Left-hander Andrew Suarez has signed with the Yakult Swallows of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball for the 2022 season, per a club announcement (link via Yahoo Japan). It’ll be the first season in Japan for the lefty, who spent the 2021 season with the LG Twins of the Korea Baseball Organization.
Suarez, 29, will head to Japan on the heels of an outstanding season in the KBO. The lefty in 23 games (22 of them starts) and worked to a pristine 2.18 ERA and 2.72 FIP with an impressive 26.6% strikeout rate, a solid 8.7% walk rate and a huge 57.1% ground-ball rate through a total of 115 2/3 innings. Given that success and his relative youth — Suarez won’t turn 30 until next September — it stands to reason that a strong season in Japan would go a long ways toward putting him back on the MLB map as a free agent.
Suarez, after all, is only three seasons removed from a pretty sound debut campaign with the 2018 Giants. That season saw the 2015 second-rounder rack up 160 1/3 innings of 4.49 ERA ball with a 19.5% strikeout rate that was below the league average but a 6.8% walk rate and 51.3% grounder rate that were both considerably better than the average big league pitcher.
Despite that solid showing and some shakiness at the back of the San Francisco rotation in his sophomore season, Suarez was used almost exclusively as a reliever the following year in 2019. He didn’t take well to the change, scuffling to a 5.79 ERA in a small-ish sample of 32 2/3 innings. Suarez saw even less MLB time in 2020 after the acquisitions of Kevin Gausman, Drew Smyly, Tyler Anderson and Trevor Cahill; he logged just 9 2/3 frames out of the bullpen that season and had his contract purchased by the KBO’s Twins that offseason.
In an odd coincidence, Suarez will continue down a similar career path to 32-year-old righty and similarly named Albert Suarez (no relation). Both made their Major League debuts with the Giants within the past five years and have seen their only MLB action come with San Francisco — Albert from 2016-17 (4.51 ERA in 115 2/3 innings) and Andrew from 2018-20 (4.66 ERA in 202 2/3 innings). The similarities don’t stop there; Albert has spent the past three seasons pitching for the same Swallows club that Andrew will now join. Albert departed the Yakult organization as a free agent this winter and signed in the KBO — albeit with the Samsung Lions and not Andrew’s former Twins.
Time will tell whether either pitcher will make it back to the big leagues, but the younger Suarez has certainly taken some promising steps down that path. Andrew’s 2021 campaign in Japan will be particularly worth monitoring for big league clubs who are eyeing 2022 rotation help.
another one
So I guess we are going to read about every minor leaguer who can’t make the majors, or over the hill major leaguer player that signs in Japan or Korea on Trade Rumors until the strike is over…..yawn!
What else are they supposed to write about right now? And it’s a lockout, not a strike.
Wait, when did anyone go on strike?
1994
So rocky7 is from the past.
No, @Rocky just doesn’t know what’s actually going on. Big difference b/w a strike and a lockout. MLB is in a lockout, put in place by the league (the owners). Not a strike, which would come from the MLBPA.
rocky7:
You’re either new to MLBTR, or simply confused. They have always posted when U.S. players signed foreign contracts. The only difference is that there’s not much else for them to post. So it’s not that news like this is any different than before because of the lockout, it’s just that there’s a lot less other news to post, making these stand out.
The way this is going, they gonna have to cancel the minor league season because there not going to be anybody left to sign.
Same old story, a borderline major league talent excels in foreign league.
…but in recent years we’re also seeing some return to the majors as improved pitchers, such as Miles Mikolas, who was an All-Star for the Cardinals, and Chris Flexen with the Mariners.
Did either of them kill someone in a theatre or a warehouse?
This news is hard to swallow.
Since 2015 the Giants have had an interesting history of having pitchers come and go after a serviceable season, Chris Stratton, Derrick Rodriguez, Ty Blach, Albert Saurez, Chris Heston and Andrew Saurez.
Yes, and it would have been interesting to see what the current coaching staff could have done with some of those pitchers, instead of having them dispatched altogether.
Nah, Most of these guys just weren’t very good, Heston’s no-hitter not withstanding. The Giants pretty much got the best out of them. Stratton is the only one that has pitched as well, per ERA+, as he did in SF. But his SF numbers were as a SP, more valuable than his current role as a reliever.
I had more hope for Andrew Suarez, but it’s not unusual, given the high failure rate of pitchers coming up from the minors, that he didn’t live up to that hope. But none went on to be any better anywhere else. I wouldn’t expect anything different from them even with the current coaching staff.
Maybe more praise is needed for the old coaching staff that got these guys to play, being they haven’t done much since. I always was impressed what Dave Duncan and Ray Searage did with old cast away pitchers. These guys were all young. Maybe the league just had time to put together the book on them
I think (as a group) they lacked the really good fastball that makes all the other stuff more difficult for MLB hitters to adjust to.