It’s been a baseball season to remember in Chicago. The Cubs and White Sox are both playing excellent baseball and if the playoffs started tomorrow they’d both be in the field. Pete Crow-Armstrong is putting together a season for the ages on the corner of Clark and Addison. The ten-year anniversary of the Cubs 2016 World Series victory has kept great vibes and fan favorites front and center for most of the season. Amid all of these storylines it’s easy to miss that Seiya Suzuki is once again putting together a quality
season for the Chicago Cubs as we head into the final 34 games of the season. Here’s his homer on Monday off Luis Castillo [VIDEO].
The thing is, we’ve seen this season from Seiya Suzuki before. All he’s done since he joined the Cubs is post above average season after above average season. Take a look at this leaderboard, showing the top 25 hitters in baseball over the last five seasons by wRC+:
Seiya Suzuki has quietly and steadily been a top 30 hitter over the last five seasons. Slightly better at creating runs than Francisco Lindor, Julio Rodríguez and Corbin Carroll. Just a smidge below Bobby Witt Jr. and Byron Buxton. This is not just excellent company, it’s elite. He’s basically been 28% better than league average at creating runs.
Suzuki’s performance during his time on the Cubs is even more impressive when you look at it in a team context. I ran the best single seasons since 2022 for the Cubs and sorted the table by wRC+. Only two players appear on this list more than once. Four of Seiya’s five seasons on the North Side of Chicago are on this list:
Having a hitter of Seiya’s caliber in the lineup changes the outcome of games, as we saw this week. There were a lot of questions about why the White Sox pitched to Pete Crow-Armstrong in the bottom of the 10th inning during the first game of the Crosstown Classic. Here’s what Cubs manager Craig Counsell and White Sox manager Will Venable said about that to The Athletic:
On Monday, his fourth hit of the night was a walk-off two-run shot in the bottom of the 10th inning to beat the White Sox. (He also homered in the first inning.)
In the aftermath, the conversation in the city and the ballpark Tuesday was whether White Sox manager Will Venable should’ve had left-hander Hagen Smith intentionally walk the lefty-hitting Crow-Armstrong … to face right-handed Seiya Suzuki, who is having a fantastic season in his own right. Just not as fantastic as Crow-Armstrong.
Counsell defended Venable — “the league has shown that they’re afraid of Seiya versus left-handed pitching” — and basically admitted that the persistent lineup-construction questions had some validity.
“That’s why they’re hitting next to each other because you try to make the manager’s decisions really hard,” he said of Crow-Armstrong and Suzuki batting 1-2 in the order. “That’s kind of the point.”
“PCA is a really special player,” Venable said, “And yeah, he’s scary. But so is Suzuki, you know what I mean? He is, too, and again, factoring all those things in with information, the gut, whatever you want to say, that was the decision that I thought was best.”
PCA sees the opportunities he does, at least in part, because he’s got Seiya Suzuki hitting behind him.
Seiya is eight long balls shy of his second 30-home run season since he came over from Japan. That may be a stretch. None of FanGraphs projection systems see him hitting more than five or six home runs through the rest of the season. But at the end of the day, whether he has 27 home runs or 30 long balls, we’ll all happily take his .268/.360/.483 slashline with 22 home runs through the first 128 games of the season. Here’s hoping he keeps it up into September and October.
