The Worst Slump of Seiya Suzuki's Career Has Come at the Worst Possible Time for Everyone

Craig Counsell sat Ian Happ down for two days this weekend, to give his struggling veteran should-be slugger a mental reset. This week, he might be wise to do the same with his other corner outfielder. Seiya Suzuki has always run in streaks and slumps, with an approach even more dependent on seeing the ball well (and even more vulnerable to stretches in which he simply can't do so) than most hitters'. He's gone through some prolonged funks before, but it's literally never been this bad.

For the month of May, Suzuki is batting an anemic .179/.270/.295 in 89 plate appearances. Somehow, that understates how ugly things have gotten. Since hitting his last home run on May 8, Suzuki has gone 8-for-53, with just one extra-base hit (a double) and strikeouts in a third of his trips to the plate. He's never had a 50-plate appearance sample worse than this one, according to expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA).

Normally great at controlling the strike zone, Suzuki is lost right now, chasing outside the zone and whiffing within it. Unsurprisingly, he's lost the ability to hit the ball hard. In fact, he's also never had a worse stretch of 50 batted balls in terms of average exit velocity than the one he's in right now.

This comes, of course, at the worst of all possible times. The Cubs' offense is the biggest culprit in the team's hideous spiral, and with Dansby Swanson, Nico Hoerner, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alex Bregman and Carson Kelly essentially locked into the lineup, the team badly needs its bat-first guys to deliver while many of those morse two-way options are mired in slumps at the plate. Instead, Ian Happ, Moisés Ballesteros and Suzuki are all scuffling. Only Michael Conforto and Michael Busch have kept the offense going at all. 

It's also dreadful timing for Suzuki himself. Free agency looms for him this fall, and because of his shaky defense and his age (he turns 32 this August), he has to rake in order to maintain a high level of appeal to teams. He's not doing it. 

Counsell has only allowed Conforto to see left-handed pitchers four times all year (out of 80 total plate appearances), but the Pirates will send right-handed hurlers to the mound for all four games of the Cubs' upcoming series there. As Happ (presumably) reenters the lineup, it feels both likely and advisable that Counsell will shift Conforto to right field for a day or two to spell Suzuki and give him a mental reset of his own. The Cubs have only scored 3.8 runs per game this month. They have to wake up and get hitting again, and that doesn't mean handing a full-time job to the hilariously whiff-prone Kevin Alcántara; it means getting Suzuki right. At the moment, that probably means offering him a break from the mental grind.