ABS Will Force Seiya Suzuki into a New Set of Adjustments

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Rick Scuteri-Imagn Images

Seiya Suzuki takes a lot of pitches. His swing rate hovers around 40% each year, which is markedly below the league average. That earns him a good number of walks, but it also means lots of called strikes. That's the price he pays for his selectivity. He gains more than he loses with his takes, but they're a source of much of the positive and negative offensive value he creates. In 2026, those takes will be affected by a new variable: the automated ball-strike (ABS) challenge system.

The less often a hitter swings, the more they'll interact with that system. Thus, Suzuki will be one of the Cubs most exposed to it, for better (he can challenge bad calls on pitches just outside the zone that are called strikes) and for worse (when he gets a bit lucky on a ball that should have been called a strike, the opposing catcher can appeal it). New teammate Alex Bregman is almost exactly as patient as Suzuki is, so he, too, will have to navigate the system well. Let's explore how these two will have to adjust to life under a partially computer-optimized zone, starting with Suzuki.

Here's the bad news: Suzuki will have to adjust his sights and his swing a bit to adapt to the shifting zone in 2026. Last season, most of the balls called strikes just outside the edges of the zone to him were above the top of the strike zone. He can continue to let those go, and get aggressive with challenges there. However, at the bottom of the zone, he got away with some takes that were called balls, but which will be strikes this year, if umpires respond to the codified zones and/or if catchers are quick to challenge against him in those zones.

This is bad news because Suzuki's swing and approach have always been geared toward owning the top of the zone. His patience on low pitches is part of a plan, and he's done best when he's dedicated himself to that. Because he has a slightly flatter-than-average swing, he naturally gets to the ball better when it's around or just above the belt. He has to be sitting on the low pitch to hit it solidly, and that makes him more vulnerable up at the top rail of the zone. He's also prone to rolling over on that low ball. Needing to swing more in that range is dangerous for him.

The good news, though, is that he can afford to lock in more on the bottom third of the zone if he can be confident enough to challenge some calls along the top edge of the zone. Moving the measurement of pitch location back to the middle of the plate (rather than the front) will mean everything shows up as very slightly lower than it did last year, which evens out the above somewhat, but more importantly, the codified ABS zone simply stops lower on the typical player's body than has generally been called. The zone is shrinking, and it's shrinking more at the top of the one (especially for players under 6 feet tall) than anywhere else.

Speaking of such players, let's turn our attention to Bregman, whose official listed height was 6 feet in 2024, 5-foot-11 in 2025 and now 5-foot-10 in 2026. With his even flatter swing, Bregman can handle the high pitch even better than Suzuki can, but unlike Suzuki, he doesn't particularly hunt in vertical layers of the zone. Instead, he assiduously avoids chasing off the edges of the plate. With anticipation and good hands, he can manipulate the contact point and tilt of his swing, but because it's so flat that he's prone to weak contact via balls on the handle or out at the end of the bat, he focuses his plate discipline on attacking the ball based on horizontal location.

Since hardly anyone knows the zone as well as Bregman does (and because of that orientation of his approach), he's in position to get a more unmitigated benefit from the system and its changes. He can afford to keep being extremely selective at the top of the zone, and he's in position to harvest lots of extra balls off the plate away, where most of his erroneous called strikes were last season.

Winning teams will find ways to gain value from this system; others will lose it. Suzuki is a good example of a hitter who has to make a substantial adjustment to thrive under the new framework, but Bregman is sitting pretty, even doing things the same way he's been doing them for a decade.

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