By Zack Meisel / The Athletic
Outfielder Steven Kwan of the Cleveland Guardians was hacking away in a Chicago batting cage over the winter. One swing and a miss followed another. It was whiff after whiff after whiff.
Kwan had the second-best strikeout rate in MLB the past two years, but, still, he would lift his front foot, uncork his bat and come up empty, again and again. All on purpose, just to see how it felt.
To become the hitter he aspires to be, and for the Guardians to field a more proficient offense, Kwan needed to get comfortable with the idea of swinging and missing once in a while. It is 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.
That is the challenge facing the Guardians and their hitting coach, Chris Valaika. This team is largely the same group that last season produced the lowest home run total and the lowest rate of hard contact in the league.
How do you repair a power-starved offense that will feature similar personnel? How do you perform a face-lift to a lineup with such a distinct identity? The bloop troop program flourished in 2022 but flopped in 2023.
To make more hard contact, the coaches have preached, batters 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.
“It’s almost like telling yourself it’s OK to swing through pitches,” center fielder Myles Straw said earlier this week at the Guardians’ spring training facility in Goodyear, Arizona.
Sometimes competency at making contact can be detrimental. Take, for example, a change-up 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 approach would not vault this group of hitters to the top of the slugging leader boards. Kwan, Straw, Will Brennan and Tyler Freeman are not going to turn 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 past 1,273 plate appearances.
It’s about trade-offs, accepting some whiffs in exchange for some doubles and homers. Valaika suggested he would 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 past 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.” He added: “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, 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. But when ahead in the count, 2-0 or 3-1, when confident the pitcher won’t nibble, there’s an opportunity to swing with more conviction, even if the downside is missing the pitch.
Kwan, Straw, Brennan, Freeman, José Ramírez and Josh Naylor tend to have elite contact rates. But Kwan, Straw and Brennan ranked near the bottom of the league in hard-hit rate last season. They received the bulk of the playing time in Cleveland’s outfield, which recorded the lowest home run total (18) of any outfield in a nonpandemic-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.
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 González, who could not 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,” manager Stephen Vogt said. “It’s, ‘What are we swinging and missing at?’ That’s the biggest question.”
Brennan, who hit 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 is not 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 would not sweat if behind in the count. The Guardians ranked 25th in walk rate, in part because pitchers could attack the zone without fearing they would surrender the long ball.
“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.”
Swinging and missing isn’t the Guardians’ goal, but it may be a necessary evil.
Valaika said it was about “taking shots, looking for go zones, looking for areas that we can impact the ball, rather than just putting the ball in play.”
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