Sliders: Eugenio Suárez is streaky, superstitious — and now he's made his mark on baseball history

New York Times

02-05-2025

Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of baseball.
Sportswriters often honor a player with a 'Good Guy' award for cooperation with the media. Eugenio Suárez won it last year from writers covering the Arizona Diamondbacks. He also won it a few years ago, in Cincinnati. His personal mantra is 'Good Vibes Only,' and by all accounts he lives it.
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'Geno is the same guy every single day — the epitome of it, literally,' said the Mets' Jesse Winker, a teammate with the Reds and Seattle Mariners. 'He's happy every single day, man. He's a great teammate, a great person, just a great dude to be around. And he uplifts everybody.'
Given all that, it seemed likely that Suárez would be up for a chat about one of the greatest offensive performances in baseball history. He belted four home runs against Atlanta last Saturday, becoming just the 19th player ever to do it. Yet, when the Diamondbacks arrived at Citi Field on Tuesday, Suárez kept quiet.
He chatted amiably with fans on the field, and politely accepted a reporter's congratulations on his big game. But an interview? Well, that wasn't happening. The Diamondbacks said that Suárez had done some interviews the last time he was in New York, at Yankee Stadium in early April, when he had five home runs through the season's five games.
Then he plunged into a three-week tailspin: a .139 average (10-for-72) with one home run in 21 games. Sports scientists have yet to determine the jinxing powers of your humble Sliders correspondent. But Suárez was taking no chances. Superstitious, perhaps?
'Might be,' said Joe Mather, the Arizona hitting coach. 'Sometimes over-talking about what you're doing can really mess you up. It's a real thing at times and not at others, but if a player is feeling it, then I don't fault them.'
When you're as streaky as Suárez, 34, you'll do anything to limit the lulls. Consider last season, his first with the Diamondbacks. Suárez entered July hitting .196 with six home runs in 80 games. His OPS was .591. It was reasonable to think that his roster spot was in peril.
A lot of money was at stake: Suárez would either make $15 million in 2025 or get a $2 million buyout if the Diamondbacks declined his option. But there was also professional pride for one of baseball's stealth sluggers.
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In the past 10 seasons (2016-2025), Suárez ranks fifth in the majors in home runs, trailing only Aaron Judge, Kyle Schwarber, Manny Machado and Nolan Arenado. He has five seasons with at least 30 homers, peaking with 49 in 2019, and never wants a day off.
Suárez played all 162 games for the 2023 Mariners. He joined Arizona in a trade that November, but struggled to justify his playing time for the first three months of last season. Manager Torey Lovullo had to be blunt with Suárez: If he wanted to play every day, he had to work harder.
'I called him in, I'll never forget,' Lovullo said. 'I just said, 'Look, you've got to practice a little bit differently. You've gotten to a certain point in your career where your age tells you that you have to do things a tiny bit differently.' So we talked about getting on a program through the course of the week and following it, offensively and defensively, with some high-intensity training — and he did. He and the hitting coach just figured it out and that's when he got hot.'
Earlier in his career, Mather said, Suárez could 'kind of wake up, roll out of bed and hit.' Last summer, he wanted to help Suárez re-train his fast-twitch movements and reaction times by working daily with a high-velocity machine in the batting cage.
Suárez responded, hitting fastballs better than he had in a full year since 2019 — .290, with a .499 slugging percentage. From July on, he reclaimed his status as one of the sport's most dangerous hitters, slashing .312/.357/.617, ripping 24 homers and driving in 69 runs — the most in the majors from July 1 on.
Included in that stretch were four four-hit games and four five-RBI games. The only other player in the past century with four of both after July 1: Babe Ruth.
'It was as good a second half as I've ever seen,' Lovullo said. 'I mean, it was awesome. It reminded me of J.D. (Martinez). J.D. seemed like he was hitting a home run a game there for the month of September (2017). But that's what he can do. He just has to be stubborn to what his strengths are, and he's figured that out.'
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Martinez was the last major leaguer before Suárez with a four-homer game, doing it for the Diamondbacks at Dodger Stadium on Sept. 4, 2017. It made an impression throughout the organization.
'I remember when J.D. Martinez was with us, he hit four homers in 2017 — I was at the (Dominican) academy, and I saw it on TV,' shortstop Geraldo Perdomo said. 'And seeing that in real life, it's kind of crazy. I was talking with a couple of my teammates: 'What about if (Suárez) hit the number four right now?' And he did. It was special to see that. It sucked because we lost, but this is baseball and you never know what's going to happen.'
