SAN DIEGO — Kyle Higashioka spent seven seasons crouching behind home plate for Aroldis Chapman, Gerrit Cole and other pitchers with rare arms and unusual speed, but in his first season with the Padres, the veteran catcher marveled at what turned out like a real pitcher feels anomaly.
Robert Suarez, San Diego's soft-spoken, hard-throwing closer, handles the warmth like no other pitcher within the majors. His combined fastball usage is up nearly 30 percentage points from last season. A bit greater than 80 percent of the time, he drove to his four-seater, which reaches a median speed of 98.5 miles per hour. He mixed in his sinker (97.9 mph average) on nearly 11 percent of his pitches. And in a remarkable eight-game stretch last month, Suarez hit 79 straight fastballs.
“People don’t even do that in high school,” said Higashioka, who played prep ball against Cole greater than a decade before the 2 Southern California natives became battery mates on the New York Yankees. “It’s pretty crazy.”
It can be even stranger if the 33-year-old Suarez had limited success with such an approach. But the Venezuelan right-hander is neither stubborn nor unimaginative. Suarez has a 0.52 ERA in 16 appearances. In an otherwise shaky Padres bullpen, he’s tied for the key league lead in games accomplished (16), saves (12) and saves of greater than three outs (three). Opponents are hitting .250 (1-for-4) against his plus-changeup and just .093 (4-for-43) against a four-seater that has justified the heavy usage.
“He has the feel, the traits and he hits at the top of the zone,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “You know what’s coming, but a lot of the hitters (batters) just can’t keep up. I don’t like him coming into the game.”
Why was a commonly seen fastball so unhittable?
“Ruben Niebla (Padres pitching coach) helped me a lot in applying all kinds of analysis to my pitches, especially spin rate,” Suarez said recently through team interpreter Pedro Gutiérrez. “It allowed me to do a little bit more.”
On Saturday, hours after Suarez threw 11 four-seamers, two sinkers and nothing else in an ideal inning against the Dodgers, Niebla explained in additional detail.
Suarez has gained a practical understanding of spin efficiency, Niebla said, since San Diego signed him from Japan's top skilled league after the 2021 season. Although there isn’t any proven technique to significantly increase raw spin rate without the assistance of banned foreign substances, Suarez has increased it lively spin — a Statcast metric that measures the spin that contributes to motion — on its four-seater from 93.7 percent in 2022 to 95.9 percent this season. Since the tip of 2023, the sector has gained nearly an inch of average vertical movement, the “travel” Roberts mentioned.
“If he starts working a little too much inside the ball, his four-seater starts to run and we lose spin efficiency,” Niebla said. “If it cuts off a little bit, we lose spin efficiency. At the moment it seems to be clicking for him. Metrically speaking, he’s behind the ball and really gets the pure backspin.”
More than 90 percent of Robert Suarez's throws this season have been fastballs. (Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)
Tuning Suarez's performance was key. At the beginning of spring training, Niebla noticed that the pitcher was moving his lower half down the mound, but in addition that his upper body was “lagging a little bit behind.” Suarez struggled in his first appearances within the Cactus League, although he and Niebla worked to deal with the cause. It wasn't until Suarez's final spring game in Arizona that Niebla felt the backup had his timing perfect.
“Even when he went to Korea (for the season opener against the Dodgers) … I was still a little nervous, and then it was good,” Niebla said Saturday at Petco Park. “Then he came out here. And then you just track – I just track. But right now I feel like it's pretty easy when I don't even have to talk to him. It’s just like, ‘You’re in rhythm.’ I don’t even tell him he’s in rhythm.”
Higashioka played six seasons with Chapman, who still holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest major league throw, a 105.8 mph fast ball thrown to Tony Gwynn Jr. at Petco Park in 2010. “He’s pretty powerful,” Higashioka said. “You could tell he was using all his strength to get everything over with.” Suarez, then again, has something near the textbook definition of “light gas.”
“Sometimes,” Padres starting catcher Luis Campusano said, “it almost teleports into my glove.”
Those who’ve frolicked around Suarez suggest otherwise.
“He has really good command,” Roberts said.
“When I caught the first bullpen, I was amazed at the command,” Higashioka said. “It was just almost spot on. And for a guy to make 100 throws with above-average control, I think that’s pretty special.”
“There's a combination of the ability to reach 100 but also the ability to reach 100 when this guy puts it at the top of the zone and then goes to the outside half of the zone and suddenly he's a two-seater can take you lock them up,” Niebla said. “It's like, 'Oh shit, was that this or was that the other?'”
During his run of 79 consecutive fastballs, Suarez threw 74 four-seamers and five sinkers. He allowed no runs, two singles and two walks. (The only run against Suárez this season got here on March 28, when Michael Conforto belted a solo home run.) He recorded only five strikeouts, but consistently made weak contact and kept batters off balance by utilizing speed of his litters varied.
Sometime across the fortieth or fiftieth fastball in a row, a few of Suarez's teammates began talking amongst themselves: Something else had happened.
“I think we were just kind of monitoring everyone,” Higashioka said. “We noticed that he didn't really throw anything else, but he still dominated. It was pretty cool.”
“I know the fastball gets used a lot, but it was his best weapon. It's his best weapon,” Campusano, Suarez's first teammate, said April 22 before a game at Coors Field. “So if you just bring all the times to the plate, it really makes it a lot more effective. I'm very confident in using it until someone can prove they're good at it.
“You know the 100s are coming. You just don’t know where it’s going to lead.”
Robert Suárez 100 miles per hour ⛽️⛽️ pic.twitter.com/ZMSQtDHInk
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) May 7, 2024
Of course, a prudent competitor never reveals an excessive amount of. Just a few hours after Campusano spoke, the catcher called for a 1-2 changeup instead of Suarez's eightieth straight fastball. Sean Bouchard fouled it. Then, against the subsequent pitch, the Colorado Rockies outfielder doubled.
It was the one extra-base hit Suarez suffered along with his fastball this season. Now, three weeks later, it's still the identical. And Suarez has only increased the usage of that pitch. So far in May he has thrown the four-seater almost 90 percent of the time. The Hitters are 0 for 14 against this month.
“It's like that's my strength,” said Niebla, who maintains that between games Suarez continues to work on his changeup and his cutter/slider, a pitch he hasn't thrown in a game this yr. “You have to use it as a relief.”
Since the pitch tracking era began in 2008, only a dozen pitchers have thrown a four-seamer, a sinker or a cutter on at the least 90 percent of their pitches (at the least 500 pitches total). Mariano Rivera, well known as the best closer of all time, is at the highest with 98.5 percent; His famous cutter accounted for 87.6 percent of his pitches during that span.
Over the last 16 seasons, nobody has thrown a four-seamer or sinker greater than 86.7 percent of the time. In 2024, Suarez (68.3 percent over his big league profession) is at 91.3 percent. The only pitcher throwing non-cutter fastballs more ceaselessly this season is former Padres reliever Tim Hill, and the left-hander's average four-seater is 8 mph slower than Suarez, who threw 13 pitches at the least 100 mph hour accomplished.
There may come a time when opponent adjustments or other aspects cause Suarez to dial back the acute reliance on the fastball. Right now, who knows when his next off-speed pitch will come: One of baseball's more automatic closers entered Sunday after throwing 32 straight fastballs.
image credit : theathletic.com