The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
SUZUKI’S SURGE A BRIGHT SPOT ON SAD TRIP
Catcher shows surprising power with 8 July homers.
How long was the Braves’ road trip? Longer than “the Mooch” lasted in the White House. Literally.
Anthony Scaramucci was introduced as White House communications director at a July 21 news conference on the morning of the Braves’ second game at Dodger Stadium, the first stop on their three-city trip. Before the Braves completed the final game of the trip Monday at Philadelphia, Scaramucci had been removed as communications director and reportedly escorted off the White House grounds.
The Trip That Wouldn’t End featured almost as dramatic a downward trajectory for the Braves, with few exceptions. Most notable among those exceptions: Kurt Suzuki, who homered in the first game of the trip, homered Monday in the last game of the trip and homered three times in-between despite starting fewer than half the games and missing three of four games at L.A. to attend his grandmother’s funeral in his native Hawaii.
The 33-year-old catcher just had one of the most productive months of his 11-year career. He hit .356 with eight homers and 14 RBIs in just 45 plate appearances and 11 games (10 starts) in July, for a jaw-dropping .911 slugging percentage and 1.267 OPS. Half of his 16 hits were home runs and Suzuki gave a lot of the credit to Braves hitting coach Kevin Seitzer.
“I’ve been working with Seitz, trying to just be tension-free, not trying to do too much and just kind of letting your hands do the work and be in synch with everything,” he said. “Everything’s kind of clicking right now. It feels good.”
Suzuki went into this week’s Dodgers series with 12 homers in 180 plate appearances (158 at-bats), just three homers shy of the career-best 15 he hit in 614 plate appearances in 2009 with Oakland, when he was 25 and in his third MLB season.
Suzuki didn’t walk at all in July but only struck out five times. Yes, he had more homers than strikeouts for the month, another stat you won’t see often these days. Eight homers in 45 at-bats in July from a guy who’s listed at 5-foot-11 and 205 pounds.
“He’s got some hand speed,” Seitzer said. “He’s got real good leverage and uses his legs — he stays closed and stays short and inside the ball — and, I mean, those hands just snap through. It’s real impressive. I’m real happy for him.”
Suzuki has a .266 batting average and .532 slugging percentage this season, which is 111 points higher than he’s ever slugged in a season. His .872 OPS is 137 points better than his career high as an Oakland rookie in 2007.
Suzuki shares duties with Tyler Flowers, though not evenly. Flowers’s 62 starts are nearly 50 percent more than Suzuki’s 41. Suzuki hadn’t started consecutive games since mid-April until he started the last two games of the trip Sunday and Monday.
No one could have predicted this level of production, certainly not nearly six weeks into the season. Suzuki played 19 games in that period and after a May 14 loss to Miami, he was hitting .204 with one homer in 49 at-bats.
In 30 games since, Suzuki hit .294 with 11 home runs in 109 at-bats, with 25 RBIs, a .342 OBP, all this in a 2½-month span. He was an unsigned free agent before hooking up with the Braves on a one-year, $1.5 million deal just three weeks before spring training.
So what happened? “In spring training, I saw him being a little bit long, and BP (batting practice) swings were a little different than his game swings,” Seitzer said. “And we talked about finishing with two hands as opposed to releasing with his top hand. So we started working on that, and he mentioned a few times how hot he got last year — was just crushing balls, homers and everything — and I said, ‘Well, let’s go watch video and see what it looked like.’ So we just saw a couple of things, like getting tension out of his upper body and really loosening his arms and using his hands more, because he gets real violent (with his swing), real tight and violent because he’s a real aggressive guy.
“So we started focusing on getting him loosened up and I mean it just, oh my gosh, he’s looked pretty much the rest of the season like he looked last year during that real hot stretch where he was hitting (home runs) and going crazy. So he’s in a really good place. It’s like when he misses a fastball we’re like, what the heck, that should have been in the seats.”