27-year-old outfielder Seiya Suzuki is expected to sign with a Major League Baseball team this year (pending resolution of the lockout). To try to get a sense of him as a player, I checked out his attributes in two recent Japanese baseball video games: Konami’s eBaseball Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2021: Grand Slam (nice game but it could use a longer title) and Bandai Namco’s Pro Yakyuu Famista 2020, both on Nintendo Switch. My gameplay footage is below, with translations for his attributes in both games. The video is split into chapters, so feel free to use those to hop around.
Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2021
Seiya Suzuki has arguably the best ratings as a pure hitter in Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2021. Though his overall 410 rating slots him in as only the fifth-best position player in the game (trailing Yamada, Sakamoto, Yanagita, and Murakami), no other hitter in the game has a B or better contact rating against both right-handed and left-handed pitching as well as an A power rating.
Suzuki’s defensive ratings hold him back from being the best overall position player in the game. Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2021 does not consider him a credible center fielder, and his experience playing third base as a teenager isn’t enough to earn him any rating there at all. As a corner outfielder, this Konami video game treats him as an average fielder, with an average running speed but a very strong throwing arm.
Pro Yakyuu Famista 2020
Pro Yakyuu Famista 2020 is more of an arcade-style baseball game, but broadly similar in how it portrays Suzuki. Suzuki gets an S contact rating and A+ power rating, similar to the other best hitters in the game like Yamada, Sakamoto, and Yoshida.
In this game, there are no separate ratings for center field versus the corner outfield spots, so Suzuki surprisingly gets handed an S defensive rating for any outfield position (and he is portrayed in-game as the starting center fielder for Team Japan, while similarly S-rated Yuki Yanagita is mysteriously missing from the national team entirely).
Bandai Namco’s baseball game is very generous with running speed scores for any able-bodied position players, and Suzuki is no different, receiving an A+ grade for running speed. Suzuki’s real-life stats reveal that while he tends to achieve double-digit steals every season, he gets caught stealing just about as often. I would not anticipate he will get so many opportunities to steal bases in the Major Leagues.
Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2019
To compare Suzuki to some other recent Japanese transfers, we can hop back a few years and take a look at Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2019. I’ve embedded my gameplay footage of Suzuki from this edition of the game below.
Suzuki’s ratings are virtually the same in the 2019 version of the game. His contact ratings are still B but his power rating is slightly lower in 2019, a B instead of an A. Let’s compare him to Yoshi Tsutsugo and Shogo Akiyama, two players in Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2019 who subsequently transferred to MLB. The video game attributes consider Suzuki likely a better hitter than Tsutsugo (D/D contact, A power) and similar to Akiyama (B/C contact, B power). Akiyama gets a higher overall rating due to his defense, 429 over Suzuki’s 400.
Neither Tsutsugo nor Akiyama has had much success in MLB to this point, though Tsutsugo had a strong 50-game run with the Pirates at the end of last season. Akiyama is older than Suzuki and Tsutsugo and has not managed to hit enough to start often in Cincinnati’s crowded outfield.
Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2016
If we want to go even further back and compare to a certain 2021 American League MVP, unfortunately Konami did not release a real, console edition of Pro Yakyuu Spirits between 2015 and 2019 (only a mobile version that I don’t have access to). So we have to switch to Konami’s other baseball franchise and play some Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2016.
Despite the cartoon aesthetic, Power Pro Yakyuu has the same attribute structure, and in the 2016 version Suzuki has similar ratings: B contact and B power. Though it will create unrealistic expectations, I must report that Shohei Ohtani was given worse hitting ratings than Suzuki in this, the last Japanese baseball video game to include him: C contact rating, B power rating. This oddly Ohtani-skeptical rating came after a year when Ohtani hit .322 with 22 home runs in only about half a season’s worth of plate appearances. Can you imagine anyone rating Ohtani’s power as a “B” now? I do not expect Seiya Suzuki to out-perform Shohei Ohtani, but I’m just here to report the numbers.
Should Major League Baseball ever resolve to have a 2022 season, I look forward to seeing what Suzuki can do. If we can believe the fine developers at Konami and Bandai Namco, Suzuki is one of the best hitters Japan has to offer, and we’ll have to wait and see if he can adjust to Major League pitching.