Eugenio Suárez of the Arizona Diamondbacks has been one of the best hitters in baseball in the second half of the season. Suárez signed with Arizona in the offseason after posting the two highest strikeout rates of his career with the Seattle Mariners. Coming off a dismal first half of the 2024 season, posting an 86 wRC+, the direction for Suarez was trending down.
Eugenio Suárez Enjoying Torrid Second Half for Diamondbacks
First Half Struggles
While Suárez has always been a high-strikeout sort of player, he has always compensated for it with great power. He struggled to replicate that approach in the first half of 2024, as he posted his typical near 30% strikeout rate, but with his worst isolated slugging percentage since his rookie season. Under the hood, Suárez was chasing pitches outside the zone at a career-high rate of 28.9% compared to his career mark of 22.9%. He was more aggressive overall but made less contact than in previous years.
While being more aggressive, Suárez maintained an above-average walk rate. However, his quality of contact suffered as he experienced a seven-year low in both barrel rate and hard-hit rate. This could be expected, as Suárez is on the wrong side of 30 years old, and age curves point to a decline in these areas around this age number. With bat tracking metrics being added to Baseball Savant this season, we can look to those numbers as an indicator of decline as well as how he performed against fastballs.
Suárez had a roughly average swing speed at 71.74 MPH with a longer 7.76 swing length in the first half. This checks out, as longer swings correlate with swing and miss and Suárez fits that profile. On the other hand, he handled velocity fairly well with a 9.5% barrel rate on all fastballs. Conversely, a hole that pitchers were poking at with Suárez was with sliders. He had one of the highest whiff rates on the pitch at 45.5% and a -8 batter run value, which tied for second worst among hitters with at least 30 plate appearances. While there were many negative signs in this sample of action, all hope wasn’t lost yet.
Second Half Stride
Eugenio Suárez has gone ballistic in the second half with the fourth most home runs in the league. Notably, this has been the theme of Suárez’s career. He has a career 104 wRC+ in the first half of the season compared to a 121 wRC+ in the second half. This season has been no different. The manner in which he has gone about it this time around is compelling.
As mentioned previously with the career-high chase rate in the first half, Suárez doubled down on the approach and ticked the aggressiveness up even more. The difference has been the improvement in making contact, in addition to substantially improving his quality of contact. Here are some of the noteworthy process differences and improvements in contact quality:
| Statistic | 2024 First Half | 2024 Second Half |
| O-Swing% | 28.9% | 34.0% |
| Z-Swing% | 67.7% | 70.6% |
| Swing% | 45.4% | 50.5% |
| O-Contact% | 45.8% | 56.7% |
| Z-Contact% | 85.3% | 86.5% |
| Contact% | 70.8% | 75.5% |
| BB% | 9.5% | 5.1% |
| K% | 28.9% | 24.6% |
| Hard Hit% | 36.5% | 48.3% |
| Barrel% | 8.2% | 15.2% |
Behind the Numbers
Many of the pitch-level statistics stand out, including the additional increase in chase rate after settling into a low 20% mark for the majority of his career. Furthermore, something that stands out as a major outlier is the significant increase in out-of-zone contact rate. The second-half mark is a career-high in terms of making contact on pitches outside of the zone. Out-of-zone contact rate drops dramatically as a hitter ages, which Suarez seems to be defying, at least over the course of a few months. This likely makes the 24.5% strikeout rate something not to put too much weight into. Consequently, the more aggressive approach shrunk his walk rate and helped him barrel the ball more as he was also swinging in the zone at a higher frequency.
The other improvement that is likely tied to the tweaks he made was hitting sliders. He was able to improve his whiff rate on the pitch to a respectable 32.3% mark while also doing damage with a 16.7% barrel rate after having a 0% barrel rate in the first half.
Eugenio Suárez has hit his stride in the second half as he normally does, and is a major reason why the Diamondbacks lead the big leagues in runs scored. He is a naturally streaky hitter and can get white-hot at any moment. As the playoffs approach, his play at the plate will be something to keep an eye on.
Photo Credit: © Owen Ziliak/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
