Anaheim and coughing up an extra 12.3%.
Does everything expect hit the baseball
Still looking at batting averages, huh?
“still looking at batting averages”…..still trying to make yourself sound smart by putting down others and suggesting only you have all the baseball answers.
Batter A swings on the first pitch and gets a single with the bases empty.
Batter B works a 9-pitch walk and gets on with the bases empty.
Which batter helped his team more?
(Hint: Batter B made the pitcher throw 8 more pitches than Batter A)
Hint: nice job going with the extremes to not make any point at all
Oh Lord, did you just say that? At some point, you’re going to need hits. A walk is as good as a hit…most of the time…not every single time. Your deference to all things analytics seems to be making you blind to some pretty basic truths about baseball.
Dylan Moore is a gamer. Absolutely love this signing.
Moore, and the Mariners, take a lot of called third strikes. It’s because they are trying to walk instead of putting the ball in play. If you can walk, and get on base, great, but you shouldn’t go up to bat hoping to draw a walk. That’s the problem I have with walks.
A walk is one base; if you put the ball in play, you could get 2, 3, or 4 bases.
Never. He can’t hit
I’ll take Moore and Haggerty all day long for the Mariners. Glad both players are on Mariners
I’m not sure how that equates to a hint, DTD, but whatever.
OPS correlates with run production more than batting average does.
Ozzie Albies had a .247 BA last year, 23 points higher than Moore’s BA.
Albies had 42 more at-bats than Moore.
Moore’s OBP was 74 points higher than Albies’ OBP.
Albies’ OPS was .703. Moore’s OPS was .753, 50 points higher.
Albies was credited with 30 wOBA Runs Created. Moore was credited with 35 — in 42 fewer at-bats.
A high OBP player with a low BA can have a higher OPS and be more productive than a player with a higher BA and a lower OBP.
Read this, Chester:
mlbtraderumors.com/2023/02/mariners-dylan-moore-ag…
Your argument has nothing you do with you said that I responded to. You went with extremes for the outcomes which doesn’t help prove that a walk is more efficient than a hit. The average plate appearance is between 4-5 pitches depending on the seasons stats that you use. That walk guarantees a maximum one base. That hit guarantees a minimum of one base. A walk only produces a run if bases are loaded. A bit can produce a run on its own or with a runner on any base. I’m not discounting walks because they are definitely important. But to discount a hit is an absolute joke.
I’m not discounting hits. I’m aware of the added value of a hit in various situations and have pointed out those advantages in other discussions. But you’re discounting the value of a walk if you can’t or won’t acknowledge that a high-OBP/low-BA hitter can be more productive than a higher-BA/low OBP hitter. A batter with a high OBP that’s driven by a high walk rate (only 14 players with at least 250 PA had a higher BB% than Moore) can have a higher OPS, OPS+ and wRC+ than a batter with a substantially higher BA, and OPS, OPS+ and wRC+ all correlate more with run production than BA does.
I don’t buy in to the WRC, OPS+, FIP, WAR, DRS, UZR…they’re all fine in theory but that’s all it is, theory. If you’re gonna suck at hitting, you dang well better be able to take a walk to be somewhat useful. But I put much more value in hitters that don’t strikeout and put the ball in play much more than someone who can’t hit but takes a walk.
We’re probably closer in viewpoint than you might think. I like a high-average slap hitter who gets on base at a healthy rate. I don’t like a high-strikeout hitter who gives me a sinking feeling every time he comes to bat in the clutch. Guys who swing from their heels when a single will score a crucial run irritate me. But a guy who walks a lot can have a lot of successful at-bats without getting a hit. Apart from Ford and Murphy who had a handful of at-bats, Moore led the M’s in OBP.
I think a fallacy in WAR, no matter how it’s calculated, is that it fails to account for how the value of a player’s skill set is context-dependent. A high-OBP slap hitter on a team full of the same will have less value than on a team full of high-strikeout sluggers with a collectively mediocre OBP. The run-scoring environment changes from team to team.
If Moore were, say, a starting second baseman, this discussion would be very different. But as a utility player, his skill set should be valuable to the Mariners.
I think you’ll appreciate wRC+ more if you delve into the calculation. You already stated something that wRC+ is based on — not all hits are equal.
library.fangraphs.com/offense/wrc/
DRS and UZR are defensive metrics, and my general philosophy on defense is that the act of fielding a ball in play is, by its nature, much harder to quantify than pitching and offense, so no defensive metrics can offer a definitive picture of a player’s fielding skills. I use them to appraise players I don’t have the opportunity to see playing very often, and I survey all the stats to come up with a rough-sketch picture of how good those players probably are. But I don’t kid myself that there’s anything like inarguable accuracy to be taken from the presently available metrics. Quite often they’re contradictory.
