Behold, Ranger Suárez

Image credit: © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #46 

And as you learn the magic, learn to believe it
Don’t be ‘surprised’ when it works, you undercut
your power. 

—Diane di Prima

Ranger Suárez takes the mound tonight for the Phillies. He’s thrown 59 innings over nine starts, worked to eight wins, and sports a 1.37 ERA. He went 32 consecutive innings in April without allowing an earned run. He has struck out more than a quarter of batters faced⁠—something you might have read about here, or possibly here⁠—thanks in large part to refined command of his curveball and changeup, allowing him to manipulate the zone like a puppet master. It’s a career-best mark. When batters have connected, it’s been on his terms, as evidenced by his 57.1% ground ball rate. He typically lives in that neighborhood but has maintained that aspect of his game as he has leveled up elsewhere. He’s been the third-best pitcher in baseball, tallying 1.9 WARP. Sometimes, a list of superlatives is enough to tell the story.

Sometimes, you can still add to it. Suárez has halved his walk rate so far this season, slicing it down all the way to 4.6%. Given that he hovered around 8% in 2021 and 9% in each of the last two seasons, he’s mostly flirted with being average or worse when it comes to issuing free passes. Really, that’s a fair way to describe his performance at large. Since becoming a full-time starting pitcher a few years ago, his DRA- has oscillated by at least 14 points per season. He’s a kitchen sink guy whose stuff could be split evenly between two sides, one kept clean by half of his arsenal and the other dirtied up by the rest of it in any given campaign. His average fastball has never broken 94 mph. 

Or it was a fair way to describe his game. There isn’t much precedent for the way he’s excised walks, treating them like a disease to be rid of. Coming into play on Monday, 52 pitchers had thrown at least 50 innings so far in 2024. He ranked 12th in walk rate, with many ahead of him being a top of the rotation arm. He stands out even more when compared to pitchers who also threw at least 80 innings last year⁠—a number that helps us avoid pure relievers, but includes guys who moved between the bullpen and rotation or faced an innings cap⁠—because that leaves us with just 48 guys to consider in the whole league. Suárez has cut the third-most walks from his game, with only Jake Irvin (-5.8%) and Jack Flaherty (-6.5%, profiled last week by Matthew Trueblood) ahead of him. You can view all of the data here. 

Only a handful of players have made year-over-year gains this big over the last few seasons: 

For Kluber, his performance was basically a swan song, something he hadn’t done in years and that you’d be hard pressed to find someone who believed he could have done it again. It was a flash before our eyes like the occasional moment of sweetness you have with an old crush before realizing you’ve both moved on because you had to. The others all achieved their most productive seasons to date by WARP. The 2022 season was a coming out party for McKenzie, showing what he’s capable of when healthy even if he hasn’t really demonstrated it since. Steele took a leap that few thought he could take, exceeding back-of-the-rotation expectations with an exceptional primary cut-fastball. Kikuchi, whose tinkering has been counterproductive at times, finally found an approach that delivered on his immense talent. 

This group provides us something else to think about, too. When considering their first nine starts⁠—the amount that Suárez has made so far⁠—all but Kikuchi became more stubborn as the year went on when it came to giving up free passes. None made big jumps but inched up their improvement by a few fractions of a percentage point. It’s unremarkable, in the way that a roadside attraction pulls your attention from a non distinct landscape but it speaks to something else that is more interesting. However, they eschewed the notion that their performance was an echo of small sample size and instead were offering a new degree of consistency, even as they were outliers among their peers.

With throwback stuff and a cool demeanor, Suárez has already worked himself into folk hero status around Philadelphia, the likes of which haven’t been seen since Cliff Lee during the team’s last competitive run 15 years ago. Sure, he won’t hold opposing hitters to a .215 average on balls in play all year. In the last decade, only three starters have come close to that. But he’s been one of the league’s best pitchers, and with how the pieces have come together, he could be well suited to navigate any negative regression. Suárez is a legitimate threat on the mound who gives the league’s best team to date even more high-end depth that could swing any given series.

Doing this kind of analysis requires finding small groups of players in a big pool, Where’s Waldo? style. That also makes it easy to lose sight of the full scope. Last year, 851 pitchers registered at least an inning of work. In the two previous seasons, it was 861 and 885. So far this year, the number is 582, which is about where we were by this point in each of the last few years. The qualifiers for this look accounted for just 5.5% of the total population. The group that Suárez is in accounts for less than 1%. These results are a kind of magic. He’s been learning it and we have to learn to believe it.