If there were any fears about how well Seiya Suzuki would transition to Major League Baseball, his hot start with the Cubs has probably quelled them. The 27-year-old right fielder has collected hits in each of his first six games, three of them homers. He reached base safely at least twice in each of those games (the last only with benefit of a throwing error) while demonstrating otherworldly plate discipline to go along with his impressive power. Admittedly, we’re in small-sample theater, but the show thus far is worthy of strong reviews.

It’s not as though Suzuki was expected to flop given that the Cubs invested nearly $100 million in acquiring him — $85 million over a five-year deal plus another $14.625 million as a posting fee for the Hiroshima Carp. As Kevin Goldstein described him when he signed with Chicago in mid-March, “At 27, Suzuki is a player in his prime, with an impressive track record of performance at Japan’s highest level since his teens. This is not a prospect; this is an established talent who just hasn’t played in Major League Baseball yet.”

Suzuki hit .317/.443/.639 with 38 homers and just a 16.3% strikeout rate for Hiroshima last year while winning his second batting title — a slash-stat triple crown this time — and earning Best Nine honors for the sixth straight time in Nippon Professional Baseball. While both the homers and slugging percentage represented career highs, his season wasn’t wildly far off from his career numbers in NPB (.315/.414/.570). Between ZiPS and Steamer, our projection systems figured that he would lose some power in the move to MLB, but his Depth Charts forecast for a .287/.369/.508 line and .371 wOBA still casts him as one of the game’s top 20 hitters.

At least through Thursday, so far, so good. I won’t pretend that half a dozen games is proof of anything for any player, and none of the stats in this piece are even close to stabilizing, but Suzuki has proven to be very entertaining while more than holding his own against quality pitchers from day one.

Indeed, on Opening Day against the Brewers, Suzuki reached base in each of his first three plate appearances. He worked a six-pitch walk and collected a single off reigning NL Cy Young winner Corbin Burnes — no big deal, just having immediate success against the qualifier who had the majors’ lowest wOBA allowed in 2021 — and followed that with an eight-pitch walk against reliever Aaron Ashby. In Chicago’s second game two days later, he drove in three runs, the first two against Brandon Woodruff via a sacrifice fly and a bloop single to center, the third via a four-pitch bases-loaded walk off José Ureña. He capped the series against the Brewers by crushing a three-run first-inning homer off Freddy Peralta, a 110.9-mph, 412-foot shot to left center, then working a seven-pitch walk off Peralta in his next plate appearance.

Two days later, Suzuki went yard twice, accounting for both of the Cubs’ runs in a 2-1 win over the Pirates. His first blow was a 397-footer to right center field off former Cub José Quintana, his second a 398-footer to left field off Anthony Banda. On Wednesday against the Pirates, he went 1-for-3 with an RBI single off Zach Thompson and a walk off Wil Crowe. On Thursday against the Rockies, he hit a first-inning RBI double off Kyle Freeland, and reached base again in the third on a throwing error by José Iglesias.

Here’s the “greatest hits” reel:

Through Thursday, Suzuki is hitting .368/.480/.895 for a 262 wRC+ — absurd numbers straight out of a video game, unsustainable by definition, and yet compelling just the same; he entered Thursday with a 322 wRC+, which ranked third behind only the Guardians’ Owen Miller and Jose Ramírez, but dropped to eighth with his 1-for-4 night in Colorado. He’s averaged a 91.0 mph exit velocity on his batted balls, and his 28.6% barrel rate is tied with Aaron Judge for fourth in the majors, trailing only Byron Buxton, Joey Gallo, and Giancarlo Stanton — the big boys, so to speak.

While Suzuki is hitting the ball hard, what he’s doing when he’s not hitting the ball at all stands out even more. His swinging strike rate is just 3.8% — that’s four swings and misses from among 104 pitches, one against Woodruff, one against Banda, one against the Pirates’ David Bednar, and one against the Rockies’ Justin Lawrence, the last two of whom struck him out swinging. That 3.8% rate still trails Steven Kwan’s ungodly 0.7%, as well as the rates of four other players, but it’s amazing nonetheless. I won’t pretend to know where he’ll finish, but in the pitch-tracking era (since 2008), 54 batters have qualified for the batting title with swinging strike rates of 3.8% or lower. Only two of them, however, have done so while slugging at least .500, both in 2014: Victor Martinez (.565 SLG, 3.5% SwStr%) and Michael Brantley (.506 SLG, 3.6% SwStr%). Brantley barely missed in 2019 (.503 SLG, 4.0% SwStr%), as did Albert Pujols in 2008 (.653 SLG, 4.0% SwStr%). That would be some company to wind up in.

