Potential Post-Lockout Roster Additions, Part III: Rangers Land Seiya Suzuki
With the calendar rolled over to a new year, baseball fans are eagerly awaiting the end of the sport's ninth work stoppage. Unfortunately, Major League Baseball and the Players Association have yet to schedule any negotiating sessions toward a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. Therefore, we are still in speculation mode.
Once the lockout is over, the chaos that will ensue will likely trump the madness that took place in the days before the owners locked out the players when the previous CBA expired. 141 big-league free agents need to find work and clubs need to settle typical offseason business—salary arbitration, trades, the Rule 5 draft, etc.—in a significantly smaller window.
Even after dropping over half a billion dollars on free agents, the Texas Rangers still plan to add more to their roster. In turn, we have started a series looking at a number of potential moves the Rangers could make once baseball returns to business as usual. In the first two installments, we looked at the possibility of trading for Oakland Athletics first baseman Matt Olson and the Rangers' interest in a trio of Cincinnati Reds starting pitchers. Now, we go back to the position player side of things, but with a trip overseas.
Seiya Suzuki, a right-handed-hitting outfielder for the Hiroshima Carp of Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan, was posted 10 days prior to the start of the lockout, and will have 20 days to decide where he wants to begin his Major League career once a new CBA is signed. Unlike when the Rangers landed Yu Darvish over 10 years ago, teams no longer make bids for players coming through the posting system. Now, the player has the right to negotiate with any team from the start, and the posting team is paid a percentage of the Major League contract value as the posting fee.
According to multiple sources, the Rangers have interest in Suzuki and the 27-year-old slugger has Texas on his list of potential destinations. Suzuki slashed .319/.436/.640/1.079 with 38 home runs and 88 RBI in 2021, and has a career .943 OPS over nine seasons with the Carp. The Rangers are one of the more active teams in pursuing players from the Pacific Rim, so their interest should not come as a surprise.
Suzuki is an athletic outfielder, has plenty of pop in the bat and can run the bases well (82 stolen bases in nine seasons with the Carp). Though he profiles as a corner outfielder, Suzuki has the ability to play all three outfield positions. The Rangers are still looking to add an outfielder when offseason business is allowed to resume, and Suzuki fits the bill of a younger, controllable player that would fit the Rangers' timeline. In addition, he would likely come at a cheaper cost than an impact player like Nick Castellanos.
Of course, there is always concern about how a free agent from overseas will handle the transition to the North American game. Pitchers throw harder in the United States, and a few recent signings from the Pacific Rim have not gone well. However, Suzuki struck out only 16.2 percent of the time in 2021 (MLB average was 23.2 percent), and he walked 87 times as opposed to striking out 86 times. There is still a calculated risk, but the Rangers are surely doing their due diligence in an area where they have scouted very well over the years.
While the addition of Suzuki makes a lot of sense for the Rangers, there will surely be plenty of competition for his services. Agent Joel Wolfe told reporters in Japan in late November that at least eight teams have expressed serious interest in Suzuki. A trio of American League East clubs—the New York Yankess, Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays—have been the "most aggressive" in pursuit of Suzuki.
As far as a potential cost, ESPN's Kiley McDaniel projects Suzuki to ink a four-year, $48 million contract, in addition to a projected $9 million posting fee.
Looking back at the other potential post-lockout moves we've addressed, adding Suzuki seems the most likely. The only resource required is money, and the Rangers still have room to add more to the 2022 payroll, even after already dropping $561.2 million on free agents. It's possible the Rangers pull off a trade, but parting with top prospects on the back end of a rebuild is far from a certainty. Realistically, the Rangers' window of contention won't open until 2023 at the earliest.
There still is one more move that could be more realistic than adding Suzuki, but we'll address that in the final installment of this series.
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