Designated hitter Eugenio Suárez, Sluggin’s infielder, hit 49 home runs between his time with the Arizona Diamondbacks and Seattle Mariners in 2025. He also hit 49 home runs for the Cincinnati Reds in 2019, a year where everyone seemed to be blasting dingers at a record clip.
He did it when everyone else was doing it, and he did it when none of the Reds were doing it. He’s a home run machine with 325 of them already on his record, and a quick look at some of the underlying metrics behind his swing suggests he’s not about to immediately slow down at age 34 in 2026.
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For example…
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According to Statcast, his 113.8 max exit velocity in 2025 was actually the highest mark of his career.
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His Barrel/PA of 8.7 last season was his highest since 2021 (8.9) and the second highest of any season in his career.
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Last season’s 21.9-degree launch angle was the highest of his career, continuing an upward trend that began by jumping up to 17.7 degrees in 2019 from 14.8 degrees in 2018 — in other words, he’s implemented a continued plan for hitting moonballs, and it’s working!
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The 47.6% hard hit rate he posted in 2025 was by far the best of his career, as was his bat’s 57 total barrels.
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The 26.5% fast swing rate – that is, the speed at which he swung a bat over 75 mph – was the best single-season mark of his career since they started tracking him in 2023, and was up 5% from his 21.5% mark in 2024.
He’s a fundamentally different hitter than he was during that brilliant 2019 campaign with the Reds, but the game itself is also fundamentally different now. What’s not fundamentally different now, however, is that a) the Great American Ball Park is still a launching pad for home runs and b) Geno Suárez can still knock the ball out of the air, and does so primarily through the air. In fact, his fly-ball rate of 50.4% (according to FanGraphs) ranks 4th among the 145 qualified hitters in the game last season, with Seattle teammate Cal Raleigh (he of the 60 crushed dingers) leading the pack at over 57%.
Factor in the fact that he has a one-year deal to prove it, and there’s every reason to believe Suárez will hit 40, 50, or even 123 homers in a Reds uniform in 2026.
What do you say?
