This is the Seiya Suzuki We've All Been Waiting For

[Matthew Trueblood]

And that 'all' probably includes the man himself.

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

There is a sizable, well-meaning contingent of Cubdom who would have you believe that Seiya Suzuki has been secretly elite, for a while now. Some of them are in the pockets of Big Wind At Wrigley—which is to say, they (rightly) took note of the extreme quiddities of the weather patterns at the Friendly Confines last year and (less rightly) believe that that masked a breakout whereby Suzuki stepped forward and became one of the league's best hitters. Others are just devout observers of park- and league-adjusted rate stats for offense, which scored Suzuki as 21, 28, and 36 percent better than average in his first three big-league seasons, respectively.

I appreciate where those folks are coming from, because amid what has been a frustrating and protracted rebuild, there's always a risk that a team's best players will take perverse, misplaced blame for the failures of their franchise. Suzuki has been, inarguably, the best Cubs hitter of the last three seasons. It's not his fault that the team failed to build a total roster within which he would have been a sufficient linchpin for the lineup, or to add players who could push him down the offensive pecking order (until this winter, of course). It would be grossly unfair for Suzuki to be treated as the problem with teams who would not even have had winning records, if not for his contributions. Pumping up his accomplishments shields us against that danger.

Here's the thing, though: At a deeper level, examining all aspects of his process and then zooming out to view his topline results, Suzuki has not been the caliber of hitter his biggest boosters would have you believe him to be. Counting numbers don't always tell the truth, and they never tell the whole truth, but it's true that he only hit 21 home runs in 582 plate appearances last year, setting a new Stateside career high. Yes, Wrigley might have dampened his power slightly, but he also had some process issues to iron out. He's been very good, all along. He was not, in any season from 2022-24, good enough to be the best hitter in a championship-caliber lineup.

Ironically, just as the team acquired a player who removed the pressure for him to be that kind of hitter, that's exactly what he's become in 2025. Whether Suzuki can keep this up is impossible to say, but what he's doing so far is legitimate. It's elite, in a way he'd never been before.

In 2023, Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus created a hitting metric called SEAGER. It's a backronym that pays homage to the foremost practitioner of the skills it rewards, Corey Seager. The stat itself is a compound measurement. It first maps the expected value of a swing or a take for all pitch locations, based on the outcomes hitters see when they do swing at given offerings (and, of course, on the likelihood that a given pitch would be called a strike if not swung at). Then, it evaluates each of a hitter's swing decisions. The first number it tabulates, then, is the percentage of a hitter's good swing decisions were takes on pitches on which the expected value of a swing would have been negative—versus, of course, the good decisions that stem from pouncing on hittable offerings.

So, whatever the percentage of good decisions that come on takes is, SEAGER uses it as an index of selectivity at the plate. Next, the model calculates the percentage of pitches with a positive expected swing value at which a hitter didn't swing. This is labeled their "Hittable Pitch Take %". To find a player's SEAGER score, you just subtract their Hittable Pitch Take rate from their Selectivity score. A higher SEAGER score is better, then, and usually, anything over 25 puts you in elite company. Last year, Aaron Judge led the majors with a 26.5 SEAGER.

Here are some key metrics for Suzuki in all four of his seasons in MLB, including one of the two major inputs for SEAGER and SEAGER itself.

Season	Hittable Pitch Take %	Zone Contact %	Contact % Over Expected	SEAGER
2022	38.2	87.6	4.7	18
2023	35.4	86.1	3.9	19
2024	36.6	85.2	-5	18.7
2025	29.7	78.5	-5.3	26.8

Suzuki has always been plenty selective. What he's needed to, ever since he arrived in the league, is find a better way to cover hittable pitches—not just the strike zone, but the sections thereof where a hitter has to do damage in order to thrive in the American majors. Lo, and behold: he's done that this year. Specifically, he's gone from average or worse in terms of letting hitter-friendly pitches sail by to being in the 92nd percentile. He still knows how to tell a strike from a ball; his chase rate outside the zone is actually down this year. He's just getting a whole lot more assertive within the zone.

