Woe Unto the Cleveland Guardians’ Bats

Intending no disrespect to the Minnesota Twins, a lovely team with plenty of commendable players, but the AL Central is a bit of a joke this year. I guess that’s not too surprising — the Central champion has either had or shared the lowest win total among the American League division winners every year since 2017. But as of this writing, the Twins are just one game over .500, a record that would put them in a battle for fourth place (at best) in four of the five other divisions in baseball; nevertheless Minnesota is securely in first place.

Maybe 30 Rock was right, everything is easier in the Midwest.

The foundations of the Twins’ easy run are legion. The Tigers tried to pivot out of their rebuild, tripped over the curb, and landed face-first on the blacktop. The White Sox are suffering the effects of Rick Hahn and Jerry Reinsdorf doing an aggro version of the hot dog guy meme. And the Royals leased their immortal soul for 99 years in exchange for that incredible run in 2014 and 2015.

But consider the Guardians. For most of the past decade, this has been Cleveland’s division to win. The blueprint has consisted of variations on the following theme: Use (in my opinion) the best pitching development pipeline in the sport to build an unhittable staff, and figure the offense out later. In 2016 and 2017, the offense was genuinely good. That was rewarded by a World Series run, and then a 102-win campaign that included a 20-game win streak. But since 2019 or so, Terry Francona’s club has had to settle for an offense that’s merely good enough.

A lot has gone wrong for Cleveland in 2023: Injuries and a series of mild disappointments on the pitching side have contributed to a sub-.500 record, but the real problem has been the total evaporation of Cleveland’s run production. After Monday’s games, the Guardians were 28th in the league in runs scored and dead last in wRC+.

There are bad offenses, and then there’s Worse Than Oakland:

Looking at Cleveland’s offensive numbers since the World Series run is a good reminder that the team’s offensive philosophy, such as it is, has been fluid. (Related: League ranks are subject to the surprisingly numerous twists and turns baseball has taken in the late 2010s — the DH, the juiced ball, the Astros’ banging scheme, etc.) The 2016 team slugged its way to a pennant thanks to some of the most aggressive platooning seen in the 21st century. Subsequent teams built a lineup mostly of first basemen. Others had “Let Francisco Lindor and José Ramírez Cook” as Plan A, and therefore had little use for a Plan B.

If there’s a consistent thread for Cleveland’s lineups during the team’s run of success, it’s in baserunning and controlling strikeouts. Power and OBP have come and gone, but since 2016, Cleveland has always done little things well. They put the ball in play a lot and make smart decisions on the bases. Even with a couple fairly big-ticket salaries on the books, Cleveland’s nine-man starting lineup makes a hair under $53.6 million this season. For comparison, Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton alone make a combined $72 million. Cleveland can’t afford to make mistakes, or spurn opportunities for marginal gains.

Last season, that approach gave the Guardians basically a league-average offense, though when translated to a playoff context it was badly underpowered. This year, everything has gone wrong:

The long and short of it is that the Guardians have a below-average wRC+, relative to both the league and other teams at the same position, at every defensive position. They’re dead last at more positions than they are in the top 20. The Guardians have backslid — enormously, in a few cases — at seven of nine positions. One exception is center field, where (mostly) Myles Straw has raised the team’s wRC+ from 67 to 74. Whoop-dee-frickin’-doo. The other is DH, where the Guardians hit .219/.266/.331 last year, for a wRC+ of 68. How is that even possible at DH? The Guardians could drag 52-year-old Jim Thome out of the cab of his combine harvester tomorrow, hand him a bat, and he’d drop better than a .600 OPS.

It’s fun to contemplate the implications of that chart. For instance, Cleveland gave the lion’s share of playing time at catcher in 2022 to Austin Hedges. He has his strengths, to be sure, but he slugged .248 last season. Tom Glavine slugged better than .248 four times in his career. So the Guardians cashiered Hedges, and then got worse offensively behind the plate.

Ordinarily, a team in playoff contention — and make no mistake, no matter how pitiable Cleveland’s offense may be, there the Guardians remain — would look at this pittance of offensive production as a blessing in disguise. The Guardians could improve offensively at catcher, or shortstop, or in right field, by doing literally anything. It’s very, very easy to upgrade on an offense like this.

The problem facing Cleveland is twofold. First, the Guardians are at their relative strongest at the soft end of the defensive spectrum. DH and the four corner positions represent four of Cleveland’s five best showings compared to the league. So if they go out and sign Luke Voit — and here, if I say “Luke Voit” you should understand I don’t mean literally Luke Voit, but rather some faceless slugger in the general mold of Luke Voit — it won’t actually help much.

Second, the Guardians are suffering severe underperformance from some of their most important players, players who are either well-entrenched due to their contract status or well-entrenched because they were expected to carry the load for their less offensively gifted teammates.

Or both. Steven Kwan’s wRC+ is down more than 30 points from last year. Ramírez remains Cleveland’s best hitter, but he’s having his worst offensive season (.261/.332/.436) since 2015. Andrés Giménez was one of the best hitting middle infielders in baseball in 2022 and earned a $100 million contract for his efforts. This year, he’s hitting .249/.311/.363. His double play partner, Amed Rosario, was a league-average hitter in 2022. In 2023, he’s hitting .224/.270/.314, and is 159th out of 162 qualified hitters in wRC+. And Josh Bell, brought in to provide the pop Cleveland had eschewed the past couple years, is slugging just .348.

And because the Guardians are run the way they are, they can’t afford to miss on any of these guys. Rosario, Bell, and Mike Zunino — combined -0.7 WAR this season — constitute nearly a third of Cleveland’s major league payroll between them. Financial considerations matter less in terms of midseason trades and waiver pickups than they do in the offseason, but a better-funded team would have built a more diversified offense.

Will this wretched offensive output sink Cleveland’s season? There, it’s useful to return to the original question. The Guardians have been able to skate by with limited offenses for four or five years now because the AL Central is the weakest division in the game. Even with the worst offense in baseball, the Guardians are still only one series out of first place. And it’s not like their offense can get any worse.