Jack Suwinski

When your numbers and your instincts don't agree, what to do?

Jack Suwinski grew up playing baseball at Norwood Park, a park and a neighborhood on the Northwest Side of the City of Chicago. In the late 70s and early 80s the uniforms at Norwood Park looked something like this:

Lord help you if you dug in against this erratic, hard-throwing right-hander. Anyway, Suwinski would eventually play baseball at Taft High School which is across the street. The Taft High School baseball field was once well known for its iron ore deposits and leaving a deep imprint of a baseball stitch on my forehead after a very bad hop on a ground ball to third. You did not slide on this field: both your pants and the first two layers of skin on your legs would not survive the slide.

This is to say, I’m very much naturally inclined to root very very hard for the success of Jack Suwinski’s baseball career. And for the first two years of that MLB career, things weren’t going so bad, 45 home runs, some walks, decent defense and baserunning made him part of the permanent temporary plans of the Pittsburgh Pirates. But 2024 and 2025 were not kind at all to Suwinski, hitting below .200 both seasons and an astonishingly low .147 before being sent down to Indianapolis.

So you can imagine my surprise when my projections spat out a surprisingly cromulent .217/.310/.410 triple slash for him in 2026. That’s slightly above league average offense. Suwinski has never been a batting average guy, he strikes out too much and hits everything in the air, but he has a lot of power and is very patient at the plate. Still, someone who was truly that bad in 2025 putting up a league average projection doesn’t seem to make sense.

So what gives? Well he did hit a ton at AAA Indianapolis and wound up getting more PAs there than in the majors last year. 2026 is technically what is supposed to be a players “peak” season at 27. He has shown the recent ability to hit in the majors in the past with a very good year at the plate in 2023. And his BABIPs the last two years (.211 and .225) are ridiculously low and absolutely due to shoot back up to something more reasonable. His career line thus far is .199/.305/.389 with a .252 BABIP. My projection has him at .276 BABIP (which is below average), and if you add that to his career you get pretty close to the above .217/.310/.410.

But if someone were to accuse me of “wishcasting” with all of that, I wouldn’t blame them. The guy hit .147/.281/.253 last year in just under 200 PAs. That’s a hard sell. So what should I make of this? Should I abandon the actual numbers because they don’t make intuitive sense? Should I question my intuition knowing that there’s solid data backing up the projection? Is Suwinski even going to get another chance to settle the matter one way or another?

Teams who are rebuilding and need bodies probably could do a lot worse than rolling the dice on Suwinski should he hit the waiver wire (he is out of options). He’s stretched in center field, but can play decent in the corners, has big left handed power and can reach base with walks if not singles. The projections on Fangraphs don’t really seem to be out of line with mine, so should the Pirates or someone else roll the dice after last year’s disaster?

Well I’m just going to keep rooting for the guy with whom I shared a baseball field (though decades apart) and we’ll see whether the numbers or the instincts win out.