The last four-homer effort to come in a loss was by Atlanta's Bob Horner in 1986, in a game when the Expos' Al Newman — a popular utility infielder of the era — hit his only career home run. The Diamondbacks recovered after Saturday's loss with a win on Sunday and a series victory in New York.
Alas, despite keeping a low profile before that series, Suárez went 1-for-12 against the Mets and headed to Philadelphia for the weekend with a .196 season average. But thanks to the scorching start and a night for the ages, he also had 10 home runs, tied with the Yankees' Aaron Judge and Seattle's Cal Raleigh for the most in the majors.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, who seem determined to be first in everything, barged into the lead on an unwanted list at the last possible moment on Wednesday.
OK, so it's not a record they'd like to have. But still, when Jack Dreyer and Tony Gonsolin started the Dodgers' final two games against Miami this week, it made the Dodgers the first team ever to use 11 different starting pitchers before May.
Besides Dreyer and Gonsolin, the Dodgers have used Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki for six starts each, Tyler Glasnow and Dustin May for five, Landon Knack and Blake Snell for two and Ben Casparius, Bobby Miller and Justin Wrobleski for one apiece. Glasnow and Snell are on the injured list with shoulder inflammation, while Knack, Miller and Wrobleski are now in the minors.
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According to the Elias Sports Bureau, only five other teams have used 10 starters before May: the 1912 Browns, 2002 Cardinals, 2021 Blue Jays, 2021 Rays and this season's Milwaukee Brewers, who have burned through Freddy Peralta (seven starts), Chad Patrick (five), Quinn Priester and Jose Quintana (four), Tyler Alexander (three), Nestor Cortes, Tobias Myers and Elvin Rodriguez (two) and Aaron Civale and Logan Henderson (one).
The difference between the Brewers and the Dodgers (and the 2021 teams) is that none of Milwaukee's 10 starters was designed to be an opener. The Dodgers have used Casparius and Dreyer in that role, but have another reinforcement coming back soon: Clayton Kershaw, who is recovering from toe and knee surgeries, threw 66 pitches for Triple-A Oklahoma City on Wednesday in his third rehab start.
Uniform numbers were not standard across MLB until the early 1930s. Sixteen franchises were around back then, which means that many players cannot be honored with a retired number. A few teams do include long-ago greats alongside their numbered brethren: Ty Cobb in Detroit, Rogers Hornsby in St. Louis, John McGraw and Christy Mathewson in San Francisco.
And then there's Philadelphia.
The Phillies now honor five Hall of Famers from the time before numbers. Grover Cleveland Alexander and Chuck Klein were already included in a display above the outfield concourse at Citizens Bank Park. On Thursday — the anniversary of the franchise's first game in 1883 — three 1890s stars joined them: Ed Delahanty, Billy Hamilton and Sam Thompson.
Owners John Middleton pulled the curtain over their names (and block-P logos) in a pregame ceremony, calling them 'extraordinary superstars' in a scoreboard segment. He's not wrong: Delahanty hit .400 three times; Hamilton held the majors' stolen-base record from 1897 to 1977 (with 914); and Thompson, a .331 career hitter, once drove in a record 61 runs in a month — a record.
Thompson also knew how to rock a mustache, with a panache memorialized in his Philadelphia Inquirer obituary in 1922:
'Although great changes took place in the game during Thompson's stay in the big show, he always stuck to his long sandy mustache. Old time fans never forgot the habit Sam had of curling up his mustache just before he came up to hit and probably many a pitcher carried the picture to his grave of Thompson walking slowly up to the plate, with his short black bat tucked under his arm, while one hand was busy curling that long mustache before he took a cut at the ball.'
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Doug Glanville might be the king of all baseball media. After a nine-year playing career for the Cubs, Phillies and Rangers, from 1996 to 2004, Glanville has forged a distinguished second act on just about every communications platform. His transition to the other side came naturally.
'I felt a certain camaraderie with the media,' Glanville said. 'They weren't my teammates, but I got just as much enjoyment from talking to the writers and people who were interviewing me, because they provided so much context and history and perspective that I found valuable to shaping how I thought about something or how I approached something. So that was always a draw to me.'
Glanville — who is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education — shared his thoughts on the joys and challenges of five mediums: writing a book, broadcasting on TV and radio, podcasting with The Athletic's Jayson Stark, and managing his new Substack, Welcome To Glanville, which opened for business in March.
Radio: 'The surprise of radio is, you would think because you have to talk all the time, you can talk about anything. But I think you have less time to talk versus TV, because you have to paint the picture. It's too important to describe what's happening. So you can't just be like, 'Let me take three pitches now to talk about something, where TV you can get away with that because people are seeing. And with the pitch clock, it became even harder, right? Because it was like, 'OK, this guy's working really quickly. I don't have as much room to tell these stories, I guess.' But I love working with my play-by-play, whoever it is, but Jon Sciambi … Roxy Bernstein, Mike Cousins, Beth Mowins, doesn't matter. I have such a great respect for all of them and what they do.'
