Seiya Suzuki is Patching His Strike Zone to Become a More Dependable Hitter

[Matthew Trueblood]

The two late hits he delivered Tuesday night were excellent examples of a subtle but important approach change by the Cubs' designated hitter, enacted coming into this year but only accelerated late in its run.

Image courtesy of © Kiyoshi Mio-Imagn Images

Everything about Seiya Suzuki's approach is geared toward getting pitches on the inner half of the plate and blasting them to his pull side. That's a fairly standard modern big-league hitting philosophy, but its effectiveness varies widely, based especially on whether and how well a hitter can respond when pitchers start adjusting to that intention. Even as he's come into his own in the majors, Suzuki hasn't hit pitches on the outer third of the plate and beyond it well, and that incomplete coverage of the zone has made it hard for him to translate his extraordinary offensive skills into extraordinary offensive value.

For his career, Suzuki is just a .217/.305/.312 batter on pitches at least on the outer lane of the plate to him. Most hitters don't handle outside pitches well, of course. They do their best work on the stuff down the middle, and generate most of their thump on balls inside. Still, Suzuki has been rough, and when you glance at the raw data, it looks worse than ever this season. He's hitting just .202/.279/.283 in plate appearances that end with a pitch away.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you can see signs of Suzuki digging deep to find ways to attack the outside pitch better. As his MLB career has progressed, he's both rolled over on the ball less often and found ways to pull it more consistently.

It's good, when you're a hitter with plus power, to pull the ball, even if the pitch is on the outer part of the plate. However, Suzuki has sometimes had an unfortunate--even devastating--tendency to roll over that pitch and hit sharp but harmless ground balls on it. It's encouraging, then, to see hits like the two he delivered late on Tuesday night. Both were hit at fairly low trajectories, but whether you classify them as ground balls or line drives, each had an exit velocity over 100 miles per hour and a launch angle of 6 degrees or higher. Even nominal grounders, when hit at launch angles above 5 degrees and with some juice behind them, are almost always hits.

Suzuki has tapped into something more sustainable on the outer third lately, even if the results are slow to reflect the value of that change. Here are his month-by-month average exit velocities and launch angles for pitches on the outer third, for the last two seasons.

This reflects a concerted and successful change this year, which is nice. Notice, too, though, that this month boasts a considerably lower average launch angle than some other recent ones. Does that mean Suzuki is falling back into the habit of rolling over on the ball?

No. In fact, I think the insight we're tapping into here is that for hitters like Suzuki whose power is mostly on elevated stuff over the inner half, you don't want to see them trying to hit fly balls on the pitch away--let alone succeeding in doing so. It probably waters down their command of the inner half of the plate, and their barrel speed and accuracy when they get those meatballs. It probably also means a lot of quasi-encouraging fly outs that really shouldn't encourage us. In the era of Statcast data and expected slugging averages rendered in neat Baseball Savant sliders, this kind of swing looks good, to seasoned fans and to data sets.

I don't believe that we should actually take much solace from those. Suzuki still only has two home runs on balls over the outer third or beyond this year, and he owes one of them to the Allegheny River, for forcing the Pirates to build a very close (though high) fence down the right-field line at PNC Park. It's ok to try to drive the ball when it's out away from you, even as an inner-third, take-and-rake slugger, but the ideal version of it might be a swing more like this one.

If he's focused on being early enough to get the bat head out and drive that outside pitch on a flat trajectory like this, he can more consistently collect actual hits than if he's trying to extend his more leveraged power swing an extra few inches to cover the corner. Just as importantly, though, I think it also leaves him more room to adjust and be the dangerous hitter the Cubs need him to be if a pitcher comes in on him, when he was looking away.

For right-handed batters who want to dominate the inner half of the plate, it's not enough to go up there with that preference fixed in the foremind and be stubborn about it. There are too many good right-handed pitchers in MLB, all eager to pick ruthlessly at the holes they find in such an approach. You can't look for the pitch you want and adjust to the one you don't want. As paradoxical as it sounds, you have to start by covering the pitch you don't want, then let the pitch you do prefer still work for you when you get it. It's a tricky mental puzzle to complete, which is why relatively few right-handed batters (especially those whose formative amateur and professional years were spent in the Americas) have such an inside-oriented approach.

For those who do, though, seeing that reverse angle on the craft of hitting is essential. Suzuki might be starting to get there. Given how good he's been for most healthy portions of his career to date, that's tantalizing. If he can come back next year with a consistent and coherent plan for covering the outer edge while still punishing pitchers who come inside on him, he'll become an even more dangerous version of the hitter we've seen over the last season and a half. That would be a huge development for the Cubs lineup.

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