Does Seiya Suzuki Make Sense for the Blue Jays?
This will attempt to be the first time in the history of mankind in which the answer to an article with a question in the title isn’t “no, shut up”.
Something you pick up on when you follow the Toronto Blue Jays Baseball Club Ltd. for as long as I have is that the Jays have had pretty much zero luck signing East Asian talent out of their home countries. This in and of itself isn’t that unusual. Not every team can be the Mariners. The alternate reality where every team is the Mariners is one both too beautiful and too frightening to comprehend.
What does seem a bit unusual is how often they seem to come up just short of signing some players. The most infamous example of this was Yu Darvish, who chose the Texas Rangers over the Jays in December 2011 when Toronto’s front office decided to stop pretending to be interested. In 2017, the Blue Jays made a competitive offer for superstar Shohei Ohtani but were turned down due to the two-way player’s preference for a West Coast team in a smaller market. More recently, the Jays missed out on a couple Asian free agents during the 2020-21 offseason. Korean Baseball Organization star Ha-Seong Kim preferred Toronto but chose the Padres due to none of the Blue Jays’ offers containing a “no minors” clause. The Blue Jays were one of several teams who offered Tomoyuki Sugano a contract, but none of those contracts was enough to get the starting pitcher to make the jump from Nippon Professional Baseball to MLB. The first and thus far only player to sign with the Jays directly out of Asia is Shun Yamaguchi, who signed with Toronto before the 2020 season, to sub-optimal results.
While the Blue Jays have clearly been involved with the Asian baseball market before, it still came as something as a surprise when, amid the owners shitting and pissing themselves a lockout, Sean McAdam of the Boston Sports Journal wrote that the three teams who had been most aggressive in their pursuit of newly-posted Japanese outfielder Seiya Suzuki were the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and the Toronto Blue Jays.
Suzuki was posted on November 22, and the deadline for Major League teams to sign him is 30 days. However, with the lockout going on, this deadline is getting pushed back, meaning that teams will still have around 20 days to negotiate with him
Taking McAdam’s report at face value, it makes sense that the Red Sox would be in on Suzuki. Boston just got done trading right fielder Hunter Renfroe to the Brewers for Jackie Bradley Jr., leaving them with a projected starting outfield of Jarren Duran/Bradley/Alex Verdugo. They’re certainly due for an upgrade. The Yankees are less clean a fit, with an outfield of Joey Gallo/Aaron Hicks/Aaron Judge, though they’re looking to move Hicks to more of a backup role anyways, meaning that Suzuki would likely be their starting centre fielder.
The Jays would seem to be even more of a puzzling fit than the Yankees, with an already stocked-up outfield of Lourdes Gurriel Jr./George Springer/Teoscar Hernández, with Randal Grichuk coming off the bench. Not only that, but the team has a much bigger hole to fill in the infield, as well as other needs in the rotation and the bullpen. At first, signing a relatively unknown quality in Suzuki seems like a head-scratcher. But does it make more sense than it would seem for the Toronto Blue Jays to get after Seiya Suzuki?
I think so, yes. And not just because it would screw over the Red Sox and Yankees, supposedly, which is a benefit in and of itself. But it’s definitely worth going into who exactly Seiya Suzuki is, along with the considerations worth making before devoting every fibre of your being to praying for him to join your Toronto Blue Jays.
Though just so we’re clear, you absolutely should devote every fibre of your being to praying for him to join your Toronto Blue Jays.
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King of the Carp
Seiya Suzuki hails from Arakawa in the Tokyo Metropolis and was drafted out of high school by the Hiroshima Toyo Carp in the second round of the 2012 NPB draft, in the same class as Shohei Ohtani and Tomoyuki Sugano. Originally a pitcher, Suzuki made his debut with the Carp in September 2013 at age 18, and bounced around the diamond for the next couple seasons, playing every position but pitcher, catcher, and second base before shifting full time to right field in 2015.
Suzuki’s bat struggled to find its footing in his first few seasons of professional baseball, bouncing between the Carp and their ni-gun (minor league) team. In 144 games with Hiroshima’s first team in 2013-15, Suzuki slashed .282/.336/.411 with only six home runs, six stolen bases, a 16.2 K%, and a 6.6 BB%. That’s certainly fine, he didn’t strike out much and he got on base at a fine enough rate, but he didn’t have much in the way of power and he didn’t walk a ton.
It wasn’t until 2016 that Suzuki played to his enormous potential. In 129 games, he slashed .329/.398/.598 with 29 home runs and a stellar 182 wRC+, cutting his strikeout rate down to 14.9% and boosting his walk rate up to 10%, leading the Carp, then in a long stretch of futility, to a Central League pennant and to the Japan Series. While the Carp would lose the championship to Shohei Ohtani’s Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, Suzuki would take home some hardware, with not only his first All-Star nod but a Gold Glove Award and a Best Nine Award (the NPB’s equivalent of the All-MLB Team) as well.
The Carp would win the pennant two more times during Suzuki’s tenure, in 2017 and 2018, reaching the Japan Series once again in ‘18 but getting cut down by the mighty, dynastic Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. Since then, they’ve scuffled, with three consecutive seasons absent of playoff baseball. Suzuki, on the other hand, would flourish, establishing himself as one of the elite players in Japan. From 2018 to 2021, Suzuki slashed .319/.435/.589 with 122 home runs, a 16.1 BB%, 16.4 K%, and a frankly absurd 175 wRC+. For some perspective, the only hitter in MLB with a wRC+ over 175 over that same span is Mike Trout (180 wRC+). Not to say that Suzuki is the second-best hitter on the planet, but safe to say he would seem to be really damn solid.
