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When the idea of moving Eugenio Suarez to shortstop from third base started to gain steam, I was fully on board. Sure, there would be a drop off in defense. But with Jonathan India having the Spring he was having, it seemed there was an option for the Reds to make room for one of their top prospects while replacing the 67 wRC+ generated from the shortstop position in 2020.
I was not expecting Suarez to be last out of 226 qualifying infielders in both OAA (outs above average) and defensive runs saved (-7 and -5, respectively). Beyond the defense, with Suarez carrying a wRC+ of only 41 (meaning he is 59% below the league average), the Reds are not enjoying the offensive payoff they expected.
As you can see from the percentile rankings below, little is going right for Suarez at the plate.
His Whiff% and K% are in the bottom three percent of the league. Suarez’s strikeout percentage is currently 37.6%, over 12% higher than his career average, and just under 10% worse than last year. The last ten games have been frustrating for Suarez, logging a 42.9% strikeout rate (18 K’s over 42 plate appearances), including two separate four-strikeout nights.
Whiff Rate
We are still looking at a small sample size this year, and his current strikeout rate will (hopefully) work its way back down, but it shows a troubling trend for Suarez over the past few seasons. Below we can see his whiff rate – dividing the total swings and misses by total swings – and the steep rise it has taken since 2018.
Sitting at a staggering 40.7% whiff rate across all pitches, Suarez is up 9% from 2020 and around 15-16% from his 2014-2018 averages. We can dive one level deeper and examine Suarez’s swing and miss by pitch type.
While all three types have increased from last year, Suarez’s off-speed swing and miss percentage is within a few points of his 2017 and 2019 season and not above his career-high of 37.5% as a rookie. The whiff rate on fastballs has steadily increased since 2017, but his rate of missing breaking balls has gone from 37.2% in 2018 to an astounding 57.6% in 2021.
A 70.5% whiff rate on sliders is the headliner amongst breaking balls – a pitch Suarez is has seen over 23% of the time (second to only a 4-seam fastball). Along with his highest whiff rate against the slider of his career, pitchers are throwing it to him more than ever. The frequency seems to highlight that pitchers have realized he is not only struggling to make good contact with sliders, but he is struggling to make any contact at all.
Pulling for Power
What has changed in the last couple of years to start this trend, and what has exacerbated it even more in 2021? 2018 was the year Suarez began transitioning to the hitter we see now – a pull hitter that hits for power. Below we can see a spray heat map of the years 2015-2017.
You can see that he is hitting to all parts of the field, even for some power. Now let’s take a look from 2018-2021 so far.
We can see that the heat map has shifted drastically from spread across the outfield to primarily left and left-center fields. The spray has gotten markedly deeper in left field as well. Suarez sacrificed contact for pull, and thus more power and home runs. Below we can see as the pull% jumps on batted balls, so do the K% and Whiff%. Suarez’s expected isolated power (xISO), derived from subtracting his expected batting average from the expected slugging percentage also jumps in 2018. For context, the league average for xISO in 2020 was .181, and despite his slow start, Suarez’s 15 home runs on the shortened year put him on pace for over 40 in a complete season.
I think it is important to keep Suarez’s K% in context with the rest of his career. While strikeouts skyrocketed through the first 20 games of the season and put him in the bottom 3% in the league, in 2019, he was in the bottom 10% in K%. Throughout his career, the highest Suarez has found himself regarding K% is the 34th percentile amongst the rest of the league.
Where does Suarez go from here?
David Bell recently attributed some of the troubles at the plate to switching positions in the field, saying, “I think playing a new position and the fact that it’s shortstop, he’s had to put so much of his focus and so much of his energy on that position.” Suarez switched positions halfway through spring training, and if he committed as much time and focus to trying to play short, maybe that explains some of the declines at the plate.
If it truly is the change of position affecting his batting, hopefully, he gets used to the position as time goes. If not, the Reds will have a challenging situation to handle. In theory, the way to make him comfortable would be moving him back to third, but with India and Moustakas playing as well as they have to start the season, the Reds would be removing a solid bat from the lineup in hopes that Suarez finds his form. The Reds would then be faced with the same question at shortstop without any answers.
It does not appear from watching at-bats or Suarez’s batted ball profile that his approach for more pull and more power has changed this season. The strikeout rates will still be high, but unless Suarez has forgotten how to hit a slider, these whiff rates are bound to bounce back. I expect his numbers to revert much closer to his 2019 and 2020 averages. Then the Reds can revisit whether the experiment of sacrificing defense at the shortstop position for the offense was worth it. For now, with subpar defense and well below-average offensive production, the Suarez move to short has been a bust.
