That's cold: Suzuki jokes he got tricked by weather charts

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The temperature was in the 30s. The wind chill was blowing straight out of mid-January.

And the baseball was howling through flurries of snow.

“Yes, obviously, yes,” Cubs rookie Seiya Suzuki said through his team interpreter of Monday’s game at Wrigley Field. “I’ve never played in a game that cold in my whole career.”

So did Jed Hoyer trick the free agent from Japan with his assurances about the Chicago weather?

Suzuki didn’t have to wait for his interpreter.

“Yes,” he said in deadpan English.

“It wasn’t a trick,” Hoyer, the team president said, with a laugh. “I think we spun it in the best possible light for Chicago. We  admitted it was cold in April, but we said once you get past May, it was very similar to what he was used to in Hiroshima. And I stand by that.”

Easy for him to say. He also was standing in a heated suite during Monday’s game, not standing in the batter’s box.

It does seem as though Hoyer’s famed weather charts that helped swing the, um, hotly pursued Suzuki to Chicago were missing a key month of data.

“It was one of six months,” Hoyer explained. “We emphasized the other five months a little bit more.”

Suzuki was so interested in the weather as a factor in his decision that he flew to Chicago the day after his dinner meeting with Cubs brass to see for himself, landing on a rare 65-degree day in March, then signed the next day.

"That was blind luck," Hoyer said.

Hoyer couldn't have drawn up anything better if he'd had another chart at dinner that night.

Then the season started.

And Hoyer and manager David Ross, who also attended the sales-pitch dinner in Los Angeles, have been hearing about it ever since the team got back to Chicago from spring training.

“He’s joked about it a couple times with me: ‘This is not what that chart said,’ “ said Hoyer, smiling and shrugging, with a signed five-year contract safely in hand.

“I just tell him: ‘Charts are averages, right?’ “

Speaking of averages, the Cubs have consequently learned something that wasn’t on the scouting reports from Japan: Suzuki can hit in the snow.

Put that on a chart.

He produced his third multi-hit game of the season Monday, along the way tying Andy Pafko’s franchise hitting streak record to start a career at nine games. The streak ended on another cold night Tuesday, when Suzuki instead drew three walks.

He’s 12-for-29 (.414) with four homers, 12 walks and leads the majors in on-base percentage (.581) and OPS (1.478) heading into Wednesday's series finale against the Rays.

All of which makes it a lot easier to laugh at those charts and this weather.

“Jed’s an awesome guy. And there’s a lot of great guys on this team as well,” Suzuki said through the interpreter “So I don’t really care about the cold weather anymore.”

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