Corey Seager apologized more than once.
He apologized when he couldn’t or wouldn’t explain why he was benched in the playoffs.
“I don’t have a good answer for you on that,” he said. “Sorry.”
Seager apologized again when he refused to revisit his departure from Dodger.
“Let’s move on,” he said. “Sorry.”
Now a shortstop for the Texas Rangers, the 30-year-old Seager returned to Dodger Stadium on Tuesday to face his former team for the first time.
He was never the type to attract attention when he played here. He wasn’t about to start now.
Seager, who was sidelined in the series opener with a hamstring strain, had to understand the subtext of each question.
In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, he was the World Series most valuable player as the Dodgers won their only title in the last 36 years. However, a half-hearted attempt to sign him to a long-term contract resulted in him losing him to rookie Rangers three winters ago.
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Last year, the Rangers won the World Series and Seager was the MVP again.
The Dodgers? Without Seager in his lineup, his hitters choked in each of the last two games of October.
Seager is in the third year of a 10-year, $325 million contract with the Rangers, and the Dodgers’ refusal to offer him a comparable deal marks the biggest fork in the road for them under Andrew Friedman’s leadership.
He was their Mr. October.
They have won just one playoff game since he left.
This has raised questions about whether their current players are ready for the postseason spotlight. Friedman rejected the suggestion last year after his humiliating first-round exit against the Arizona Diamondbacks, essentially arguing that there was no such thing as a “postseason player.”
“Look at Corey Seager,” Friedman said, pointing out how Seager didn’t perform well in the 2019 and 2021 playoffs.
Manager Dave Roberts did what he could on Tuesday to minimize the effect of Seager’s defection on the Dodgers.
“For us,” Roberts said, “you still need more than one player. I think collectively we haven’t been good offensively the last few years.”
The Dodgers likely wouldn’t have traded for Trea Turner at the 2021 trade deadline if they hadn’t anticipated Seager’s exodus. They probably wouldn’t have converted outfielder Mookie Betts to play shortstop if they hadn’t lost Seager.
On the other hand, they probably wouldn’t have signed Freddie Freeman before the 2022 season if they didn’t have to replace Seager’s left-handed bat in the middle of the lineup.
For his part, Seager was grateful for his homecoming, in which the Dodgers paid tribute to him with a highlights package on their video scoreboard.
“I spent a lot of time here,” Seager said. “This organization kind of raised me. Prepared here. It kind of made me the man I am today. He taught me the game of baseball. I made a lot of friends, I made a lot of friends. I had a lot of good times out there, so all those memories kind of come flooding back when you arrive.”
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Seager said he spent part of his team’s day off Monday in Manhattan Beach with Dodgers utilityman Chris Taylor. Seager marveled at Betts’ ability to move to shortstop and revealed that he remains in contact with his fellow 2020 postseason hero.
He credited the Dodgers with helping him build a winning culture with the Rangers, who lost 102 games the season before signing him.
“They taught me everything I knew,” Seager said of the Dodgers. “How to win. How to do things the right way. It’s a first-class organization. You try to take that to another first-class organization. It’s all those little things that you’ve learned throughout the year that you try to get out there and talk about. ”
Predictably, Seager wasn’t as revealing when asked about how far the Dodgers went to re-sign him.
In his last spring training with the Dodgers, the team offered Seager an eight-year, $250 million contract, which he rejected.
At that point, did he imagine 2021 would be his last season with the Dodgers? Or did he remain hopeful that they could work something out?
“You’re always hopeful,” Seager said. “That was a long time ago, though. I can’t really remember what it was like.”
Everything worked out for Seager, who signed one of the most lucrative contracts in baseball history and won another World Series. The Dodgers are still waiting for the day they can say everything worked out for them, too.
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This story originally appeared on Los Angeles Times.