Also impressive is Suzuki’s 10.9% chase rate, which is in a virtual tie with Christian Yelich for the majors’ lowest among qualifiers. Suzuki entered Thursday at 8.3%, the only qualifier in single digits — even Kwan’s at a comparatively normal 23.7% — but went down chasing a well-placed sinker by Lawrence:

That was just the fifth pitch Suzuki has chased outside the zone; he fouled two of them off, singled off Woodruff, and doubled off Freeland.

Again, Suzuki won’t maintain those numbers, but it’s worth noting how advanced he is at controlling the zone relative to the other Japanese hitters who have come over recently. In mid-March, just after he signed, Hiroshi Miyashita published a piece on the FanGraphs Community Research blog comparing Suzuki’s final NPB season to those of Shohei Ohtani (2016 and ’17), Yoshi Tsutsugo (2019), and Shogo Akiyama (2019) via data from the 1.02 – Essence of Baseball site, with tables covering his slash stats, WAR components, batted ball stats, plate discipline stats, and more. The plate discipline one particularly stood out to these eyes:

Among MLB qualifiers, only Juan Soto (15.1%), Max Muncy (19.1%), Robbie Grossman (19.2%) and Tommy Pham (19.3%) swung at less than 20% of pitches outside the zone; Ohtani, the only one of the above players to qualify last year, had a chase rate of 30.1% in 2021 and is at 31.1% for his career, so perhaps we can expect Suzuki’s line to wind up in a range comparable to what he did in Japan.

Speaking of Ohtani, he and Keith McDonald (the son of an American serviceman stationed in Japan during the Vietnam War) of the 2000 Cardinals are the only other players born in Japan who homered three times in their first six games in MLB, with Kenji Johjima the only other one even to homer twice; no other Japanese player had a multi-homer game so early in his major league career. (Ohtani hit .364/.417/.773 (221 wRC+) in his first six non-pitching games in 2018, in case you’re wondering.) Meanwhile, Suzuki’s six-game hitting streak is the third-longest of any Japanese player to start his career, after those of Akinori Iwamura in 2007 (nine games) and Hideki Matsui in ’03 (seven games). His 10 RBI are the most by any Japanese player in his first six games, and in fact only two players born anywhere have more RBI in such a career-opening span, the Tigers’ Dale Alexander in 1929 (13) and the Rockies’ Trevor Story in 2016 (12), while four other players had 10, including the Reds’ Jonathan India last year.

That stuff is admittedly trivial and fleeting, and we’ll have to wait and see how well Suzuki maintains his power and plate discipline as pitchers adjust to what they’ve seen. Still, it’s pretty clear that he belongs in the majors, and it appears very possible that the Cubs have a legitimate middle-of-the-lineup star on their hands.

Spring training games may be underway but the abbreviated post-lockout free agency period means we’re still seeing a number of players find new homes for the upcoming season. This weekend, the Cubs and the Twins added some much-needed pitching depth. Let’s take a look at what they can expect from their new hurlers.

The Cubs, who appear to be on the outer fringes of contention, signed starting pitcher Drew Smyly to a one-year, $5.25 million deal with $2.5 million in incentives and a mutual option for 2023. At 32, the left-handed Smyly has had an up and down career thanks in part to health issues that include missing the entirety of the 2017 and ’18 seasons due to Tommy John surgery. He spent 2019 knocking the rust off with the Rangers and Phillies, and he didn’t quite look fully recovered until a resurgent stretch with the Giants in ’20, where he showed off a 2.5 mph boost on his fastball and a career-high 14.9% swinging strike rate. That performance secured him a $11 million deal with the Braves before last season, but his performance suffered; his ERA (4.48) and FIP (5.11) tumbled below league-average and he found himself left off of Atlanta’s playoff rotation. Smyly now looks to bounce back in a return to the Cubs, where he spent the 2018 season rehabbing.

The first thing to note about Smyly is that he’s still throwing a tick harder than earlier in his career, even if he has lost about half of his velocity gains from the 2020 season. This puts his 92.1 mph fastball right around league average for lefty starters. Performance-wise, his heater took a big hit, though, with hitters putting up a .415 wOBA as he surrendered 14 home runs. The likely culprit is the shape of the pitch, as both its drop and run became more average — not the direction you want your movement to go, especially with merely average velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

Free agent signings come in several flavors. There are the big splashy ones – ooh, Kris Bryant and Freddie Freeman are in the NL West now! There are good-fit signings – Mark Canha on the Mets and Yusei Kikuchi on the Blue Jays fill necessary roles on exciting clubs. There are even feel-good reunions, like Zack Greinke returning to the Royals.

