On Sunday, June 23rd of this year, the Guardians culminated a three-game sweep of the Toronto Blue Jays with a 6-5 victory that afternoon at Progressive Field. The win moved their record to 49-26 and put them 7.5 games up on the second-place Minnesota Twins in the American League Central Division. It was propelled in part by a standout hitting performance by Cleveland’s All-Star left-fielder, Steven Kwan.
Kwan would go 2/5 on the day, simultaneously scoring and driving in a run on a home run he hit in the 4th inning off of Toronto reliever Zach Pop, giving the Guardians a 5-3 lead at the time. When all was said and done, Kwan would end the game with a sizzling .390 batting average. His slugging percentage would be .575. He would not yet be eligible for average-based leader-boards (like the batting title, for instance), but would have a 193 wRC+ in 49 games played. His batting average would lead the baseball world when accounting for all players with at least 100 plate appearances. His wRC+ would only trail Aaron Judge. Just a few days earlier, I had published an article that talked about how exemplary Kwan had been on the season, remarking that game-for-game he was playing like a potential Most Valuable Player candidate.
And I stand by the article because at the time, he really was playing at that high of a level. Unfortunately, though, the last 2+ months have not been nearly as rosy. Since that magic date of June 23rd, Kwan is hitting just .219 and slugging .316. That wRC+ number that rivaled the best slugger in baseball earlier in the year? It has been 75 since. 100 is average and higher is better. For better reference, Brayan Rocchio‘s wRC+ for the full season has been 74.
For as spectacular as Kwan was in the early going, he has more than come down to earth since. This turn of events is legitimately troubling. While the team’s welfare is far from solely on Kwan’s shoulders, it is significant perhaps that since that same June 23rd date the Guardians’ record is 31-33. When your All-Star lead-off man is struggling as mightily as Kwan has, it is hard to avoid a cold spell as a team.
The natural question is to wonder what the heck happened. Steven Kwan was sincerely one of the best hitters in baseball for a sizable portion of the season. For him to find futility for an even longer period of the same season calendar (48 games of great hitting vs. 64 games of struggles) is just baffling.
One could question if the hamstring injury Kwan suffered that caused him to miss most of May has something to do with the problems he’s had at the plate. However, if this is the case, you would think it would manifest itself in other ways as well.
For instance, the high-intensity sprint of a stolen base attempt can be detrimental to a player’s legs if they aren’t confident in their health. If Kwan’s leg were in some way troubling him, he would likely cease or at least be more selective in trying to steal bases. Instead, Kwan attempted five steals while reaching base 59 times before getting injured. That’s one attempt every 11.8 times on base. Since returning from injury he has attempted 10 steals in 119 times on base, or one attempt every 11.9 times on base. That’s essentially the exact same steal rate, to the point that it is a little uncanny. Additionally, Kwan has actually been more successful stealing since returning from injury, swiping 8 bags in 10 attempts, which is much better than the 2/5 he went before going on the Injured List. If Kwan’s leg was still an issue I imagine he would shy away from steals and he would even more likely not be as successful as he has been.
Beyond that, Kwan doesn’t seem to have lost a step in the outfield either. The eye test suggests he is still patrolling at a high level. He made a couple of particularly adept plays on Tuesday night in Kansas City on line drives hit to his left. The numbers also still have him as the third most rangy left-fielder in baseball according to Statcast’s Outs Above Average, despite missing almost a full month of games. If his hamstring were a problem, wouldn’t his hamstring be a problem when fielding or running the bases too?
One other theory I’ve heard is that Kwan has become too pull and home-run-happy. The Guardians came into this season knowing they needed the young position players on their roster (which is basically all of the position players on their roster) to start hitting the ball with more authority (especially early in counts and in hitter’s counts), even if it meant swinging and missing more. The goal was to hit more balls in the air to the pull-side because fly balls to the pull-side tend to be the biggest contributor to home runs and doubles. The Guardians were dead last in home runs last season by a significant margin.
Kwan, coming off a 2023 season that was a small step backward from a promising rookie season, was one of the main players looking to make this adjustment. At one point during Spring Training, he spoke about how he spent part of the off-season changing his approach and even working on getting more used to swinging and missing. The idea behind such madness was that more extra-base hits would make more whiffs worth it because swings and misses early in counts are actually less detrimental than weak contact that leads to easy outs.
For all his time and effort, Kwan has seen his home run numbers increase. Even in this weaker portion of the season that started on June 23rd, he has hit six home runs since that date which is the same number as he hit in all of 2023. He has a career-high 13 so far this year.
