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Defensive metrics take a long time to stabilize. As such, I’ve been waiting for a few months to write this article. But the season is over. We’ve gotten as much information as we’re going to get, and Seiya Suzuki is still grading out as one of the best fielders in baseball. His 8 FRV is tied for 12th among outfielders, his 14 DRS is tied for seventh, and his 1.4 DRP ranks 33rd. To illustrate how surprising that is, let me show you what those numbers have looked like over the course of his MLB career:

Wait, sorry, that graph didn’t include the numbers for the 2026 season. That’s my bad. Let me just add them back in real quick:

Yeah, that’s much better. Suzuki certainly looks like a whole new defender out there. As is the case for many players, the three advanced defensive metrics have rarely agreed about Suzuki’s performance. DRP, by far the most conservative, has generally graded him as slightly above average, while Statcast has almost always been the low man. However, there are some general points of consensus here, the biggest being that Suzuki graded out very badly according to all three metrics last year, and then, in his age-31 season, experienced a miraculous reinvention. He’s been consistent, too. Statcast credits him with at least one fielding run in each month of the season. What is going on in right field at Wrigley?

I should confess that, like Statcast, I was low on Suzuki’s defense for quite awhile. Back in 2022, I took Statcast’s outfield jump metrics out for a spin. Two players jumped off the page in a bad way. Suzuki and Oscar Gonzalez were off in their own world because they were simply too fast to be so bad in the outfield. Suzuki possessed 78th-percentile sprint speed, but he was in just the eighth percentile in OAA. That’s always stuck in my head, maybe because it was the first article I ever wrote here at FanGraphs. What can I say? I was just a naive, impressionable 38-year-old.

In that article, I found that an outfielder’s route was negatively correlated with both their reaction time and their overall performance. In other words, players who were credited with taking a good route to the ball largely did so because they had a slow first step. They knew the right direction to run because they were getting started so late that they had much more information about where the ball was going. With -3 FRV, Suzuki didn’t grade out terribly overall, but he was the rare player who took poor routes despite having a relatively poor reaction time. And although he had good speed, he didn’t make up any ground once he got going. He had a slow first step, he took bad routes, and he never really got up to full speed. It was pretty damning stuff.

In 2023, Suzuki’s defense improved according to all three defensive metrics. However, toward the end of the season, he made this memorable misplay, which cost the Cubs a game and reinforced his reputation as a weak defender:

Suzuki finished the 2024 season playing more DH than right field, and in 2025, Chicago’s acquisition of Kyle Tucker pushed Suzuki into DHing more or less full-time. He got into just 48 games as an outfielder.

But I’d like to take you back to 2022. A few months after my first article, I wrote a second one breaking down Statcast’s defensive metrics in a different way. I found that players who received a higher proportion of three-star opportunities – balls with a catch probability between 51% and 75% – tended to grade out better according to OAA and FRV, while players with a higher proportion of five-star opportunities – 0% to 25% – suffered. You can’t control the chances you get. If you get a bunch of three-star chances – the ones that get caught most of the time but are still hard enough to be noteworthy – you’re going to rack up a bunch of value. If you’re unfortunate enough to get tons of balls with a 5% catch probability – the ones that only the very best fielders in the game even have a chance at – then your numbers are going to take a beating. To some extent, that’s going to hold true with the other metrics. They may not be using Statcast’s cameras and formulae, but they’re still beholden to the makeup of chances that each player gets.

I found that the average outfielder’s starred chances broke down so that 23% were five-star, while 18% were three-star. However, 31% of Suzuki’s starred chances were five-star, while just 6% were three-star. He wasn’t the unluckiest of the bunch, but he was definitely hurt by the makeup of his chances. Suzuki’s chances were never quite so lopsided again, and as you’d expect, all three defensive metrics clocked an improvement in 2023. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that his numbers ticked down in 2024 and 2025 either, considering that he wasn’t playing in the field every day. That goes double for 2025. Over the first two months of the season, Suzuki started just two games in the outfield; he didn’t get to play outfield three games in a row until mid-September. Name a player who wouldn’t be rusty in that situation.