There are also reliever signings. So, so many reliever signings. Not every team can sign a star first baseman, but everyone needs a flock of middle-inning arms. There are nine innings every game, and starters don’t pitch as many frames as they used to, and – well, you get the idea, there are a ton of reasons to go out and find some innings, even if you’re not planning on winning 257 games like the Dodgers or overthrowing the established order of things like the Blue Jays.

To that end, the Cubs signed three relievers yesterday, and the Angels signed two of their own. Chicago gave Daniel Norris one year and $1.75 million plus incentives, David Robertson one year and $3.5 million plus incentives, and Mychal Givens one year and $5 million plus incentives. For their part, the Angels signed Archie Bradley for one year and $3.75 million, but also went up-market and signed MVP vote-getter Ryan Tepera to a two-year, $14 million deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Seiya Suzuki is rightfully the headline grabber, but the Cubs stayed in the news on Thursday by agreeing to terms with infielder Jonathan Villar on a one-year deal worth $6 million. Villar spent the 2021 season with the Mets, hitting .249/.322/.416 in 142 games for 2.1 WAR and playing second base, third base, and shortstop for the injury-riddled franchise. That 2021 season represented a colossal comeback from his poor showing in 2020, when his power disappeared and he finished with a lackluster .232/.301/.292 line.

Versatility is one of those things that’s hard to put a precise figure on, but having a player such as Villar on your roster is basically like giving yourself a 27- or 28-man roster. He won’t remind anyone of Ozzie Smith at short, but that’s hardly the point with a player with his skillset. Whatever infielder you lose to a pulled hammy or a sprained elbow, Villar represents a 20/20-capable player who can man the position. He’s played much less often in the outfield, but there’s no particular reason to think he’d be a problem out there; he’s certainly fast enough to play even center field, and he stole 40 bases as recently as 2019. Being versatile isn’t one of the parameters that ZiPS looks for when making comps, but it still warms my heart to see Tony Phillips, the Platonic ideal of a super-sub, showing up high in Villar’s comp list at 15th. If he is 80% of Phillips, the retooling Cubs ought to be overjoyed with how their $6 million was spent. Read the rest of this entry »

When we released our Top 100 Prospects list last month, one of the questions we heard most frequently was, “Where is Seiya Suzuki?” It was the subject of considerable internal debate, but the larger discussion revolved around whether or not the Japanese superstar even belonged on a prospect list.

While in terms of service time and rookie eligibility, Suzuki is technically a prospect, it just doesn’t feel right to rank him amongst unfinished products. He is not a player who requires development, or one where we’re talking about the gap between who he is now and what he can become. At 27, Suzuki is a player in his prime, with an impressive track record of performance at Japan’s highest level since his teens. This is not a prospect; this is an established talent who just hasn’t played in Major League Baseball yet.

That’s about to change. After a flurry of inaccurate Twitter reporting on Tuesday, Suzuki ended all speculation about his future on Wednesday morning by signing with the Cubs on a five-year, $85 million deal (when combined with his posting fee, Chicago will spend nearly $100 million for his services), where he’ll step right into the middle of the lineup as the everyday right fielder.

Suzuki’s performances in Japan have been nothing short of outstanding, with an OPS north of 1.000 in each of the last four seasons, including a career high of 1.073 with Hiroshima in 2021, when he hit .317/.443/.639 in 132 games with 38 home runs. Still, statistical projections for him can be challenging, as is the case with any player who has never been in the big leagues; there are skills, tools and traits that may lead to success elsewhere yet not translate at the game’s highest level. Still, Dan Szymborski gave it his best shot and in the end nearly hit a bullseye with a contract projection of five years and $83 million.

Scouts are just as optimistic as Dan as to Suzuki’s ability to produce in the big leagues. He’s a well-rounded player, but the beginning of any discussion about his potential begins with what he can do with a bat in his hands, and luckily for the Cubs and their fans, there’s a lot to like. He features the much desired combination of excellent swing decisions with a very good contact rate and rarely chases outside the zone, which you can reasonably expect will continue with the Cubs; breaking balls in Japan, while rarely matching the velocity he will see in the majors, do move just as much, if not more. Read the rest of this entry »

The itinerant gunslinger is a time-worn trope in Westerns, but baseball experienced a resurgence of its own version of it over the weekend. Andrelton Simmons and José Iglesias, two older free agents with sterling defensive reputations, are each headed to a new team. Simmons signed with the Cubs, a one-year, $4 million deal with incentives that could push his total payout higher. Meanwhile, Iglesias signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the Rockies. Rather than cover them both separately, let’s go through the deals together so that I can force some metaphors on you and compare two delightfully shrewd defensive wizards.

