The Seiya Suzuki BABIP Polka

Seiya Suzuki has been in the news as a trade candidate all offseason — partially because the Cubs can’t stop shipping outfielders in and out — and at the Winter Meetings, his agent, Joel Wolfe, sprinkled some enlightening details into a massive throng of onlooking reporters. Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer and Wolfe have had conversations about the 30-year-old outfielder’s future. The Cubs aren’t desperate to trade a player who hit .283/.366/.482 in 2024, but Suzuki apparently isn’t particularly keen on being a full-time DH, which is the most natural landing spot for him after the Cubs traded for Kyle Tucker.

If the Cubs were to trade Suzuki, they’d have to have a pretty good idea of how valuable he is. In fact, they would have to have a firm belief in Suzuki’s value, and a good idea of the rosiest possible picture they could sell to a potential trade partner, as well as the difference between those two numbers.

I’m not sure of Suzuki’s value myself, to be honest. When in doubt, check WAR, I suppose; Suzuki was worth 3.2 WAR in 2023 and 3.6 in 2024. And that’s in spite of a reduction in defensive value.

The sales pitch for Suzuki would probably include the line that he’s coming off his best offensive season. In 2024, he had a wRC+ of 138, which was 16th among qualified hitters. In 2023, his wRC+ was 128, which is a noticeable difference. In 2024, Anthony Santander had a wRC+ of 129, while Freddie Freeman had a 137, just to give you an idea of what kind of gap we’re talking about.

In reality, Suzuki’s 2024 numbers were frighteningly similar to those he put up in 2023:

The biggest change in Suzuki’s batting profile was in his strikeout rate, which got worse as his league-adjusted numbers got better. And as you might expect, the league as a whole was worse at hitting in 2024 than in 2023 — a .310 wOBA, down from .318 the year before.

And offense isn’t the whole picture, or at least it wouldn’t be if Suzuki got his way. Suzuki believes, according to Wolfe, that he’s a good defender, and that moving to DH is “not a compliment.” But the numbers say different. Across the past two seasons, he’s 82nd in fielding run value out of 108 outfielders with at least 1,000 defensive innings. Maybe he should be more open-minded about DHing.

Regardless, defense isn’t the thing that determines whether corner outfielders get paid or not, unless they’re Jason Heyward on one hand, or MJ Melendez on the other. In Suzuki’s case, we’re talking about a couple runs a year in defensive value. This is all about the bat.

Suzuki’s been on my mind recently not just because of the trade rumors generally, but because after the Phillies’ humiliating first-round exit — punctuated by numerous swinging strikeouts from the team’s highly-paid core — Suzuki has come down with a condition I like to call Kevin Kolb Syndrome. After a bad loss, Philadelphia fans have a tendency to want change for change’s sake. (In this respect, I imagine they’re not alone, but these are my people, so I know their idiosyncrasies intimately — feel free to generalize to your own community if you see anything familiar.)

In the latter days of Donovan McNabb’s time with the Eagles, Kevin Kolb was the vacant-eyed second-rounder being groomed as the heir presumptive to the best quarterback in franchise history. McNabb had an annoying habit of leading the Eagles to a point just short of a championship, and was therefore constantly subject to calls for his replacement. Kolb was popular, for a time, among fans who knew nothing about him other than his name and the fact that he hunted boars with a knife for fun. (One of the most true-to-life flourishes in Silver Linings Playbook was Jacki Weaver’s character wearing a Kolb jersey.) When you’re sick of looking at the starting quarterback’s stupid face, any backup will do.

Comparing Suzuki to Kolb is a little uncharitable to both Suzuki and the Phillies fans who have come to view him as a potential savior. The general takeaway from the NLDS is that the Phillies chased their way out of the series. Indeed, this is a team built largely out of aggressive hitters — Bryce Harper, Trea Turner, Alec Bohm, Nick Castellanos — so it’s not unreasonable to want a more selective hitter in the middle of the lineup. (Even though Harper, Castellanos, and to some extent Turner all had a good series.)

Suzuki is quite selective; among qualified hitters in 2024, he had one of the 10 lowest chase rates and one of the five lowest overall swing rates. He still struck out a ton — 27.4%, 16th-highest in the league — but his strikeouts take longer than three pitches. Wanting Suzuki might be a case Kevin Kolb Syndrome, but it has sound logical underpinnings.