But has the quest for more pulled fly balls actually backfired? Has Kwan turned into Willie Mays Hayes in the second Major League movie, forgetting about the contact and speed skills that made him so good and now hitting easy-out, lazy flyballs that zap his abilities as a lead-off man?
Well, Statcast is a wonderful thing. And using Statcast, I am comfortable saying the answer to those questions is “Well… kinda. But there is a little bit more to the story.”
Allow me to explain the lukewarm answer.
The above graph shows how commonly Kwan was hitting the ball at different launch angles between the start of the season and our magic day of 6/23. The further the gray blob sticks out from the batter, the more common that particular launch angle was. The red blob shows the same information but limits the data to Kwan’s base hits only (gray is all batted balls, either hits or outs). Launch angles between 10 and 25 degrees are considered line drives. Anything above 25 degrees is a fly ball. Anything below 10 degrees is a ground ball. As you can see, Kwan was drilling line drives constantly in the early going. All his most common hits were within that 10 to 25-degree range.
Now here’s the same material but since June 23rd
Sure, there are still some balls hit in that 10 to 25 range, but look. The most common launch angles are 30 degrees and 0 degrees. Fly balls and groundballs. In another way of looking at it, Fangraphs tracks every player’s line drive rate over the course of the season. Up to June 23rd, Kwan’s line drive rate this year was 31.3%. That was 4th best for all batters that had 100 plate appearances or more in that time period. Since June 23rd, his line drive rate has been 17.1%- almost half of what it had been. Using the same comparison, Kwan’s fly ball rate is also up by about 10 percentage points, meaning about 2/3 of the line drives that he has lost have turned into fly balls.
So yeah, Kwan is hitting more balls in the air, and those balls are often turning into outs. He is hitting just .143 on balls he hits in the air throughout the course of the entire season. Even his slugging percentage on such balls (.453), which you would expect to be much higher since it’s near impossible to hit a home run without hitting a fly ball, is only slightly better than his overall slugging percentage for the season (.432).
So, you would think that by looking at this data, this is an open and shut case, Kwan is simply trying to lift everything and he and the Guardians coaching staff are a bunch of idiots for thinking that getting Kwan to hit fly balls is a good idea. Instead though, this isn’t necessarily a story of poor strategy at the plate, but rather, poor execution. Time for another chart.
This is a spray chart showing the most common landing places for flyballs that Kwan hit from the start of the season to June 23rd. Red spots are the most common spots. Grey/white spots happen semi-often and blue spots happen every once in a while. Notice the two gray/white spots in the right-centerfield gap and the big red spot deep in right-field past the fence. Kwan does have red spots in left field too, but two of the main ones are bloop shots that could land over the shortstop’s head or down the left-field line. Now for more context, here’s the same chart but since June 23rd.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have two red spots in total. One right where the center-fielder usually stands and another that would be a lazy flyball to left field. We have just a couple of gray/white spots to the pull side, but they are smaller than they were earlier in the season and the big red splotch over the right-field fence has transitioned into a smaller gray/white one.
I’ll cut to the chase. The Guardians wanted Kwan to hit more flyballs, and he has. The problem is that he is supposed to be hitting pulled-fly balls. When he did that earlier this season, he was rivaling Aaron Judge. Now, he’s hitting lazy flyballs to center field and left field and he’s rivaling Brayan Rocchio. To this point, when Kwan pulls a flyball at any point in the calendar this year, he is hitting .417 and slugging 1.444. When he hits a flyball to center or left he is hitting .049 and slugging .107.
The contrast doesn’t get much starker than that.
Well now, the solution should be simple, right? Kwan needs to start pulling the ball more often. Why doesn’t he just do that?
Because even with all the computer programs, charts and data that we have at our disposal, one thing will always ring true. The most effective way to hit most pitches is to hit them in the direction in which they are pitched. And at some point this season… probably some time around June 23rd… the league’s pitchers made a massive adjustment on Steven Kwan. Time for one more set of charts.
This heat map, which is for the start of the season until 6/23, works similarly to the one we just looked at, but in this case, red is the most common location for pitches that Kwan faces. The gray/white happens fairly often and the blue happens every once in a while.
I’ve heard our booth on broadcasts this year talk about how they’ll talk to opposing teams’ coaches and players and those coaches/players will talk about how they don’t bother trying to pitch around Kwan because of his eye at the plate and bat to ball skills. The anecdote essentially goes that opposing pitchers will just throw pitches in the zone somewhere and hope Kwan hits it at someone. Early in the season, this story seems to have actually been true.
