Eugenio Suárez’s Extended Hot Streak Continues to Drive the Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks won a wild game against the Brewers at Chase Field on Sunday, one in which they built and then squandered a 5-0 lead, overcame an 8-5 deficit to send the game to extra innings, fell behind 10-8 in the 10th inning, and finally, won in walk-off fashion, 11-10. Eugenio Suárez was at the center of much of the excitement. The 33-year-old third baseman drove in the game’s first run, and later plated both the tying and winning runs as well. It was the latest stellar performance of the player who’s been the NL’s hottest hitter since the beginning of July, digging his way out of an early-season slump.

Suárez began his Sunday afternoon by slapping a one-out RBI single off DL Hall through the right side of the infield, bringing home the first of three runs that the Diamondbacks scored in that frame. Facing Hall again, he struck out in the third before Arizona mounted a two-out, two-run rally that extended its lead to 5-0. Suárez grounded out against Joe Ross to end the fourth, and struck out again, against Aaron Ashby, to end the sixth, by which point the Brewers had pulled ahead 7-5 after chasing Zac Gallen and roughing up reliever Kevin Ginkel.

After the Diamondbacks scored two runs to cut the lead to 8-7 in the seventh, Suárez hit a sacrifice fly that brought home Corbin Carroll — who had walked, stolen second, and taken third on a wild pitch — in the eighth. Milwaukee scored two in the top of the 10th, but in the bottom of the frame, four straight Diamondbacks reached base, via three singles and a hit-by-pitch, before Suárez swatted a towering 100.5-mph fly ball that bounced off the right-center field wall, driving home Ketel Marte with the winning run.

The win helped the Diamondbacks (83-66) avoid a sweep by the Brewers and remain firmly entrenched in the second NL Wild Card spot; they’re 1.5 games behind the Padres (85-65), and two games ahead of the Mets and Braves (both 81-68). Though Arizona has gone just 8-12 since August 25, it still owns the majors’ second-best second-half record (34-19, .642) behind only that of San Diego (35-16, .681).

Nobody, not even the resurgent Carroll, has played a bigger part in the Diamondbacks’ turnaround than Suárez, whose wRC+ since July 1 is seventh in the majors and first in the NL:

Suárez is right up there with the big boys, not only in wRC+, but also in home runs and RBI. His wRC+ in that span is 12 points higher than Ohtani’s full-season mark of 168, which leads the NL. He’s tied with Judge and Rooker for the major league lead in home runs during that span, one ahead of Ohtani. Suárez didn’t homer this weekend, but he entered the series in the middle of a binge, having hit eight in 12 games from August 30–September 11, including two against the Rangers on Wednesday. And while I don’t usually put RBI in these tables or pay too much mind to their totals, with Suárez’s big Sunday he moved into the major league lead in that category since July 1 as well.

Thanks to his extended hot streak, Suárez overall is hitting .256/.323/.480 (119 wRC+) with 28 homers, a solid but not tremendously remarkable line that’s the product of his powering up after struggling earlier in the year. Here’s a look at his monthly splits, as well as his numbers before and after July 1:

Through the end of June, Suárez had the majors’ second-lowest wRC+, third-lowest slugging percentage, and fourth-lowest batting average among qualifiers, though if you lower the plate appearances threshold, those rankings aren’t as dire; the point is that the Diamondbacks were sending him out every day despite his struggles, something not every team is willing to do.

So what happened to put Suárez in such a hole, and how did he turn it around? As with Carroll, it sounds as though he spent the winter overcorrecting for one issue but created new problems for himself. In Carroll’s case, as I noted earlier this month, he spent the winter after his NL Rookie of the Year-winning campaign tweaking his swing in order to better handle fastballs and cutters. In doing so, he inadvertently made his bat path too flat, and further compounded his problems by counter-rotating too much while loading his swing.