In some respects, Suzuki’s selectivity is similar to another former Cubs corner outfielder, Kyle Schwarber. Schwarber’s walk rate dwarfs Suzuki’s, but in 2024 the two ended up with identical OBPs of .366, so I guess there’s more than one way to get on base.

Apart from Schwarber’s elite strike zone judgment, his standout skill is massive raw power. That’s something Suzuki lacks; he’s averaged 23 home runs per 162 games over his major league career. His career high in ISO is an even .200.

But one column over from isolated power on our stat dashboard is a number that, I believe, is the whole proverbial ballgame for this player: BABIP.

This past season, Suzuki’s BABIP was .370. That wasn’t just the highest BABIP of any qualified hitter in the league, it would’ve at least tied for the league lead in 2022 and 2023 as well. And Suzuki isn’t some lefty groundball machine with 80-grade speed. He’s a right-handed corner outfielder who usually hits in the middle of the order and puts balls in the air.

Where is this BABIP coming from?

Well, it does help that Suzuki, for reasons I don’t intuitively understand, does beat out a lot of groundballs. He has 45 infield hits in his career, and his infield hit rate of 9.2% — the lowest of his career — was tied with Anthony Volpe for 25th in the league.

But speed and grounders, it turns out, aren’t the key to posting a high BABIP. If you look at the 20 highest BABIP seasons over the past four years, you’ll find a couple fast guy outlier campaigns, but also MVP efforts by Harper, Paul Goldschmidt, and Aaron Judge. Plus 30-homer seasons by Austin Riley, Brent Rooker, Tyler O’Neill, and Marcell Ozuna.

Well, Suzuki hits the ball hard. His exit velocity topped out at over 115 mph this season, which was in the top 4% of the league. But one or two supersonic line drives do not a superstar make:

Suzuki isn’t among the league leaders in exit velocity, no matter where you set the marker. But we’ve been spoiled a little bit by Judge and his ilk. Suzuki isn’t a 6-foot-6, 270-pound circus act. He’s listed at 5-foot-11, 182 pounds. You know, like an accountant or a car mechanic. And then consider that placing between 30th and 50th on an exit velocity leaderboard, out of 400-plus players, is pretty good. If hard hitters were distributed evenly across the league, there would only be one other guy on Suzuki’s team capable of hitting the ball like he can.

So I’m willing to give Suzuki a pass into the Earns His BABIP Through Hard Contact Club. Especially considering that his BABIP across his first two seasons in the U.S. was .335. Having investigated Suzuki’s quality of contact and BABIP, I’m mostly curious now about how he’s beating out all those grounders. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to conduct a detailed investigation into that topic, because I spent all afternoon yesterday making this:

You’ll notice I colored in some of the cells on Suzuki’s side of the table. For the section on batting average and slugging percentage, cells in blue are areas in which Suzuki underperformed the league average by 50 points or more. Yellow cells are those in which he outperformed the league average by less than 50 points. Orange cells are those in which he outperformed the league by between 50 and 150 points, and red cells are those where he outperformed the league by more than 150 points.

Most of the cells are either orange or red. And I don’t think that’s a fluke. As you can see, I’ve sorted all these batted balls by direction (pull, center, opposite) and elevation (grounder, line drive, fly ball). And unlike your standard BABIP figure, the numbers in this table include home runs but exclude bunts, so bear that in mind.

Anyway, if you take the various categories for direction and elevation, plus the total numbers for all batted balls put together, you get 16 buckets. Suzuki has an above-average hard-hit rate in 15 of those 16 buckets, in some cases by more than 10 points. The category in which Suzuki doesn’t hit the ball as hard as the average batter is opposite-field grounders, and he hit .583 on those.

Suzuki isn’t a perfect hitter. As much as he makes hard contact and puts the ball in the air — which is what you want to do — he doesn’t pull fly balls as much as you’d like. That probably has something to do with why all that hard contact only results in 20-homer power. But if you’re looking for a path to a .370 BABIP, spraying hard-hit balls all over the place is a good place to start. Would he completely revolutionize a contending team’s lineup? Perhaps not. But it’s easy to see why fans of a team in need of a spark would latch onto him.

Source