With Tucker gone, the Cubs recommitted to Suzuki as their right fielder this year, and for that they deserve a lot of credit. That said, I can’t resist showing you one more ball that he biffed from back in May:

That’s not nearly as easy a catch as it looks in slow motion, but it’s certainly a memorable play. The reason I couldn’t resist showing it to you is that even David Hamilton, who ended up with a triple, couldn’t keep from smirking as he rounded second:

Ugly plays aside, Suzuki’s defense has been better both according to the numbers and the eye. I mentioned earlier that I’ve been waiting to write this article, and as a result, a few people have beaten me to it. “Maybe it’s about time everyone — fans, opposing players, everyone — realized what kind of defender Suzuki can be,” wrote Vinnie Duber of the Chicago Sun-Times back in May. He interviewed a few Cubs about the turnaround, including the man himself. “The last few years, with my defense, I think there was a little bit of worry,” Suzuki told Duber. “But coming into this year, I felt good.” On June 3, Meghan Montemurro of the Chicago Tribune dug into the numbers and interviewed third base coach Quintin Berry:

[Berry] took the same approach with Suzuki that he utilized last year with center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong. During spring training, Berry focused on the three pillars of outfield defense: reaction, burst and release time.

“We do so much work there so that when we get in the game, you just maintain that,” Berry told the Tribune. “You always know what to go back to, and I think the visuals plus the practice really helps him get an understanding for how he wants to go about it, what it’s supposed to look like and constantly showing him that he’s doing so well.”

Berry focused on finding a comfortable pre-pitch routine with Suzuki that helped position him for a better first step and anticipation to create better routes.

It would be hard to argue that the approach hasn’t worked. Statcast’s jump numbers tell the story eloquently:

Suzuki’s jumps improved dramatically after 2022. His routes stayed below average, but as we’ve established, that’s nothing to worry about, and may even be a good sign. I can think of a million factors that could have informed Suzuki’s step forward after 2022. Maybe he got used to playing in MLB rather than NPB. Maybe he got used to navigating the tricky Wrigley outfield. Maybe the sore ankle that caused him to miss some time in May 2022 was bothering him more than we knew. Maybe the makeup of his chances also affected his jumps.

The reasons that his jumps got worst in 2025 are easier to discern. He barely played in the outfield at the beginning of the season, and didn’t consistent playing time there until the last two weeks of the season. Still, this year’s improvement go far beyond getting back into the swing of things. By both reaction and overall jump, Suzuki ranks fifth among qualified outfielders. The other names in the top 10 belong almost exclusively to standout defensive center fielders:

Suzuki hasn’t just improved; he’s one of the best in the game. I should point out that according to burst – which measures the total distance covered from 1.6 to 3.0 seconds, and which I found to be the jump metric that correlates strongest with OAA – Suzuki ranks a bit lower, 20th among qualified outfielders. That’s where his lack of elite speed hurts him. For his first five years in Chicago, his sprint speed held steady between 28.3 and 28.5 feet per second. This year, he’s down at 27.9 fps, a hair below average for an outfielder, and his home-to-first time has seen a commensurate increase.

In other words, Suzuki is getting these great jumps and making all these extra plays despite losing (part of) a step. Statcast gave him an expected catch percentage of 88% and an actual rate of 90%. The 2% difference is the best mark of his career, and it’s just the second time he’s been in the black.

He’s also making totally different kinds of catches. Until this year, Suzuki had never once made a five-star play. He was 0-for-61. This year, he’s made three five-star catches. Lance Brozdowski and Katie Krall devoted a recent segment to Suzuki’s improved jumps on Marquee Sports Network, and they highlighted this play in particular. Suzuki is already moving fast by the time the camera cuts to right field:

Before I close, I should admit that I do think Suzuki’s defensive numbers contain at least a little bit of helium. Specifically, a significant portion of his defensive value came from his arm this season. Throwing accounted for 4 of his 8 FRV and 3 of his 14 DRS. That’s not necessarily a surprise. Suzuki’s got a very strong arm and he racked up a whopping eight assists this year, tied for 12th most in baseball. He absolutely deserves credit for them, but outfield assists are pretty fluky. They’re not just beholden to opportunities, but to the wind and the runner’s slide and the infielder’s tag and on and on. When we look forward to next year, we shouldn’t assume that Suzuki will keep that up, even if his arm stays every bit as deadly. And although he more than offset it with those assists, he actually lost some value because runners tried to take the extra base on him more often that expected.

We’re only talking about one year, which isn’t as big a sample size as you’d like for a defender, and we’re never going to know with any certainty all of the reasons that Suzuki has improved. But I’m inclined to believe that some combination of lessons from Berry and plain old hard work on Suzuki’s part really has paid off. Jump metrics aren’t something you can fake. When the ball meets the bat, either you’re moving in the right direction or you aren’t. I also think that playing on a team whose identity is so wrapped up in playing great defense can rub off on a player. Whatever the reasons, Suzuki really does look like a different defender out there.