Eugenio Suarez Has Optimized His Brain, Results Have Followed

Last season, Eugenio Suarez was a pretty good Major Leaguer — 17% better than his peers, by measure of the runs he created. He was far better at home than he was on the road, as you may expect for a slugger who plays half their games in Great American Ball Park, but overall he had turned into a dude with Cincinnati in his third full year there.

2018 has been a different, even better story since jump street, though. Suarez has morphed again, this time into arguably the best hitting regular third baseman and the eighth best hitter in all of baseball, regardless where he’s playing. It’s even more impressive when considering his thumb was broken on an errant pitch in April and he hasn’t missed a beat since coming back. The whole thing is really curious.

Suarez rate stats

He’s walking and striking out a little less and he’s hitting a few more balls in the air. None of those explain how he’s driving the ball so much harder, as his ISO indicates, or why he’s been 23% better than last year when he was pretty good, though. Sometimes, seeing year-over-year differences in these numbers tells enough of the story. But looking at the surface doesn’t for Suarez doesn’t show us how he went from a dude to the dude. He leaves us with no choice but to wade into the water.

Suarez Contact and Discipline

Did your eyes pop going over the change in how Suarez attacks the ball like mine did? He’s dwarfed his lightly hit dinkers this season compared to last. He’s absolutely ripping the ball when he does hit it. He’s chasing the exact same rate of pitches and he’s going more at the ones in the zone. Throw in that he’s hitting the ball less to the opposite field and more up the middle, and the picture starts to clarify.

But not completely. We can see the What that’s driving Suarez’s production, but not the How. We don’t know how he went from just above average at generating hard contact to top two in the Majors, a half percentage point behind only Matt Carpenter, who has been Ares on a warpath for months.

Let’s wade into the Suarez water deeper and get to some gifs.

Suarezzz17

This is Suarez in 2017. He pulls a 94 mph fastball into left field for a single. He ended up driving in a run. An all around solid outcome.

Suarez 18 change

This is Suarez this season. He drives a 94 mph fastball into the right field seats for his 22nd tater of the year.

Suarez’s two swings are largely the same. But the big difference is that he’s gone from starting with his bat being parallel to his body in 2017 to starting with it parallel to the ground in 2018. His rate stats being so similar over the last two seasons suggest that he hasn’t drastically changed his approach. The tiny mechanical difference in his stance suggests that he’s found a way for his brain to make the same decisions in the mere milliseconds it takes for a pitch to reach the plate, but provide much more impressive results.

Frankly, what he’s doing this season is amazing. We don’t know where he’ll go next, but we do know that the new Eugenio Suarez is a strong representation of baseball in 2018: able, powerful, smart, and optimized.

Data from FanGraphs. Gifs made with Giphy from Statcast video





Tim Jackson is a writer and educator who loves pitching duels. Find him and all his baseball thoughts online at timjacksonwrites.com/baseball and @TimCertain.

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