GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Steven Kwan was hacking away in a Chicago batting cage over the winter.
One swing-and-miss. Another swing-and-miss. Whiff after whiff after whiff.
The baseball whizzed toward the guy with the second-best strikeout rate in baseball the last two years, and he wound up, lifted his front foot, uncorked his bat and came up empty, again and again.
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All on purpose, just to see how it feels.
Kwan could wear a blindfold, spin in a circle for 30 seconds, clutch a twig in his hands and still fend off an upper-90s fastball at the knees on the outside corner.
But to become the hitter he aspires to be, and for the Cleveland Guardians to field a more proficient offense, Kwan needed to get comfortable with the idea of swinging-and-missing once in a while. It’s not an intentional attempt to sabotage his contact ability, but an organizational plea for him and a roster full of bat-to-ball mavens to take more chances and swing with more authority, to shoot a slider to the right-center gap rather than flick it to the opposite field and pray the BABIP gods are in a forgiving mood.
Kwan ideally would have packed on more muscle and bettered his bat speed and transformed into a hulking slugger who can turn on any pitch and launch it into the stratosphere. That isn’t how he’s built, though, and it’s difficult enough to recalibrate a hitter’s DNA, especially in one offseason.
That’s the challenge the Guardians and hitting coach Chris Valaika face. This is largely the same group that, last season, produced the lowest home run total and the lowest rate of hard contact in the league.
Silly's Show.#GuardsSpring pic.twitter.com/rcLNrlFJYF
— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) February 25, 2024
How do you repair a power-starved offense that will feature similar personnel? How do you perform a facelift to a lineup with such a distinct identity? The bloop troop program flourished in 2022 but flopped in 2023.
Now, they’re after more hard contact. To make more hard contact, the coaches have preached, they need to take more chances. To take more chances, hitters must be amenable to more swings-and-misses. And so, after some initial hesitation, Kwan sought to gain familiarity with failing.
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“It’s almost like telling yourself it’s OK to swing through pitches,” center fielder Myles Straw said. “(Kwan) can see a pitch, react and touch pretty much any pitch.”
Sometimes, that contact competency can be detrimental. Take, for example, a changeup on the outside corner, in which the hitter’s best-case scenario might be to tap it toward the second baseman.
“I’d rather you be 0-1 in a count than 0-for-1,” Valaika said.
Valaika acknowledged this isn’t a simple approach to implement. This won’t vault the same group of hitters to the top of the slugging leaderboards. Kwan and Straw and Will Brennan and Tyler Freeman aren’t going to morph into 30-homer threats who also strike out 200 times a season. Straw switched trainers and added 10 pounds of muscle over the winter in the hope of driving the ball more, but he also has one homer in his last 1,273 plate appearances.
It’s about tradeoffs, accepting some whiffs in exchange for some doubles and homers. Valaika suggested he’d sign up for a middle-of-the-pack home run ranking if the Guardians dropped to, say, fifth in strikeout rate after finishing first the last two years.
“It’s embarrassing to decide to swing at something, swing hard and then miss it,” Kwan said. “I just have to get over that. My identity is supposed to be contact, bat-to-ball. If I miss it, it’s like, ‘Oh, this guy got me.’ Whatever. I’m trying to do some damage. If I miss, that’s almost good because I get to survive, as opposed to I make contact but it’s weak contact. I was up (in the count) 2-0 and now it’s a groundout.”
The key is capitalizing on hitters’ counts. It’s one thing to resort to a defensive swing when the pitcher lands two strikes to start an at-bat. Terry Francona used to refer to it as “survival mode.” But when ahead in the count 2-0 or 3-1, when confident the pitcher won’t nibble on the outskirts of the strike zone, there’s opportunity to swing with more conviction, even if the downside is a possible whiff.
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Kwan, Straw, Brennan, Freeman, José Ramírez and Josh Naylor tend to boast elite contact rates. But Kwan, Straw and Brennan ranked near the bottom of the league leaderboard in hard-hit rate last season. They received the bulk of the playing time in Cleveland’s outfield, a unit that recorded the lowest home run total (18) of any outfield in a non-pandemic-or-strike-shortened season since the 1976 Chicago White Sox. Cleveland ranked third in singles, but the difference between its league-worst homer total (124) and the 29th-ranked total (151) was greater than the difference between 29th and 19th.
“We have to break that mold,” Valaika said. “The hallmark of the organization has been drafting good decision-makers, high-contact bats. So we have to add to more of that impact potential that we have.”
Not everyone on the roster fits into that contact-first category. Trade acquisition Estevan Florial, Rule 5 draft selection Deyvison De Los Santos and prospects Johnathan Rodriguez, Jhonkensy Noel and George Valera, for instance, could enter the mix this season. All five wield plenty of power and swing-and-miss potential.
#Guardians 20yr old INF prospect Deyvison De Los Santos crushes a HR on the backfields at Goodyear.#ForTheLand pic.twitter.com/SK48Wlo89x
— Guardians Prospective (@CleGuardPro) February 21, 2024
The messaging to hitters with those profiles isn’t too dissimilar, though. To maximize their power, they need to identify which pitches they can wallop. Strike zone awareness doomed Oscar Gonzalez, who couldn’t resist chasing pitches, which too often resulted in either whiffs or weak contact, neutralizing his power. A year after he was a postseason hero for Cleveland, he became a roster casualty.
“We can live with a lot of swing-and-miss,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. “It’s, ‘What are we swinging-and-missing at?’ That’s the biggest question.”
Brennan, who socked Cleveland’s first Cactus League homer of 2024 on Sunday, ranked in the 88th percentile in whiff rate and the 95th percentile in strikeout rate last year, but because he chased so much (sixth percentile), pitchers offered him nothing worthwhile. The result? The league’s second-lowest walk rate and seventh-lowest slugging percentage of any hitter with at least 450 trips to the plate. A better understanding of which pitches he can bruise could go a long way.
For Kwan, the goal isn’t 30 homers. That’s not realistic for someone with 11 homers in two seasons in the majors. But Valaika believes he could hit 10 to 15, and just posing the threat is enough to stoke discomfort in a pitcher who otherwise wouldn’t sweat if behind in the count. The Guardians ranked 25th in walk rate, in part because pitchers could attack the zone without fearing they’d surrender a souvenir to a fan parked in the left-field bleachers.
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“It’s a weird dynamic and idea to wrap your head around,” Kwan said. “I’ve been so used to finding the barrel and making contact in a certain way that my success is a double in the gap or a single the other way, whereas another guy will try to hit the ball literally out of the ballpark, not even just over the fence. I’ve never had that opportunity because it’s just not realistic at times. But there are times when I can take that shot. It’s just trying to buy into that a little more.”
To buy into it a little more, he needed to accept whiffing a little more. Swinging-and-missing isn’t the Guardians’ goal, but it might be a necessary evil.
“(It’s about) taking shots, looking for go zones, looking for areas that we can impact the ball,” Valaika said, “rather than just putting the ball in play.”
(Photo of Steven Kwan reacting to a strikeout in 2023: George Kubas / Diamond Images via Getty Images)
