Mariners looking brilliant for letting Eugenio Suarez leave for Reds

Mariners looking brilliant for letting Eugenio Suarez leave for Reds originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

The Seattle Mariners had a chance to re-sign Eugenio Suarez in the offseason.

They had just traded for him in July from the Arizona Diamondbacks, and he hit 13 of his 49 home runs on the season once arriving to the Mariners.

They didn't bring him back, though. It didn't necessarily seem like they even went after him all that hard.

Suarez ended up signing with the Cincinnati Reds for a single year at $15 million.

So far, the Mariners seem to have come out on the smart side of this outcome.

Suarez has had, by far, the largest decline in hard hit percentage from 2025 to 2026.

Last season, he hit the ball hard (95 MPH-plus) 47.6% of the time.

Through April 28, he's hit the ball hard 19.7% of the time in 2026.

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That 27.9 percentage point decline is MLB's top by more than eight percentage points.

The Mariners may have been brilliant, or they may have gotten lucky, but at this point, it doesn't matter all that much what their intentions were.

The reality matters much more, and this is a reality where much of Suarez's potency and barrel-to-ball skills seem to have left him, at least for the moment.

The Reds needed pop, and so they brought Suarez back for his second stint with the club. The Mariners likely could've still used a strong version of Suarez, but right now, they're looking just fine without this lesser version of him.