Television: 'The best advice I got was from Gerry Matalon, he was a talent officer at ESPN. You'd come in after (a show), almost (for) an autopsy of it. So one day I walked in and he has both his hands in fists with his arms outstretched. I was like, 'Well, what's that?' He's like, 'Just tap them.' So I tap and he opens both hands and there's Starbursts in each hand. One of them is pristine, it's in the wrapper, and the other one looked like it'd been run over by a car, still in the wrapping. So he asked me, 'Which one do you want?' I was, like, 'Well, obviously this one is all wrapped.' And he's like, 'Same content, different packaging. It matters how you deliver. This is a communications job. This is not a baseball job. There's a bunch of people that play baseball that can then talk about it. But can you communicate it? Can you deliver it? Can you sell it? Can you share it? That is where you need strategy, skills, practice, and I'm going to give it to you.' That was how it went. From that day forward, I learned this is a communications job. I love baseball and I can talk about baseball, and I do, but it's not enough for me to be like, 'I played the big leagues.' You have to convey information, you have to reach people, you have to be clear.'
Book writing: 'The hardest part is that I realized I'm an essayist real quick. Because if I have to sit down and someone says, 'Hey, write this whole chapter 15,000 words,' I get kind of lost in my own words. I'll get like 5,000 words in and say, 'Wait did I say that before? I might have said that already.' And this is how good my publisher was. He said, 'Look, write the whole book as a chain of essays. Then we'll categorize those essays, make chapters of them, and then we'll fuse them together. So that's how I wrote it. I wrote in, like, 52 pieces and then bridged it together. Because I figured out pretty quickly that it was just hard for me to just write a chapter.'
Podcasting: 'I just love talking to people. I love learning, and any chance you have to talk to anybody, new or not new, I feel like you learn so much. It's a real chance to explore that curiosity. … It's current events, it is live — well, not live in the exact sense, but it's straight talk and it's recorded as-is, and we just get to talk to these amazing people around the game.'
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The Substack: 'I think what Substack has given me is the ability to just write freely and not be in the box. The box will tell you baseball is only relevant in these places, and that I reject that 100 percent. It's a proxy for life. It's teamwork. It's sport. It's social justice. It's change. It's anything — it's cookies, it's aliases (on the road). As a player and having these experiences, I felt that baseball deserves to be showcased in all these ways. And it's harder to pitch to each individual place and say, 'Hey, I have this idea.' It's more like, 'Hey, give me your one-off piece and I might call you in four years and ask you to write another one.' I just think it's hard to be able to be a conscience of something, because you don't get the rhythm. I like that these publications are getting many different kinds of voices. There's an ensemble that I appreciate. But I think as a person trying to write consistently, that's pretty hard today. … So I think Substack is freedom, and it's also an elevation of baseball. I refuse to limit it to just, 'Oh, I hit .350 this week.' There's so much more to baseball, and I've witnessed it firsthand in my life.'
Daulton Varsho's stumbling, tumbling catch in Toronto this week is rightly being considered among the best plays ever. All that was missing was a compelling game situation: Varsho did it in the fourth inning of a game the Blue Jays were losing by five runs.
For both degree of difficulty and historical importance, it's hard to beat the catch of DeWayne Wise's life, which saved Mark Buehrle's perfect game on July 23, 2009. Two of our weekly features join forces this week in honor of Wise, an Immaculate Grid superstar who produced a highlight clip for the ages.
Wise played for six teams from 2000 to 2013, appearing at every outfield position and twice as a pitcher. He qualified for the left-field/right-field square in Monday's Grid, but made his biggest impact in center on a midweek afternoon against the Tampa Bay Rays.
Inserted for defense in the top of the ninth inning, Wise got his chance immediately when Gabe Kapler drove a pitch to the wall. Wise, who was playing shallow to guard against a bloop single, raced back, leaped, reached over the fence to pull back the ball, then bobbled it as he fell — and caught it with his bare hand, mid-tumble.
'It was crazy, man,' Wise said a week or so later, when I talked with him in Chicago. 'That situation, a dead sprint out there. Every time I look at that I just get chills, like, wow, how did I make that catch?'
Here's something else to give you chills: Wise made his leap in front of a mural of Billy Pierce, a star White Sox lefty who once lost a perfect game on the South Side with two outs in the ninth.
(Top photo of Eugenio Suárez: Norm Hall / Getty Images)