At 8:09 p.m. Mountain Standard Time on Nov. 1, Corey Seager smiled.
He had smiled before, of course. His teammates hate the idea—which, in fairness, Seager perpetuates—that their shortstop is a collection of wires and gears programmed to mash baseballs and mutter monosyllabically. Seager smiled before Game 5 of the World Series when Rangers backup catcher Austin Hedges told him, “We’re going to win this game. And then I’m going to get you so drunk on tequila that I can take all your fantasy football players from you.” Seager smiled when the final out of the 2023 World Series settled into catcher Jonah Heim’s mitt, when Seager received his second World Series MVP trophy, when he drenched his teammates in beer.
But even when all that was done, he could not quite relax. He still had to attend to his obligations as the $325 million face of a franchise that he joined two years ago, fresh off a 102-loss season, and helped drag to the first title in its 62-year history.
The Hall of Fame wanted his batting helmet, to add to the bat he used in 2020 to help the Dodgers win their first title in 32 years. He became only the fourth man to win two World Series MVP awards, joining Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Reggie Jackson, which meant he had to lug the trophy around. (“It’s f—— heavy!” Seager exclaimed a few times. Perhaps he’d forgotten.) He endured four minutes and 45 seconds of questions at a press conference, gamely attempting to answer all but “Why did the Dodgers let you go?” Then he hopped down from the podium and made his way back to the clubhouse.
Was he more relieved to win the World Series or to be done answering questions about it?
“Oh, the media,” he said, grinning.
Seager is a man of few words but many hits, and his teammates are very happy about the ratio. He finished the postseason with a .318 average and a 1.133 OPS. He had the single biggest swing of the series, by win probability, when he turned a 5–3 ninth-inning deficit into a tie game in Game 1. The Rangers went on to win in 11 innings. They would only lose once more.
On Wednesday, Seager collected the Rangers’ first knock of the day against Diamondbacks ace Zac Gallen, who had carried a no-hitter into the seventh. In the dugout, manager Bruce Bochy was “getting on [offensive coordinator] Donnie Ecker,” he said afterward. “I said, ‘Let’s quit playing possum. How about getting a hit here?’” Seager, leading off the inning, got a 1–2 curveball down and away and flicked it the other way down the left field line, which Arizona had left vacant as part of a shift. Left fielder Evan Carter followed with a double, and DH Mitch Garver drove Seager home with a single. When Seager returned to the dugout, Hedges thanked him “for breaking it up.”
“Breaking up what?” Seager asked.
“He’s too locked in,” Hedges said afterward, standing on the field with his champagne goggles pushed up on his forehead. “That’s why he’s the best. That’s why he’s the MVP of the World Series.”
Seager is often so focused on the minutiae of his swing that he spends whole half-innings engrossed in video of his previous at bats. The Dodgers sometimes had to remind him to watch the game. The Rangers joke that the tripod that holds the camera that records his swing is their 27th teammate. But the Rangers have noted this year that Playoff Corey has surprised them with his in-game emotion, and that was never more true than on Wednesday. Ecker kept looking over to see who was hollering from the bench and being surprised to find it was Seager.
“He was yelling in the dugout,” Ecker said. “I’ve never seen him do that. He was animated and kept telling the guys, like, ‘Let’s go! Let’s take it! Let’s take it!’”
Seager said he would allow himself to enjoy the victory for a little while. He said he might not hit again until January.
Ecker disagreed. “He’s gonna take, like, a week off,” he said.
Well, whatever makes him happy.
