The Slap Hitting Will Continue Until Production Improves

Last year, as you might have heard, the Guardians cracked the code. I say “you might have heard,” but let’s be honest: you heard. You couldn’t walk five feet without someone telling you that contact was in, that this team of genius mavericks had turned baseball on its ear by finding players who don’t fit the modern-day ideal. What dummies, those other teams! All you have to do is not strike out, and then baseball is easy. Why didn’t anyone else try this plan before?

Good news! The Guardians have continued their no-strikeout ways this year; they’re fourth in baseball in strikeout rate (lower is better), striking out only 20.3% of the time. But bad news! They stink. Their offense is hitting an aggregate .224/.301/.330, good for a 75 wRC+, the worst mark in baseball. The Athletics are in the middle of recreating the plot of Major League, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. The Nationals traded everyone who wasn’t nailed down, then traded the nails they had left over, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. They’re comfortably worse than everyone offensively; the Tigers are in 29th place, and they’re six points of wRC+ better. Only the Tigers and Marlins, who combine awful offense with awful baserunning, have scored fewer runs.

What gives? To some extent, this is about overhype. The Guardians had the lowest strikeout rate in baseball last year, but it’s not like they lit the world on fire offensively. They produced a 99 wRC+, which is below average (that’s how it works), and scored 698 runs, 15th in baseball. That’s despite playing a lot of games against the Royals, White Sox, and Tigers, who were all bad pitching teams. They did that with Andrés Giménez putting up a 140 wRC+ and Oscar Gonzalez coming out of nowhere to hit .296/.327/.461 over nearly 400 plate appearances. To put it mildly, those two haven’t backed up their performances this year.

That’s a boring answer, though, and it certainly won’t help me write 1,500 or so words about what’s going wrong, so let’s dig a little deeper. What are the benefits of rarely striking out? They’re all over the place. Fewer strikeouts means more movement on the bases, which gives good baserunners a chance to shine. It means that your batted ball quality plays more often; the harder you hit the ball, the more it matters how frequently you put it into play. On a related note, it puts more pressure on the opposing defense; there are more plays to make, for better or worse.

Put another way, replacing strikeouts with a random batch of other offensive outcomes is clearly good: a strikeout never puts a runner on base or advances the ones already there; a random batted ball becomes a hit fairly often. How good replacing strikeouts with other outcomes is depends on how much damage you do on contact; if you’re replacing every strikeout with a grounder, that’s a lot less impressive than if you’re replacing them with scorched line drives and fly balls.

There’s a reason that strikeout rate has never correlated particularly well with individual offensive statistics. Babe Ruth was far and away the most strikeout-prone hitter of his era, and also far and away the best hitter. Joe Panik struck out only 10% of the time, miles better than average for his era and less frequently than Ruth even in an absolute sense. He had a career 92 wRC+. Not striking out isn’t sufficient, and it isn’t even necessary, though it’s obviously not a bad thing on its own.

Another way to think about it: I took the ten hitters with the most plate appearances on the Guardians this year and divided them into three rough buckets based on contact quality. To get a bigger sample size than just this year, I used 2022–23 wOBA on contact and threw in xwOBA on contact and barrel rate as well to get a good range of statistics. Here they are:

The archetype label I slapped on the end is my best attempt to group them into categories. For context, league-average wOBACON is .363, league-average barrel rate on contact is 7.6%, and average hard-hit rate is 38.4%. You could argue with some of these categories — Giménez and Ramírez lack the raw exit velocity and frequent hard contact of true sluggers, and Naylor and Bell are right on that cusp — but the point is that there are a lot of Guardians who aren’t exactly hitting the stuffing out of the ball.

In fact, calling any of these guys boppers might be generous. For a point of comparison, every other team in baseball has a player with a better wOBACON than the best player on the Guardians this year. There are 108 players (with at least 50 batted balls) who have a higher xwOBACON than Naylor, who has the highest 2023 mark on the club. There’s absolutely no power to be found here. This isn’t exclusively a case of batted balls not finding holes; the Guardians aren’t doing much when they put the ball in play because they aren’t hitting the ball hard very frequently.