Meanwhile, Suárez hit a comparatively subpar .232/.323/.391 (104 wRC+) with 22 homers for the Mariners last year while striking out 214 times (30.8%); it was the second season in a row that he led the league in punchouts. Traded to the Diamondbacks for Carlos Vargas and Seby Zavala in November, he quite understandably looked to improve. According to the Arizona Republic’s Theo Mackie, Suárez focused upon improving against high fastballs. “He’s performing better against those pitches, but doing so has cost him his power stroke on pitches over the heart of the plate,” wrote Mackie in a May 27 piece.

I can’t figure out exactly what data Mackie was referencing to back up that claim. That’s not intended to be a criticism of the writer, particularly given that we’re talking about one line in passing within a larger piece that was focused more on Carroll and Christian Walker; he may have been presented with internal data from the Diamondbacks that made the case, but I can’t replicate it with Baseball Savant. For example, last year Suárez hit .125, slugged .313, and whiffed on 42.6% of swings against four-seamers in Gameday zones 1, 2, and 3 — quite bad, in other words — but as of the article’s publication was 0-for-13 with a 34.3% whiff rate in that same area, and 0-for-18 if I expand the sample to include even higher fastballs in zones 11 and 12. Including sinkers doesn’t clarify things; to that point, against fastballs in Gameday zones 1–3, he had dropped from .165 AVG/.342 SLG in 2023 to triple zeroes (0-for-18) this year, and just 1-for-25 including zones 11 and 12. Neither adding cutters (which Baseball Savant lumps into the most general fastball category but which often function more as offspeed pitches), nor moving from a zone-based split to a height-based one (Plate Z) produced a sample that favored Suárez’s first two months of 2024 over ’23.

In fact, even without any zone- or height-based definition, with or without cutters, Suárez’s performance against fastballs (I’m sticking with four-seamers and sinkers) had actually deteriorated to that point. However, it’s much improved since, to the point that his 2024 wOBA against that combo is just one point lower than his ’23 one:

Note that if I just use four-seamers, Suárez’s .355 wOBA from last year exactly matches his mark this year, though as with the stats above, his expected numbers and barrel and hard-hit rates aren’t as strong.

Setting that aside, I did find a more convincing explanation. After Suárez hit three home runs in a game against the Nationals on July 30, manager Torey Lovullo praised the slugger’s attitude and work ethic while battling through his slump, and cited minor adjustments to Suraez’s work habits that turned him around. Earlier in the month, Lovullo specifically mentioned Suárez taking a suggestion by “ramping up the intensity of his pregame work and just practicing a little bit different.”

Lovullo didn’t specify exactly how Suárez did it, but according to an August 20 Arizona Republic story by Alfred Smith III, the turnaround owes plenty to his use of a new robotic hitting machine called a Trajekt Arc. The eight-foot, 1,200-pound machine — which as of June was in use by 19 teams, and which was approved by MLB for in-game usage this year, according to the article — projects video of a pitcher’s delivery at game speed and marries it up with an accurate approximation of his offerings, including the release point and tempo.

Some players step in against the contraption merely to track pitches and get a feel for timing. Others, including Suárez, take swings against it. In mid-June, the Diamondbacks suggested he begin using the technology within his pregame routine, and he now cycles through each pitcher’s repertoire before Diamondbacks home games, starting with 10 fastballs.

“Joe Mather told me, ’You’ll see it. Just try tracking and to see the pitching and see if you like it,’” Suárez said, referring to Arizona’s hitting coach. “I started doing it, and now it’s one of my favorite things to do at (Chase Field). You know, it’s something that I take advantage of.”

… Mather said Trajekt is far from flawless and does not throw the exact pitches of the players it mimics. It offers a fairly accurate breaking ball and allows players the ability to “float through a pitcher’s repertoire.”

… “I don’t know how much money they have to spend (on Trajekt),” Mather said. “But it gives us another tool to use for the players. It’s the only pitching machine that will throw a true slider, like a gyro spin slider, just the way it can move the wheel.

“So three-wheel machines can kind of get the shape, but there’s no other machine that throws that slider.”

Using the June 30/July 1 cutoff from above, you can see that Suárez has improved his batting averages, slugging percentages, wOBAs and (with one exception) whiff rates against the seven pitch types he’s most commonly seen: