How Seiya Suzuki's Bat is So Lively, in a Season of Deadened Baseballs

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images

The baseball is alarmingly dead in the major leagues this season. If you're a Cubs fan (which seems likely, if you're reading this), you might be forgiven for not having even heard of this, but it's true. Even as Kyle Tucker, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Seiya Suzuki and Dansby Swanson have each marched out to paces for more than 30 home runs, much of the league has fought in vain to generate those very homers. In a modern game much more reliant on power as the engine of offensive value than previous iterations, it's a miniature crisis, affecting the entire league.

The league's collective slugging average is a weak .394, but we don't need to depend on outcomes to tell us whether the ball has changed. At Baseball Savant, a site owned and operated by Major League Baseball itself, there's a Drag Dashboard that shows the daily average values for drag on the ball, calculated using the loss of velocity from release to home plate on four-seam fastballs—and a cursory check of it will tell you that drag is way, way up in 2025.

Not even a partial season within the last 10 has matched the first two months of this year in this regard. Combining this information with some gathered in other, previous studies, we can say with some confidence that the ball is flying less well this year than at any time since at least 2014—when the league was mired in a trough of low offense, from which it wouldn't emerge until the second half of 2015.

Suzuki, like a few of his Cubs teammates, does not care. He's hitting .273/.333/.569 this year, enjoying the bump from great to truly excellent at the plate. Oddly, too, he's doing it by hitting for much more power than in the past, even when the very interactions between the ball and the air would tend to deflate the value of power. Suzuki used to derive a much greater share of his value from getting on base, but just when the league is becoming less friendly to sluggers, he's leaning hard into slugging.

Why is this working? It's not a swing change, per se. Suzuki has made some small changes to his stance and stride, but his swing speed and tilt are close to identical to last season's. However, we can still use the new swing-tracking data from Statcast (via the aforementioned Baseball Savant) to understand what has changed.

First of all, it's safe to say that Suzuki is making his swing decision a hair earlier. That's made his decisions in the box a hair more erratic—he's chasing a bit more often, without swinging noticeably more within the zone—but it's a deliberate adjustment, with a clear intention: getting around on the ball more, to create some pull.

In 2023, when he squared the ball up (meaning, in this case, when he got a clean enough piece of the ball that his exit velocity was at least 80% of the possible maximum, given his swing speed and the velocity of the pitch he was hitting), Suzuki averaged a 4° attack angle, and a 1° attack direction toward the opposite field. That's not as productive a set of numbers as you'd like, though it's far from unusual. Batters are most likely to meet the ball most squarely when they time it such that their swing has just begun to work uphill before contact. That's often relatively deep in the hitting zone, and can often be before the hitter has gotten their barrel past the point of perpendicularity to the incoming pitch.

You'd love to see a slightly steeper attack angle, when we preselect for balls met well like this, to maximize a hitter's chances to hit for power. Most of the time, though, guys who meet their squared-up balls at a steep angle are more prone to whiffs or ugly mishits. A flatter attack angle means the hitter had a bit of margin for error in their approach. Meanwhile, staying behind the ball carries the same implications. The biggest consolation, in Suzuki's case, was his average swing speed on those balls, over 73 miles per hour. A swing that fast squaring up the ball usually means good things, even if a lot of those good things are hard singles.

In 2024, Suzuki slightly increased that attack angle on squared-up balls, to 6°, and his attack direction swung to 1° to the pull side. Those are significant changes, telling us he was starting to time his best swings to find the ball a bit farther out in front of himself. His swing speed stayed essentially the same, and thus, his average exit velocity on squared-up balls (99 mph) did, too, but his average launch angle on those batted balls rose from 12° to 16°, which counts for something.

This season, though, that adjustment has reached a new gear. Suzuki's attack angle is up to 7°, on a swing with no more or less generalized steepness than in the past. He's not swinging harder, but by catching it a bit farther in front (34 inches in front of his center of mass, up from 32.3 last year and 30.7 in 2023), Suzuki is getting through the hitting zone a bit farther before running into the ball. The result is another tick of exit velocity (99.7 mph), a hair more lift (17° launch angle), and most importantly, the newfound proclivity to pull the ball. His pull rate on squared-up batted balls was 36.5% in 2023 and 38.5% in 2024. This year, that figure is 43.4%. That's why, suddenly, his power is on full display.

Back in March, I wrote a bit about the unfortunate pattern that was Suzuki's tendency to hit his hardest and best batted balls to center field, especially in the air. He's fixed that this season. The percentage of his batted balls grading out as Pulled AIR balls, according to Statcast, is up from 15% the last two years to 25.5% in 2025. By being a bit earlier, even though he's not swinging measurably faster or with a more pronounced uppercut, Suzuki is finally making the most of his power. Yes, he can drive it with authority to all fields, but in the majors, most power utility has to be found to one's pull field. It's just not possible to beat the pitchers and defenders teams boast these days without thinking that way. Now, Suzuki is doing just that. 

The ball might not be carrying as far as it did a few years ago, but Suzuki is one exemplar of the ways the Cubs have dedicated themselves to not being dependent on the ball. They're hammering it, in the air and to the pull field, where even a bit of extra drag can't hold them back. We've never been better able to see that process at work.

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