Over his Japanese career, Suzuki has won three Golden Glove Awards, four Best Nine Awards, five NPB All-Star nominations, and he seems likely to win his first-ever Central League MVP Award for his monster 2021, during which sabermetrics site Deltagraphs says he was the best player in the country by far, boasting a 200 wRC+ and 8.7 Wins Above Replacement. He’s also represented Japan at several international tournaments, winning a bronze medal at the 2017 World Baseball Classic, and gold medals at both the 2019 WBSC Premier12 and the “2020” Summer Olympics.
Jolly Olive has a terrific video looking at what exactly has made Suzuki an elite player in Japan. While his monster numbers obviously won’t necessarily (or likely) translate in North America, one attribute that sticks out is his excellent plate discipline. Over the last three seasons, his chase rate of 19.8 would have ranked fifth in 2021, behind only Tommy Pham, Robbie Grossman, Max Muncy, and Juan Soto. This is also less swing-and-miss than his fellow countrymen, Yoshitomo Tsutsugo and Shogo Akiyama, who have both struggled mightily with whiffs since coming over before the 2020 season. While he’ll have to contend with tougher pitching, it stands to reason that aspect of his game should remain largely intact, which would go a long way towards ensuring success.
As Tom Mussa of Prospects Live notes, Suzuki is, on top of being an excellent hitter, a solid defender in right field, with speed and a strong arm being his best assets. Mussa says he has the speed to play centre field, but he projects better as a right fielder, where he can take full advantage of his arm to keep baserunners obvious.
As for how he projects, while there is volatility inherent to forecasting this sort of thing, the consensus seems to be that Suzuki is, at worst, an everyday MLB right fielder. The ZiPS projection system seems to agree, as it currently has him slashing .281/.350/.469 with 21 home runs, 118 OPS+, and 2.2 fWAR. While that would effectively mean an expected comedown from his numbers in Japan, they’re still solid numbers that any team would be pleased to get out of him. As for financial terms, Fangraphs has him getting four years, $40 million, while MLB Trade Rumors has him at five years, $55 million.
Why the Jays Might Not Get Him
The biggest reasons that the Jays might not bring Seiya Suzuki into the fold have to do with both positional needs and financial flexibility. While any team would love to have Suzuki’s bat on board, he’s basically limited to the outfield, having not played the infield since 2014. And in terms of position players, the Jays are stacked with both outfielders and right-handed hitters. While it’s not necessarily out of the question to consider moving Suzuki back to third base, for instance, it seems pretty unlikely that A) he would want to do that or B) that the Blue Jays would want to get cute with who’s playing third base after the decided failure of the Cavan Biggio position switch over to the hot corner. Especially since he does seem to be a plus defender in right field.
To shamelessly quote myself for a second, I mentioned this in my last post with regards to Marcus Semien leaving for the Texas Rangers.
Much as I hate the notion that a parasitic corporation that makes more money than God simply couldn’t afford to bring Semien back, the fact of the matter is that it would be naive of me to pretend that the Jays aren’t operating under the sports landscape that they are. With the [Gausman signing], the Jays have already just about matched last season’s budget, and while management has indicated that they will have more room to spend, it stands to reason that there’s still a limit that Rogers has indicated they can’t surpass. Which sucks, but it’s the unfortunate reality of professional sports, and there’s no pretending otherwise.
With some of the younger players getting deservedly more expensive in the coming years, the front office made the calculation that paying Semien that much money for that many years wasn’t worth it for the goal of the Jays’ long-term success. With the spectres of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette’s extensions looming, this is not going to be an inexpensive team, not that it has been for a while.
All of this basically applies to Suzuki, albeit less than, say, a Kris Bryant signing might. Despite the projected numbers not being the most expensive contract by any stretch of the imagination, it’s still money going towards a player that is ultimately kind of redundant and could instead be going towards an infielder or starting pitcher.
Why the Jays Could/Should Get Him
Do you know what happens when you get the opportunity to sign a really good player who might not be a perfect fit? You sign the fucking check and worry about putting the greater puzzle together later. Signing Suzuki feels like something that the Jays can and should earnestly pursue, and let the chips fall where they may afterwards.
All signs point to Suzuki being a good offence, and while there’s an argument to be made that any resources potentially committed to Suzuki could be better used elsewhere, there’s no reason that both couldn’t be achieved. Cam Lewis from Blue Jays Nation notes that a signing of Suzuki would likely mean that one of Teoscar Hernández or Lourdes Gurriel Jr. would be traded away in a deal for an infielder or starting pitcher. On the other hand, I disagree with the notion that signing Suzuki makes a trade necessary. I absolutely believe it’s absolutely doable for all four outfielders to fit on the team’s lineup without trading everyone or crippling the team’s monetary flexibility. After all, the financial projections aren’t Scherzer money by any means.
Signing Suzuki and keeping the other outfielders would entail having Springer and Suzuki playing centre and right field respectively while Hernández and Gurriel would go back and forth between left field and designated hitter. In addition, Suzuki could fill in at centre field when Springer requires the DH spot. The way to think of it is not Suzuki replacing Gurriel (maybe an upgrade) or Hernández (tougher to see as an upgrade), but as Suzuki replacing Randal Grichuk and Alejandro Kirk (who would both be coming off the bench, going off the current roster), which has the potential to be a much clearer upgrade. While this would also perhaps reduce the flexibility of the DH spot, Springer, Hernández, and Gurriel were likely to be the three players using it most, and they would all get their fair share of plate appearances.
Is that what I expect to happen? No, not really. If they are interested in Suzuki and they do sign him, a subsequent trade would not be shocking in the slightest. For all I know, the Jays are driving up the price to screw with the Red Sox and Yankees. Which is fine and cool in its own right, but they should sign him too. And then he should simply destroy them. That would be a fun bit, I think.