How the Cleveland Guardians remade their offense on a budget

The Cleveland Guardians are the biggest surprise in Major League Baseball this season. That much is now beyond dispute. It is July, long past the time when hot starts and small sample sizes stop offering credible explanations for unexpected behaviors. So be careful in applying skepticism when considering the following:

The Guardians began July with more wins than every team but the New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles and Philadelphia Phillies. Their offense, one of the five least productive last year, has scored more runs than all but five teams. No team hit fewer homers than the Guardians did in 2023. This year, entering Monday’s games, only nine teams have hit more. And the Guardians are paying their roster less (around $100 million, according to Spotrac) than 25 teams are paying theirs.

That Cleveland would get more out of a less expensive roster than most teams is not surprising. 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 largely because of a proven knack for developing cheap, young pitchers who populate a rotation and bullpen good enough to give Cleveland an annual chance in the weak American League Central.

But this year’s emergence is something different, a complete offensive turnaround that has propelled the Guardians to the top of the AL even without ace Shane Bieber, who underwent Tommy John surgery in April, and their normally stable rotation.

So how did they do it? The key, Guardians hitters and coaches say, is destigmatizing the idea of striking out looking.

High fives for strikeouts

The process by which the Guardians’ offense transformed, players say, began long before this season. Cleveland’s front office spent several drafts finding high-contact bats, meaning its system was stocked with a different kind of player than those of teams that chased power and launch angle above all else. The payoff showed up early; many of those young players made their way to the majors in 2022, when the Guardians’ pesky hit-and-run offense lifted them into the playoffs with a promising young roster.

But last season, that roster faltered. The offense never quite recovered that run-and-gun form. A year after scoring 698 runs in the regular season and winning 92 games, Cleveland scored 662 and won 76.

The losses forced a sell-off, and from last summer into the offseason, the Guardians jettisoned veterans Josh Bell, Amed Rosario, Myles Straw, Kole Calhoun and Mike Zunino — all of whom were, or were hoped to be, key pieces of a contending roster. By the time the Guardians got to camp, they had cleared their books of every veteran hitter but José Ramírez, which meant they would rely mostly on a young core of homegrown talent in 2024.

At the same time, the front office and coaching staff acknowledged Cleveland’s lack of power meant the team had little margin for error offensively. The Guardians lost 31 one-run games in 2023, games in which one big swing might have changed their fate. Their high-contact lineup had a better chance to string singles together than most, but stringing hits together against major league pitching these days takes a minor miracle.

They analyzed bat speeds of players in their lineup and realized that because of their hitters’ proclivity for contact, they were often swinging slower more often than hitters on more productive teams — in other words, they were rarely setting themselves up to take their hardest swings, the ones that could do the most damage. No team struck out less than the 2023 Guardians.

“We erred on the side of having lower bat speed — that speed-accuracy trade-off,” hitting coach Chris Valaika said. “So if we could incrementally turn up the bat speed a little bit — even knowing there’s always a concession with that, that we might swing and miss more — there’s been a little bit of a mind-set shift to that.”

That required adaptation on the part of young hitters — particularly Steven Kwan, the contact savant who emerged in 2022 with a .298 average in 147 games as a rookie. As with so many of his fellow young hitters with elite bat-to-ball skills, asking him to swing and miss more seemed like a risk: Why fix the one thing about the offense that wasn’t broken?

“I think my first two years, it was like my reputation — my ticket to stay in the big leagues was, like, contact,” Kwan said. “But coming into my third year, I was more comfortable with my coverage zone and willing to try some different things.”

The idea, Valaika explained, was not to turn Kwan and others into slugging strikeout machines. Instead, the goal was to prioritize making hard contact early in counts and make better decisions about when to prioritize contact of any kind later.

Convincing the players was a delicate process, though not necessarily a difficult one. Contact hitters are trained to avoid striking out and spend their lives learning how not to do it. So in spring training, Guardians staff made an effort to praise hitters for the right mind-set, even if it meant an uncomfortable outcome.

“It was, we’re going to hunt these zones. If we swing, great. If not, we’re going to high-five you in the dugout for taking a pitch that wasn’t where we wanted to swing at it,” Valaika said. “A lot of the dugout stuff — the power of the high-five with 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 looking, tip your cap. We stuck to the plan.”

So far, so good

Far from breaking Kwan, the changes have led to an explosion. Though he missed most of May with an injury, the 26-year-old has more home runs this year (seven) than he did last year and is hitting an MLB-leading .368.

“Swinging and missing is almost the goal. If you don’t get that big hit, swing and miss and live another day instead of decelerating your swing and just making contact,” Kwan said. “If you can keep those two in mind, it’s a win-win.”

For example, 26-year-old Will Brennan has seen his OPS jump 75 points from last year while his batting average has dropped just 10 points. He has already hit more homers (eight) in 68 games than he did last year in 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 reached his career high of 20 homers.

The Guardians also have reason to believe they can sustain this. Ramírez, one of the most consistent hitters of his era, remains elite at the heart of their lineup with a .280 average, 23 homers and an .889 OPS. Rookie Jhonkensy Noel — the towering first-base prospect whom Manager Stephen Vogt calls “Big Christmas” — homered in his first big 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 aren’t flailing: Only four teams in baseball are striking out less.

“It helps seeing other people buy into that as well. If a couple people only were into it, maybe you wouldn’t buy in,” Kwan said. “But if you see everybody hunting for fastballs, hunting for high-leverage counts and trying to do damage — when you see top-to-bottom doing that, it’s easier to fall in line.”

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