How Seiya Suzuki Slid Back into the Right Rhythm to Blast Thursday's Key Grand Slam

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images

Seiya Suzuki hardly ever gets a clear runway to start the season. He's dealt with oblique strains (in March 2023 and April 2024), and this spring, he suffered a knee sprain on a slide at second base during the World Baseball Classic. That delayed his 2026 debut until April 10, but it didn't slow him down much at all. He burst from the gate with a .328/.430/.567 stretch to end April, and was in the thick of the Cubs' blazing run of 20 wins in 23 games. Then: thud. He (and the Cubs' offense, as a whole) hit the cellar floor like a sack of flour.

In May, Suzuki's OPS was barely over .550, some 200 points off what the team hopes to get from its bat-first right fielder. The slump was the worse of his career, and it threatened to derail the entire season—not on its own, of course, but in tandem with the similar funks into which Nico Hoerner, Dansby Swanson and other Cubs hitters plunged at the same time. For a solid month, Suzuki looked thoroughly lost, in a way that he'd never looked for more than a week or two before.

That's all over now. On Thursday, Suzuki launched a cathartic grand slam in the top of the fourth inning in Denver, giving the Cubs the lead in a game in which they faced a real risk of falling below .500 for the first time since before the midpoint of April. It wasn't really a slump-buster, though, because Suzuki has been pulling out of his nosedive for over a week, now. The homer was his third of June, and he's flirting with a 1.000 OPS in that short span. He's hit in eight straight games—and that's not a coincidence.

One of the great benefits of the new Statcast data providing swing timing details for batters will be slump analysis. Teams have already been using this, behind the scenes, but now, fans can see it, too. Here, for instance, is the distribution of swing timings for Suzuki against fastballs this season, split by month.

In this image, you can think of orange and green as 'good Suzuki' and red as 'bad Suzuki'; we got a bit lucky in the way his slump confined itself (mostly) to one calendar page. Three things stand out about May, relative to the other two months, when it comes to the way Suzuki timed up the fastball:

1. He mostly centered the ball on his barrel, but not perfectly; his most frequent horizontal intercept point was just off the sweet spot, toward the label.
2. He was late more often. That's a big one. Hitters talk endlessly about the importance of being on time for the fastball, and in May, Suzuki was late on it too often—22% of the time, versus 18% of the time in April and 15% of the time so far in June.
3. He was under the fastball more often, too. That's related to being late on it, but distinct, and Suzuki had both problems going against him last month.

In June, he's much more on the ball. His most frequent horizontal intercept point on heaters has moved to the sweet spot, or a hair off toward the end of the bat. He's late much less often, but still in the later half of the on-time window. And he's squaring it up most of the time, vertically, neither hitting the top of the ball nor clipping underneath it.

Ah, but Suzuki's huge homer Thursday came not on a fastball, but on a Ryan Feltner slider. Does the above really apply then? Well, look, you know a rhetorical question when you see one. Yes, it does.

Here's the same set of monthly timing distributions, but for breaking balls, which Suzuki (like most Cubs hitters) has seen tons of recently. 

At first, these look so noisy as to be analytically void, but there's a good bit of signal in there—including in what looks like noise, itself. Note the fact that he's rarely missing the sweet spot of the barrel by just a little, this month; that's what was happening to him in May. Now, he's either squaring up the breaking ball, or whiffing on it entirely, way off the end of his bat. The latter sounds like a bad thing, but not all whiffs are failures. Sometimes, you'd rather swing and miss than mishit the ball and make an easy out.

Now, move to the middle image. Suzuki has been early much less often on breaking stuff this month. That's huge, and it's where we see the value of his adjustment on the fastball. For his swing, the sweet spot, timing-wise, is to be very slightly late on the heater. When he can consistently be that way, he can also be on time for slower offerings. He couldn't stay in that happy zone in May, and got eaten alive by spin. In June, he's back in the groove. 

Finally, note the right-hand image. Whereas he was often swinging over breaking pitches (slightly or significantly) in May, he's now under them more often than over them, and on plane with them plenty of the time. That, too, is a result of having his swing well-timed to the fastball, in a way that can cover other pitches, too. 

These data really expose the fragility of great hitting. Suzuki could start getting out of rhythm again tomorrow and be back in a slump next week. Right now, though, he's on time for the heater—and, because he's willing to be slightly late on it when needed, on time for other stuff, too. He might even be just in time to save the Cubs' season.

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[Patrick88]

Hopefully Suzuki is getting his trade value up.