The Cleveland Guardians are Major League Baseball’s biggest surprise this season, that’s beyond dispute. It’s July, long past the point where hot starts and small sample sizes no longer offer credible explanations for unexpected behavior in baseball. So be careful about applying skepticism when considering the following:
The Guardians entered July with more wins than every team except the New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles and Philadelphia Phillies. Their offense, one of the five least productive in the sport last year, has scored more runs than all but five teams. No team has hit fewer home runs than the Guardians in 2023. This year, entering Monday’s games, only nine teams have hit more. And the Guardians are paying their roster less (about $100 million, according to Spotrac) than 25 teams are paying theirs.
Not surprisingly, Cleveland gets more from a less expensive roster than most teams. Chris Antonetti, the team’s president of baseball operations, and his No. 2, Mike Chernoff, have been doing that for the better part of a decade, but in large part because of a demonstrated knack for developing young, cheap pitchers who fill out a rotation and bullpen good enough to give Cleveland an annual shot in the weak AL Central.
But this year’s emergence is something different, a complete offensive turnaround that has propelled the Guardians to the top of the American League even without ace Shane Bieber, who underwent Tommy John surgery in April, and their normally stable rotation.
And how did they do it? The key, say the Guardians hitters and coaches, is to destigmatize the idea of striking out while looking.
High five for strikeouts
According to players, the process by which the Guardians’ offense was transformed began long before this season. Cleveland’s front office spent several drafts looking for high-contact hitters, meaning its system was stocked with a different type of player than teams that sought power and launch angle above all else. The payoff came early, as many of those young players reached the majors in 2022, when the Guardians’ pesky offense carried them into the playoffs with a promising young roster.
But last season, that roster faltered. The offense never quite regained its run-and-gun form. A year after scoring 698 runs in the regular season and winning 92 games, they scored 662 and won 76.
The losses forced a selloff, and from last summer through the offseason, the Guardians shed veterans Josh Bell, Amed Rosario, Myles Straw, Kole Calhoun and Mike Zunino — all key pieces of a contending roster. By the time the Guardians reached training camp, they had emptied their books of every veteran hitter except Jose Ramirez, meaning they would rely primarily on a young core of homegrown talent in 2024.
At the same time, management and the coaching staff recognized that Cleveland’s lack of power meant the team had little room for error on offense. The Guardians lost 31 games by one run in 2023, games in which a big swing could have changed their fate. Their high-contact lineup had a better chance of hitting singles than most, but getting hits against big league pitchers these days requires a minor miracle.
They analyzed the bat speeds of the players in their lineup and realized that because of their hitters’ propensity for contact, they often took slower swings more frequently than hitters on more productive teams—in other words, they rarely set up to take their hardest swings, the ones that could do the most damage. No team struck out fewer than the 2023 Guardians.
“We erred on the side of having a slower bat speed, that’s the trade-off between speed and accuracy,” hitting coach Chris Valaika said. “So if we could gradually increase the bat speed a little bit, even knowing that there’s always a trade-off with that, that we might miss more swings, there’s been a little bit of a mindset shift on that.”
That mindset shift required adaptation on the part of young hitters, particularly Steven Kwan, the contact expert who emerged in 2022 with a .298 average in 147 games as a rookie. As with many of his fellow young hitters with elite skills in the game, asking him to swing and miss more seemed like a risk: Why fix the only thing that wasn’t broken on offense?
“I think my first two years, my reputation, my ticket to staying in the big leagues, was contact,” Kwan said. “But coming into my third year, I felt more comfortable with my coverage zone and willing to try some different things.”
The idea, Valaika explained, wasn’t to turn Kwan and the others into strikeout machines. Instead, the goal was to prioritize hard contact early in counts and make better decisions about when to prioritize contact of any kind later on.
Convincing players was a delicate process, though not necessarily difficult. Contact hitters are trained to avoid striking out and spend their lives learning how not to. So in spring training, the Guardians staff made an effort to praise hitters for having the right mindset, even if it meant an uncomfortable outcome.
“What happens is we’re going to look for those areas. If we hit them, great. If we don’t, we’re going to high-five in the dugout for getting hit by a pitch that wasn’t where we wanted to hit,” Valaika said. “A lot of the dugout stuff, the power of high-fiving the rest of the dugout, has really driven that. If we’re not looking in an area, and someone throws three pitches there and we strike out, we tip our caps. We stick to the plan.”
Far from breaking Kwan, the changes have sparked an explosion. Though he missed most of May with an injury, the 26-year-old has more home runs this year (seven) than last year and is hitting .368, the best average in MLB.
“Swinging and missing is almost the goal. If you don’t get that big shot, swing and miss and live another day instead of slowing down your swing and just making contact,” Kwan said. “If you can keep those two things in mind, it’s a win-win situation.”
For example, 26-year-old Will Brennan has seen his OPS rise 75 points from last year while his batting average has dropped just 10 points. He’s already hit more home runs (eight) in 68 games than he did last year (138). David Fry, a second-year player who hit .238 last year, is hitting .310 with a .945 OPS in 62 games. Josh Naylor, one of the few hitters in Cleveland’s lineup who always had that power club, has already hit a career-high 20 homers.
The Guardians have reason to believe they can sustain this, too. Ramirez, one of the most consistent hitters of his era, remains an elite player at the heart of their lineup with a .280 average, 23 homers and an .889 OPS. Rookie Jhonkensy Noel, the first-base prospect whom manager Stephen Vogt calls “Big Christmas,” homered in his first major league at-bat. Their commitment to platoon matchups means the Guardians have the fifth-highest OPS in baseball against lefties, but they also fare well against righties.
And for all their emphasis on being willing to strike out, they’re not wavering: Only four teams in baseball strike out less.
“It also helps to see other people commit to it. If only a couple of people committed to it, maybe you wouldn’t do it,” Kwan said. “But if you see everyone looking for fastballs, looking for high-leverage counts and trying to do damage, when you see everyone doing that, it’s easier to follow suit.”
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