Seiya Suzuki's Well-Roundedness Actually Makes Him a Very Rare Hitter

[Matthew Trueblood]

For two years, many Cubs fans have struggled with the inarticulable feeling that Seiya Suzuki's whole is less than the sum of his parts, offensively. That might not be true, but at last, I think I can help clarify where the feeling comes from.

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

The thing about Seiya Suzuki is, he does almost everything well on offense. His baserunning is inconsistent, but when he's healthy, he balances the key skills of a batter--making contact, controlling the strike zone, generating power and using the whole field--as well as almost any hitter in MLB. He's been worth somewhere between 20 and 25 more runs than an average hitter, according to both Baseball Reference and FanGraphs. That's a few runs better than he was in almost identical playing time last season, and it makes him a valuable hitter.

Part of the frustration some fans feel with Suzuki is rooted not in anything he does wrong, but in the fact that the team lacks any hitters better than he is. Shohei Ohtani has been worth 67 runs more than an average hitter in 2024, according to Baseball Reference. Juan Soto has been worth 61. Each has played considerably more than Suzuki, but even if we even out those differences, those guys are worth an extra 25 or 30 runs per year, relative to the Cubs' top slugger.

For a lot of fans, though, there's something else that nags about Suzuki--a sense that his overall numbers oversell his real production. It feels like he's not creating as many runs as he should, given how good he really is. Does that vague notion carry any validity?

To take the question from abstract to concrete, we can turn to an invaluable tool provided by FanGraphs--the + stats suite. On their leaderboards page, the site allows one to select a time period and get the numbers for all players within it set on an indexed scale, where 100 is average, higher is better, and everything is anchored to the league average and adjusted for park factors. It's a way to see how a player compares to the rest of the league in which they play, not just on an overall production basis, but within specific component stats.

Suzuki is, as you can probably sense just from watching him or holding a passing familiarity with his raw numbers, better than average at almost everything. Looking at the last two seasons as a pair, to maximize the robustness of these comparisons and wash out fluky weather, park, or ball effects, he's about 20 percent better than a typical hitter in terms of walk rate, batting average on balls in play, and isolated power. In other words, he takes a very disciplined approach, has a plus knack for generating extra-base hits, and can line the ball all over the diamond, making him hard to defend.

He does strike out about 10 percent more than average. That's his tradeoff. This year, alone, it's even a bit higher than that, but he's gotten the ball off the ground more often and is hitting for a higher average on balls in play as a result, so the swap has worked. Swinging at the first pitch only about 13 percent of the time and remaining patient throughout the at-bat, Suzuki sets himself up to strike out sometimes, but that's part of how he finds success.

The fun thing about the + stats, really, is that it makes it easy to find comparable players, both within and beyond a player's specific context. Suzuki's particular flavor of balance, though, turns out to be a fairly unique one. I did my best to find some comps. Let's see what we make of them. For this exercise, I used 2023-24, then searched for similar hitters in 2008-09, 1991-92, and 1983-84, to figure out how what a player like Suzuki looks like has changed over time. Here are the best comps I could rough out.

Player	Seasons	BBr+	Kr+	ISO+	BABIP+	AVG+	OBP+	SLG+
Seiya Suzuki	2023-24	121	111	124	119	114	112	118
William Contreras	2023-24	126	91	112	115	115	115	114
David Wright	2008-09	135	110	120	117	114	115	116
Matt Holliday	2008-09	125	92	131	116	119	119	123
Ray Lankford	1991-92	101	138	132	114	105	104	114
Jeff Bagwell	1991-92	137	109	126	111	110	116	115
José Cruz	1983-84	115	85	120	118	120	116	120
Kent Hrbek	1983-84	122	100	150	112	115	115	127

The hardest thing to find, it turned out, was a hitter who could make a similar impact on the ball and showed similar plate discipline to Suzuki, who nonetheless struck out more than an average hitter. The closest comp of the lot, here, is David Wright from 2008 and 2009. Those were the peak seasons of a near-Hall of Fame player. Alas, that one comes with a major caveat. The Mets moved from the defunct Shea Stadium to Citi Field between those two seasons, and in the first year in his new home, Wright's production crashed. His strikeout rate shot up, and his power cratered. He was a much better hitter than these adjusted numbers imply in 2008--and, maddeningly, worth just a few runs fewer than Suzuki has been this year in that second campaign.