Nearly 10% of the pitches Steven Kwan saw early on were middle-middle. Another 6% were middle in. Essentially, there was a 1/6 chance that any pitch Kwan got early in the season was right down the middle or middle in. Remember, the average at bat is about four pitches long. Kwan was seeing a couple of these easy to handle (and easier to pull) pitches every game.
If I can speculate for a moment as well, I think Kwan came into this season with a reputation. All the stuff about opponents knowing he has a great eye and knowing he can put the ball in play is true, but I think he also had a reputation as someone who you could knock the bat out of his hands with fastballs. Pitchers were comfortable pounding the middle of the zone against him early in the season because he hadn’t proven he would hit the ball with authority. In turn, Kwan adjusted over the off-season and started drilling balls with more authority.
And then pitchers responded in kind. The big red dot that was in the middle of the zone is now on the outside corner. Pitchers early this season may have been happy to pitch to contact on Kwan, but after about two months of Kwan tearing the cover off the ball, they finally wised up. The target has been moved, and not only has it been moved, but it has been moved in a specific direction: outside.
Good luck pulling flyballs at a .417 clip when pitchers are pelting the outside corner over and over again.
One more component to this dynamic that I do not have a chart for but is necessary to mention is a change in pitch mix. If you watch the Guardians often, you may have noticed that as we have gotten deeper into the season other teams are attacking the Guardians’ hitters with more changeups. Kwan hasn’t been exempt from this strategy.
Kwan is seeing changeups 12 percentage points more often since June 23rd. Additionally, not only is he seeing them more often, but he is seeing them as “put away” pitches. Earlier in the season, Kwan was seeing changeups more often early in the count. More recently, he is seeing them more and more in two-strike counts.
I’m back in speculation territory, but ultimately, my take is that pitchers have completely changed their pitch sequencing on Kwan, and it has been hugely effective. Early in the season, they were happy to mix up pitches early but pound the middle of the strike zone.
More recently, they are firing fastballs to the outside corner early in counts, throwing more four-seamers and fewer in-breaking fastballs that he can drive. Kwan, with his discerning eye at the plate is taking these fastballs on the outside corner (or not doing much with them). They aren’t the pitches he is looking for in his plan for trying to find something to drive early in the count, but in turn, he is falling behind in the count.
And now that he is down 0-2 or 1-2, here comes the changeup. Remember when I was showing the launch angle charts and the more recent launch angle chart showed not just a lot of flyballs but also a lot of grounders? Those grounders are coming from rolled over off-speed pitches. And when he does give in and swing at the outside fastball, he’s getting those lazy flyballs to left or center that showed up on the heat maps.
Again, some of this is speculation, but I am supremely confident of one thing. Pitchers are handling Kwan differently now and the biggest change is a steady diet of pitches to the outside corner. The good news is that if I, as some guy with a laptop and internet connection can hop on Statcast and figure this much out, then I’m sure Kwan and the Guardians coaching staff are painfully aware of what has changed as well.
The question becomes what can Kwan do regarding the adjustment pitchers made to the adjustment Kwan made this off-season?
Well, adjust, of course.
It would help for Kwan to temporarily back out of scoping out pitches to pull and drive. Seeking pitches to hit in the air and pull was genuinely fruitful for Kwan early in the season, but its just not happening enough right now. If he can keep his short stroke and put a good swing on the pitches he is seeing on the outer half, he may not hit a bunch of doubles and home runs, but he stands a much better chance of line drive base hits to left-field. He isn’t slugging well enough right now to justify keeping the slugging mindset. He slugged the ball better last season before he changed his approach (.370) than he has since June 23rd (.316).
A move back to the basics would make him more productive, at minimum. At most, if he starts getting more 3 and 4-hit nights like he had a gained a reputation for doing, it might soften some pitchers into returning more to the middle of the zone.
More than anything, I am reminded of how Major League Baseball is a game on continual adjustments. Steven Kwan was on top of the world for the first fifty games of his campaign this season, but with some small changes to pitch location and type, he has found himself searching for new answers- the type of answers that not only matter to Kwan’s season but also may have much to do with the Guardians’ outlook for October.
When the playoffs come, everything is magnified all that much more. Teams have scouted and analyzed every morsel of information they can find about their opponents for the post-season. The Guardians will absolutely need their stars, including Kwan, to be performing if they want to be true contenders for the World Series.
Kwan resolving this adjustment isn’t just his job. It isn’t just the latest cat and mouse game in a long line of cat and mouse games that happen in baseball over the course of a year. It very well could be one of the keys to the Guardians’ season.
The post What’s Going on With Steven Kwan: An Analysis appeared first on Cleveland Sports Talk.