Seiya Suzuki Is Showing Signs of Progress

Between Cody Bellinger’s perplexing season, Dansby Swanson’s continued excellence, and Christopher Morel’s power surge, there are a lot of fascinating things happening with the Cubs. But I want to focus on their cleanup hitter and right fielder, Seiya Suzuki. In his introduction to the majors, he posted a 116 wRC+ in 446 plate appearances, but various hand, ankle, and finger injuries throughout the year kept him from getting in a prolonged rhythm; a 158 wRC+ in the first month and a 139 wRC+ in the final month sandwiched a 98 wRC+ from May through August. We got a few glimpses of what peak Suzuki could look like; health was the key to that becoming a consistent display.

Unfortunately for him, he suffered an oblique injury during spring training that forced him to withdraw from the World Baseball Classic and slowed down the start of his season. Early-season oblique injuries are incredibly frustrating; as you’re ramping up activities, the last thing you want is to hurt a part of your body that compromises your rotational power. He returned to action on April 14, but he wasn’t the best version of himself. His groundball rate that month was 49.1%, most likely due to an overly flat swing path. His 30-degree Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) — the angle of the barrel at impact — was flatter than any of his best months in 2022 by at least a full degree without a corresponding increase in pitch height, making it very tough for somebody of his size and mechanics to cover breaking balls and offspeed pitches consistently without significant body angle adjustments to compensate for his high hands preset and flat path. The blueprint for success from the previous season didn’t look like this.

Given that Suzuki didn’t barrel a single non-fastball in April, it’s safe to say an adjustment needed to be made. Here are a few of his hard hits on breaking balls that month that he didn’t get high enough off the ground to be considered barrels:

Each of these were hit over 100 mph, and two of them resulted in hits, but if you’re consistently hitting a ball at this launch angle, your offensive ceiling will be low. You’d expect Suzuki to be able to get some lift under pitches smack in the middle third of the strike zone and get them into the gap, but he hit just .250 on breakers during his two weeks in April with an xwOBA of .268.

As Suzuki got more comfortable at the plate post-oblique injury, he needed to focus on getting his mechanics to a point where he could convert these hard grounders into line drives. That he did, which makes sense; it’s likely that the oblique injury limited him from achieving the level of lateral torso bend needed to elevate these pitches. Here are a few breaking balls in the middle of the zone during May where he got his barrel under his hands and the ball:

Not everything needs to be a light tower homer, like the swing against J.P. France, but each of these swings is a great example of what a good power hitter should do to breaking balls in the middle of the strike zone. Unlike the swings when he returned from injury, Suzuki got these in the air to a varying degree: one was good for a line drive single, another was a deep flyout, and one was a moonshot home run. As a hitter, you’re much happier when your hard outs are deep fly balls as opposed to one-hoppers to infielders. That’s a more sound process that will eventually result in gappers.

In May, Suzuki increased his VBA from 30 to 32.3 degrees. Interestingly enough, the average height of pitches he made contact with in April was 2.33 feet, but in May that increased to 2.40. With all else even, that should result in a slight downtick in VBA, but Suzuki’s slight barrel adjustment put him in a better spot to lift the ball. Changes like these are how a hitter can go from a goose egg Barrel% in one month to 14.8% the next.

Hitting breaking balls hard is something Suzuki needs to be able to do. Last season, most of his production came from hitting fastballs: nine of his 15 home runs came on heaters, and he held a .361 xwOBA against them. Breaking balls, on the other hand, were a legit problem, and an unsurprising one for a player facing MLB pitching for the first time. But in his sophomore season, Suzuki has taken strides toward better production on breakers:

As you can see, Suzuki has decreased his Whiff% by 10 percentage points and kept the same chase rate. He has been more aggressive with attacking breaking balls in the heart of the zone but kept his shadow swing rate relatively the same. This isn’t in the table, but when he has swung at breakers in the shadow zone, his wOBA has jumped from .209 last year to .346 so far this season. And while his wOBA in the heart of the zone has dipped a little bit, he has made up for it with better performance around the edges. If you want to be a good big league hitter, you need to be at least competent against breaking balls. If he can continue to sustain this improvement from last season, we could be in store for a more permanent breakout that holds over a larger sample size.

I should note that since the calendar has flipped to June, Suzuki has been in a rut at the plate, going 1-for-23 with 11 strikeouts and chasing too many changeups out of the zone. With a 94th-percentile overall chase rate, I’m comfortable saying I don’t expect this to continue; this isn’t something that has been a big issue for him in the first 645 plate appearances of his career, and it would be surprising to see that trend continue. With solid right field defense — per Statcast, his jump rating has gone from the 10th percentile last year to the 98th in ’23 to pair with above-average speed (28.3 ft/s) — and a good power/plate discipline combination, Suzuki can be a very valuable player for the Cubs both this season and going forward as they try to solidify their place in the NL Central as a legit contender.