Jeff Bagwell is the next-closest comp, but before you get too excited, those were Bagwell's first two seasons in the majors. At ages 23 and 24, he hadn't yet refined his zone to the extent he eventually would, and his power was evident but nascent. He only managed 103 extra-base hits in almost 1,400 plate appearances between the two seasons, and only 33 of those were homers--although those unimpressive numbers can be partially explained by the fact that Bagwell played his home games at the pitcher-friendly Astrodome.

Suzuki turned 30 last month. There's no next level coming for him. José Cruz is the only player on this list who was also in his 30s when he put together such similar production, and his comes with the warning that he didn't strike out nearly as much as Suzuki, even adjusting for their respective eras. Cruz was very good in those seasons--better than Suzuki would be even if we gave him an extra 100 plate appearances of the same level of production this year--but got a substantial share of that value from putting the ball in play at a solid rate.

Coincidentally, Cruz also had exactly 103 extra-base hits in something approaching 1,400 trips to the plate across the two seasons we're talking about here. Only 26 of those were homers. Kent Hrbek had 123 in his 1,217 plate appearances in the same years, and 43 of those were homers. For Suzuki, in just 1,151 trips, it's already a total of 109 extra-base hits, of which 41 are dingers. Yet, look how much greater Hrbek's adjusted isolated power is. Cruz had a similar ISO+ to Suzuki's, with six fewer extra-base hits in 200 more plate appearances.

That tells us one important thing about the players themselves, and the context that sets production on a value scale. The league-wide power inflation has made it harder to stand out as a power hitter, and even a player with obvious and impressive power like Suzuki's doesn't derive as much relative value from it as a player like early-career Hrbek did. We know, too, what pressure the global rise in strikeout rate applies to hitters. With that patient approach that will lead to some strikeouts anyway, Suzuki has to fight hard to create positive value, because the confluence of that approach and the league's out pitches forces him to get a lot of hits on balls in play, draw ample walks, and find a lot of power just to be above-average.

Just as importantly, but far more subtly, notice what all the above means for the value of a player with a Suzuki-shaped skill set. Because the league's baseline for batting average and OBP has sagged over the last several years, there's been some leakage in the value teams used to be able to create by chaining together good hitters in their lineup. It would be hyperbole to say that all offense is short-sequence offense at this stage of the evolution of MLB, but it comes nearer the truth than would be optimal for a player like Suzuki to have the most possible value. His skill set is built around both keeping the line moving and bringing around runners when they're on base, without truly excelling in either regard.

Remember Derrek Lee's 2007 and 2008 campaigns, when his power was still semi-dormant after a broken wrist in 2006 but he was healthy enough to be a very good overall hitter? He's a pretty excellent comp to Suzuki. What's missing from the current Cubs are threats as dynamic as Alfonso Soriano (159 ISO+, even though it came at the cost of any meaningful walks and with a lot of strikeouts) or Aramis Ramírez (146 ISO+, plus great bat-to-ball skills), but it's also very hard to be that caliber of power hitter these days. There were 32 qualifying hitters with an ISO+ over 140 in MLB in 2007-08. In 2023-24, that number is 21. When the baseline rises, it gets harder to be exceptional, and in a zero-sum game, exceptionalism is a key aspect of value, because all value is relative.

This doesn't mean Suzuki isn't a good hitter. On the contrary, it seems very safe to say that he's worth about 20 runs per year more than an average hitter going forward, with the understanding that it will require the team to replace him for a handful of weeks each year and baking in the aging curve that will gain gravitational force as he moves into his 30s. However, his balanced skill set won't lead to any kind of breakout from here, and his value as a complementary piece is slightly diminished by broader changes to the way the game works.

The Cubs can't plan to win with a Suzuki-style player as the linchpin of their lineup. They need a player who's clearly better, making him a partner to Ian Happ, Michael Busch, and perhaps Dansby Swanson and Isaac Paredes as complementary weapons. They need one of the 10-15 players worth over 30 runs at the plate in each of the last few seasons, and that player needs to fit one of the positions they're capable of opening up in the everyday lineup. Unfortunately, such players are extremely difficult to acquire, and it's not clear whether this front office is up to the task.

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