DRS, btw, is calculated by humans hired by BIS to watch plays on computer screens. There’s plenty of subjectivity involved.
My issue with WRC/WRC+ is that it is just a spinoff of another theory that is again, just theory. All these things take something that isn’t complicated and make it mean something more than it is. I look at OPS for offense and really pay attention to hitting with RISP. For pitching, give me WHIP, K/BB ratio, ERA, hard hit rate. For defense, it’s honestly more of the eye test mixed in with errors and baseball smarts. For example, I know a lot of people thought Dansby was overrated on defense even with him winning a GG this yr. I’ve watched him since day 1 as a Braves fan. He never had the best arm but had a solid glove and good range but his instincts and baseball smarts jumped off the screen. That’s just how I look at defense, not saying it’s right or wrong.
You literally swayed no one with this attempt, contradicted yourself, and proved that your deference to statistical analytics has made your brain clouded.
“a low BA can have a higher OPS and be more productive than a player with a higher BA and a lower OBP”
Yes, but all that is dependent on slugging percentage which is a product of ACTUALLY HITTING THE BALL. You can’t take a walk over a hit every time and say it’s automatically better because… OBP.
Your above comment about a 9-pitch walk being better than a hit is still flawed.
Still trying to act like getting more hits isn’t important, huh?
20th century thinking
Dylan:
straight ball, he hit it very much
curve ball….bats are afraid
Sodomojo: Agreed!
Except
Ill never get behind .224/.368/.385 being a “strong” batting line.
2022 MLB average obp: .312. Your point is totally valid and I can’t blame you, just sayin…..
And I get the OBP argument too, I’m a big OBP guy, but that’s all his stat line suggests he does… get on base. He can see where the ball is goin, just can’t seem to actually hit it. He’s Ben Zobrist minus the bat.
Zobrist’s career OPS+ is 113 and Moore’s is 97. He’s at a small fraction of Zobrist’s cost.
Wise move to lock in the guaranteed money.
Yeah he did well for himself. He was a long term stint on the dl away from being league minimum caliber salary wise. Makes some decent coin, protects himself and family, and if he gets better he’ll hit free agency and have a chance to get paid again at 32.
I don’t expect the guy to be anything more than he has been over the past couple of years. We Mariner fans love this guys versatility, big hits, and moxy. We know he’s not a regular. But I WILL say that there is a realm of possibility where Dylan gets 500 abs, sneaks the average up closer to .250 and hits 15-20 HR’s and swipes 30 bags; all while playing every position except pitcher catcher and 1st
There’s also a great chance he hits Kelenic’s career line too.
For those who think his bat is weak, he slashed .314/.415/.486 with a 162 wRc+ in high-leverage situations last year.
Great stat. One thing you can’t take away from Dylan; he is a clutch hitter. Period. He’s done it time and time again, for several years now. I’ll never forget that grand slam against the Astros August ‘21! The place was on fire. Great memory.
He’s no Leury Garcia (3 years, $16.5M), but I suppose he’s fine.
Every team could use a Dylan Moore. Nice deal for both the Mariners and the player.
Whens Evan White gonna play? Its felt like forever. Ever since he got that extension hes been dogging it. Wonder how the Mariners fan base feels about him
White can sure play 1st base like no one.. I wonder how his injury’s are, and has he had anytime to work on his hitting?
He did make it back to baseball last year. His numbers at AAA were pretty bad, but it wasn’t a huge sample.
He ain’t dogging it, he’s is just too fragile. Finally seems to be healthy, but that’s not to say he ain’t gonna pull a hammy this spring. Needs more time to get back into it with so much time missed.
So were on the subject of Moore, he bugs me, he capable of making great defensive plays, and he steals bases only I’ve seen him make some bad decisions on the base paths though he’s not the only one. .I’ve said this before about him he needs Moore HELP with his hitting I mean what’s not obvious with him swinging at those inside pitches? HELP…, those opposing pitchers know all about that.. The other thing is he swings up on the ball too much causing too many popups. This Moore could be a good hitter he has quick reflexes along with some pop in his bat I had thought if they play him every day he would possibly work through his bating issues but then he is an established utility player so that’s were he will stay. .
When 224/.368/.385 is considered a strong batting line, you know the game is broken.
With a 30% K rate. Yeah – he adds value, but that hitting line isn’t exceptionally fun to watch.
Versatile and an on-base machine. Good late game hitter too
Great deal
As a Cardinals and Rangers fan, I would take him on my ball club any day. Some of these comments sound like a bunch of idiot fans the Cubs acquire any time they have a good team.