I included the middle two columns as a way to understand how he's doing so much with so many hittable pitches this year. This early in any season, no one should trust a hitter's change in numbers if they've achieved an improvement without a sacrifice. If a guy has 100 great plate appearances in which they haven't had any negative indicators, that's not a permanent change; that's a hot streak. Suzuki, however, has traded some contact to get himself geared up and more attacking in his sweet spots. As you can see from the Contact Above Expected column (which compares a hitter's actual contact rate to what we'd expect, based on the quality of pitches they swing at), he began to make that change last year, but he wasn't really ready to accept more swing-and-miss within the strike zone. As a result, he did less damage than he might have.

This year, he's showed up with some subtle adjustments in place, ready to demonstrate a different level of commitment to being an attacking, dangerous offensive player. Firstly, he's moved a bit closer to the plate. Here's what his stance, stride, and contact point looked like in the second half of 2023.

He's never really been one to get cheated, when he swings, but even late in his second season in the majors, Suzuki was waiting to see the ball a fractional moment longer, which pushed his contact point deeper than might have been ideal—both relative to home plate, and relative to his own body. He was not much for going and getting the ball.

Here's what Suzuki looked like at bat in 2024. In this particular way, little changed.

This season, though, Suzuki has moved a bit closer to the pitcher, and a bit closer to the plate. It's not enough to even spot on TV, but in a game where a sliver of a difference in where the bat finds the ball can matter a great deal, the change is important. It's not just about where he's setting up, though. Suzuki's contact point is about 3 inches farther from his own body than it was in the past. He's getting on top of the plate more, and because he hits from a slightly more spread-out base, he's been able to get even more aggressive with his stride. He's catching the ball out where there's more power to be found. That he whiffs more in the process shouldn't surprise you; that's the nature of this tradeoff. But it's very much a worthwhile trade.

That small move toward the plate has helped a great deal, because of the approach Suzuki has taken this spring. He's noticed, over the years, that pitchers felt they could bully him and set him up inside (often with sinkers down and in, which he would too often foul off, but not exclusively in that way), then go away and either freeze him or draw a flailing, reaching swing. He had a very general, middle-middle approach last year, and because opposing pitchers don't make enough mistakes to turn that into an especially fruitful approach, he created only as much power as their slips permitted.

This year's Suzuki is laying off that pitch inside, for the most part. He knows where pitchers want to live against him, and he's in position—physically and mentally—to make them die there, instead.

Because he's closer to that outer third, and because he's swinging more aggressively and getting the bat head out there, Suzuki's pull rate has risen sharply, even as he focuses more of his swings on the outer half. He's lifting the ball more often, because his only grounders now are the balls on which he's a hair too early, and therefore rolls over. Anything he times better is still likely to be pulled, but in the air.

He's not swinging quite as fast this year, and that might remain true from now on. Set to turn 31 later this summer, his bat speed might be in for irreversible (if gentle) decline. It doesn't really matter, though. With a better-organized approach, Suzuki is making higher-value contact even amid a slight diminution in swing speed. Orr also created a statistic called Damage Rate, which gives the percentage of batted balls by a hitter that meet a slightly more rigorous standard for expected power than the one offered by (say) Baseball Savant, which uses Barrel Rate for the same purpose.

Season	Damage%	90th Percentile Exit Velocity	Pulled Fly Ball %
2022	22.6	104.8	3.5
2023	23.2	106.3	5.9
2024	30.6	106.8	6.5
2025	33.3	108.5	8.8

Having Kyle Tucker alongside him in the lineup has certainly helped Suzuki find a few more pitches to hit. He's made significant and valuable changes independent of that, though. It's not just better weather that has allowed him to hit six home runs early this year. It's a full-scale change of approach that has taken him from good to great in several categories. He was a great hitter the last three years. Now, he's inarguably more dangerous than ever.

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[squally1313]

Setting aside you taking one sentence from his deep, deep dive into Suzuki's improvements this year and the reasons behind it to do the Same Exact Thing You Always Do, it's ironically very funny that after years of at least generally thoughtful analysis and differentiation between players of different skill levels down to the lowest levels of the minor leagues, you now just default to "actually all these players are good and you're an horsefeathers who loves ownership for claiming otherwise."

[Transmogrified Tiger]

I'm gonna be one of those guys who says that Seiya has basically been this guy since roughly the all-star break of his first season, he just took some time to get fully operational after the oblique injury last year.

[Development DL]

Your bio mechanics data , both explains and helps validate your hypothesis.  His approach change,  has been incremental , but small changes over time often  produce significant results .  Gaizan is the Japanese term for this process . 
 

Look forward to your work .  Always thought provoking.