With that tiering done, who are the Guardians striking out least frequently? Ramírez has the lowest strikeout rate of the bunch, which is great. After that, though, it’s Kwan, Brennan, and Straw, the three guys whose low-strikeout ways do the least to move the needle. Rosario and Zunino are striking out the most, so at least the top guys are holding up their end of the bargain, but it’s fairly clear that “just don’t strike out” doesn’t make you a good hitter. Kwan sports a decent 97 wRC+, but Brennan is at 41, and Straw checks in at 80. In fact, Brennan is now in a time-share with Gabriel Arias, who’s running a 42.9% strikeout rate. Meanwhile, Gonzalez’s struggles got him optioned to Triple-A.

The fact that not all non-strikeouts are created equal has a lot to do with why Cleveland’s offense has fared so poorly, but that’s not the only reason. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re getting unlucky in addition to not hitting the ball hard. Here are team-wide statistics matching the ones I compiled for each player, plus BABIP:

In a lot of ways, the Guardians are hitting like they did last year, which is to say not particularly well. They’re far below average as a team when it comes to production on contact, but that was the case last year, too. They’re racking up even fewer barrels this year; they’re last in baseball by a decent margin there. That BABIP has some flukiness to it, no doubt, but on the other hand, they outperformed their expected results last year and still only got an average offense out of it, so it’s hard to feel too aggrieved on their behalf. If they produced up to the level of what Statcast thinks they should have expected on balls in play, they’d be something like the 23rd-best offense in baseball instead of the worst. On the other hand, they would have been the 25th-best offense last year instead of 15th-best by the same calculation, so variance clearly cuts both ways.

Should we expect improvement? For sure. The Guardians are batting only .565 on line drives this year against an expected batting average of .632 and a league-wide .648 mark. A few more of those finding holes should help prop up the average and on-base percentage part of the equation. Naylor in particular has had brutal batted ball luck; as mentioned above, he leads the Guardians in xwOBA on contact despite being eighth out of 10 (ahead of only the demoted Gonzalez and time-shared Brennan) in wOBACON.

On the other hand, if you’re expecting the Guardians to be a great offensive team, I’m afraid you might be in for a disappointment. We project them as a bottom-10 offense going forward. That’s a lot better than what they’ve done so far, even. A lot of that will just be Ramírez getting less unlucky than he has so far this season; his frequent fly ball contact leading to only three homers so far is shocking and unlikely. Some of that will likely come from Giménez, too: he hasn’t been unlucky this year, just bad, but we’re counting on the pedigree shining through. The rest of the team just isn’t good enough offensively, regardless of their strikeout rate, to turn this operation into an offensive juggernaut.

If Guardians fans were to quibble with one part of my analysis, I’d bet it’s that I’m underselling Kwan. He’s an above-average player, but we already know what he is: a nice OBP guy with no power to speak of. That’ll mean some 124 wRC+ seasons with a ton of doubles and good BABIP (2022), and some 97 wRC+ seasons with fewer doubles and a .300 BABIP (2023). When your game relies on a heaping helping of balls in play, some fluctuation in outcomes is inevitable. Kwan’s is a valuable skillset, but he’s not Ramírez, who combines the walk and strikeout excellence with real pop when he connects.

None of this might matter. The Guardians don’t need to be a great offensive team to succeed. They have a lot of other advantages: their pitching development team continues to find new gems like Tanner Bibee; Aaron Civale looks good; and Shane Bieber is a great pitcher, though the strikeout rate decline is certainly concerning. They have a good bullpen. They run the bases well, which at least lets them make the most of their singles and in-play outs. They have good defenders at some key positions, though in the interest of telling both sides of the story, they’re 20th in baseball per Statcast so far on defense, four outs below average.

Most importantly, the Guardians have one key edge: they play in the worst division in baseball. No division leader has a worse record than Minnesota’s 19–16. No division has a worse run differential. The White Sox are a mess this year, and yet they’re miles better than the Royals. The Tigers look disjointed. Getting to 85 wins might be enough, an eminently reachable target given Cleveland’s pitching.

If they win the division again, though, it won’t be because they don’t strike out. That’s a thing they do, but it’s not the reason they’re so good. Heck, Zunino has been one of their best hitters this year — fifth on the team in OBP and second in slugging — and he’s the exact opposite of the kind of hitter the team is known for. The Guardians are a good baseball team, and they employ a bunch of hitters who don’t strike out much. Just don’t go assuming that correlation equals causation, because the first month of 2023 has been a pretty clear sign that simply not striking out doesn’t make you a great offense.

All statistics in this article are current through games played on Sunday, May 7.