The glove-only shortstop isn’t what it used to be, particularly if you hit like Simmons did in 2021. He stumbled to a .223/.283/.274 batting line, and while his defense was predictably excellent, that’s simply not enough to lock down an everyday starting role. The Twins weren’t good last year, and even then, Simmons started to lose playing time as the season wore on. The Cubs will be his third team in the past three years, and he’s solidly into the short-term-stints-on-okay-teams phase of his career.

For his part, Iglesias must think Simmons is downright sedentary. The Rockies will be his sixth team in five seasons; he’s bounced around on one-year deals since 2019, and even got traded in-season last year. He wasn’t an offensive black hole to the extent that Simmons was in 2021, but he’s hardly Carlos Correa with the bat in his hands; he’s compiled a 93 wRC+ in his last four seasons. His defense doesn’t grade out as well as Simmons’ does, though; depending on who you listen to, he was somewhere between acceptable and quite bad defensively last year after being solid throughout his career. Read the rest of this entry »

Job Title: Software Engineer, Baseball Systems

DEPARTMENT: Baseball Operations: Research & Development – Baseball Systems
REPORTS TO: Architect, Baseball Systems

Location:Chicago, IL

Description:
The Chicago Cubs Baseball Systems Department is seeking to fill a Baseball Systems Software Engineer position. This role will focus on the development and maintenance of the Chicago Cubs baseball information system data warehouse, including creating web interfaces and web tools for the user interface; assisting in mobile application development; building automated ETL processes which feed it; maintaining back-end databases; and troubleshooting data source issues as needed. This role will collaborate with software engineers and data analysts in their use of the Cubs’ data warehouse and coordinate plans for database growth, while also reviewing and recommending new technologies for use by Baseball Operations department. Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Analyst, Research and Development

Department: R&D
Reports To: Director, Research & Development

Role
The Chicago Cubs are seeking analysts to join the Research and Development group in Baseball Operations. Analysts will contribute to core research furthering the general knowledge-base of the Chicago Cubs while specializing in one of five core areas:

• Amateur Scouting
• Biomechanics/Performance Science
• International Scouting
• MLB Advance Scouting
• Pitching Development

The analyst will work closely with the entirety of the R&D department to develop statistical models that evaluate players and development opportunities, process and interpret data, and disseminate analytic insights to their associated departments. We will consider applications with various levels of experience. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Chicago Cubs.

Batters

Losing Javier Báez, Anthony Rizzo, and Kris Bryant hurt the offense, but the drop-off may not be all that significant. The first two weren’t amazing offensively, simply solid. And even amid some of the surprising breakouts from their Quadruple-A players, the Cubs got little out of second base and right field; Joc Pederson may have had some 2021 heroics, but they happened in Joctober, not Jocpril or Jocly. Read the rest of this entry »

Caleb Kilian made giant strides in 2021. Unranked as a San Francisco prospect at season’s start, the 24-year-old right-hander now profiles as one of the most promising arms in the Chicago Cubs system. The NL Central club acquired Kilian, along with outfielder Alexander Canario, in exchange for free-agent-to-be Kris Bryant at the July trade deadline.

The degree to which Kilian stepped up this year is apparent in his numbers. Pitching almost exclusively at the Double-A level, the 2019 eighth-round pick out of Texas Tech University put up a 2.42 ERA while allowing just 75 hits and 13 walks in 101 1/3 innings. Augmenting his signature plus command with increased velocity and an improved pitch mix, he punched out 112 batters.

Kilian’s repertoire revolves around a sinker and a cutter, the latter of which he began developing in the rookie-level Arizona League.

“It was early, almost right when I got there,” explained Kilian, who had pitched in a pair of College World Series with the Red Raiders. “When I got to pro ball, my slider was kind of just a worse curveball, so the Giants recommended a cutter. That way, I’d basically be throwing what felt like a fastball — same arm speed, just a different grip. I supinate with the ball anyway, so by turning it in my hand, it kind of just comes out naturally with cut.” Read the rest of this entry »