Dennis Lee-Imagn Images

Last week, a reader named Kevin submitted a particularly pithy mailbag question. I have reproduced it here in its entirety. This won’t take long:

Dear FanGraphs team,

Steven Kwan is broken. Should us Guardians fans have any hope that he can be fixed?

Kevin

In honor of Kevin’s brevity, I suppose my answer should have consisted of a single word, but Kwan has been one of the most interesting players in baseball for years. It’s worth taking a full look at what’s going on with him right now.

Let’s start with Statcast percentiles, because in Kwan’s case, they can paint a confusing picture. If you were to look at the percentiles for hard-hit rate, bat speed, squared-up rate, chase rate, whiff rate, and strikeout rate – all the stuff that tells you where a hitter lies on the power-contact spectrum – you would assume he’s having another typical Steven Kwan season. If you were to throw walk rate in there too, you might even come away with the impression he’s doing better than usual.

But as Kevin established, Kwan is broken. The percentiles are misleading us because he was already at the first or 100th percentile in so many categories. When you’re already the most extreme hitter in the league, percentiles have no way to show that you’ve pushed the boundaries to new levels, but that’s exactly what Kwan has done. Among qualified players, his current 97.8% contact rate on pitches in the strike zone is the highest ever recorded in the Statcast era. His squared-up rate is the fourth highest since Statcast started measuring it in 2023. And while his chase rate isn’t the lowest of his career, Statcast doesn’t give us percentiles for swing rates specifically on pitches in the zone. His is the fifth lowest recorded in the Statcast era, and it’s more than four percentage points below his previous low. He’s running the second-lowest bat speed ever recorded. He’s also running the second-lowest hard-hit rate ever recorded, above only 2018 Billy Hamilton. Think about that for a second. The only player in the past 12 years to put up a season with a lower hard-hit rate than Kwan is putting up right now is literally Billy Hamilton. In four other seasons, literally Billy Hamilton posted higher hard-hit rates than Kwan’s current mark of 9.6%.

Kwan has always built his game on patience and contact ability rather than aggression and power, but this year he’s out-Kwanned himself, and the results have been dreadful. He’s running a 67 wRC+, tied for fourth-worst mark among qualified batters. What’s going on?

First, we need to keep in mind that having first-percentile bat speed is, to some degree, a choice. Kwan is definitely capable of swinging the bat harder than this. But he’s 5-foot-8 and well aware that he’s never going to put up monster power numbers, so he’s gone all-in on contact over power (or at least we thought he’d gone all in before 2026, when he went even aller-in). That means letting the ball travel deep, taking a shorter, quicker swing, and slapping it the other way. “I knew at an early age that I wasn’t going to hit the ball out of the park,” he told David Laurila in 2022, “so I had to find different ways to impact the game.” That kind of offensive profile is always something of a tightrope walk. It requires a high line-drive rate and a decent amount of batted-ball luck, but Kwan made it work for the first four years of his career, never putting up fewer than 3.0 WAR in a season.

It’s easy to see in his spray charts. Previous seasons tend to look the same. Kwan sprays line drives all over the field, and lots of them drop in front of the outfielders for singles. He also sneaks a few balls down either baseline for doubles, and then turns on a handful of meatballs for pull-side home runs. That’s the recipe. This season, it’s not working out.

Kwan isn’t turning on the ball for those doubles and homers, and even the singles have dried up. Just 19% of Kwan’s balls in play have dropped in for singles, the lowest mark of his career by nearly three percentage points. Some of that is bad luck. His measly .229 BABIP is the lowest of his career by more than 50 points, and the fifth-lowest mark in the game this year. His expected batting average on balls in play is 43 points higher than his actual batting average, and the difference between his wOBA and his xwOBA is the same. However, those expected batting average and wOBA numbers are still the worst of his entire career. The interesting thing is that Kwan has claimed for awhile now that he’d like to be less dependent on weak liners falling in for singles.

Kwan came into spring training talking about increasing his bat speed and hitting the ball harder. In fact, every spring, he arrives at camp and tells reporters that he’s been working on doing more damage at the plate. On the February 17, 2024, episode of the Cleveland Guardians Podcast, he announced that he’d started a bat-speed program. Two weeks later, he explained that he was so committed to shifting from the contact side of the spectrum over to the power side that he’d been whiffing intentionally during batting practice, just to get comfortable with the feeling. In 2025, he explained on MLB Network that he’d been focusing on lifting and pulling the ball like José Ramírez, then told MLB Network Radio that he’d been working on his bat speed using the Stack System and taking weight-room tips from Carlos Santana. This March, MLB.com’s Tim Stebbins reported once again that Kwan was using a weighted-bat program to increase his bat speed.

That’s three years in a row Kwan has made a point of announcing that he’s committed to hitting for more power. He really did improve his power output in 2024, launching a career-high 14 home runs despite playing just 122 games, and putting up a career-high 131 wRC+. In 2025, Kwan hit 11 home runs, but his production fell off in the second half, coincidentally or not, around the same time that he acknowledged that he had been dealing with a nagging wrist injury.

This year, he once again came into camp talking about doing damage, but this time, every single part of his approach screams the exact opposite. He’s letting hittable pitches go by. He’s almost never getting his A-swing off. That’s not somebody who’s looking to do damage! In that sense, I can’t sit here and say that Kwan is definitely broken. Less than two years ago, we were wondering whether the guy could hit .400! Unless there’s something physically wrong that’s destroying his bat speed, and that something is causing a lack of confidence that explains his suddenly unprecedented passivity, I have to imagine he’s capable of running back the old approach that worked for him. I can’t guarantee that it would be successful, but it certainly seems possible to try.

I can say for certain is that Kwan needs to change something. Better batted-ball luck is only going to help so much, and as Patrick Dubuque noted a few weeks ago, it’s only a matter of time before the one bright spot in his profile, his walk rate, winks out. Pitchers are hitting the strike zone against Kwan 49.4% of the time. That’s on the higher side, as you’d expect for a guy who doesn’t chase and doesn’t do much damage, but it’s the lowest mark of his entire career and more than a four-point drop from his 2025 level. At some point, pitchers are going to realize that they’re facing slow Billy Hamilton. They’re going to start filling up the zone, and Kwan’s walk rate will collapse no matter how infrequently he swings.

As for whether Kwan’s brokenness is physical, I suppose we can’t rule out the possibility. I do not like this bat-speed distribution graph from Baseball Savant at all. I’m not seeing any sort of different shape that indicates a change in approach; it looks a lot like his distribution from previous years, just dragged a tick or two to the left. Only one of his 20 fastest swings of the past four seasons has come this year.

As we’ve known for a while now, you can’t look at bat speed in a vacuum. Statcast measures bat speed at the point where the bat intercepts the ball, and bat speed increases throughout the swing. So if Kwan were just making contact deeper in the hitting zone, that would explain at least some of the loss in bat speed. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening; he’s meeting the ball 30.1 inches in front of his center of mass, the farthest in front he’s ever been. Kwan’s bat speed has dropped against fastballs, breaking balls, and offspeed pitches, which are all of the pitches.

Something real is going on here, and the end result is a staggering three-point drop in average exit velocity and an even larger drop in 90th-percentile exit velocity. Kwan’s hardest-hit ball of the season left the bat at 101.1 mph. In all of his previous seasons, that wouldn’t even be enough to make it into the top 15.

All of this is to say that I’m not sure how to answer Kevin’s question. I have hope in the sense that approach has to be at least part of the problem here. Kwan really has changed his approach in a drastic way, so he could change it again. He’s taking so, so much, but he still has his gift for contact. He’s making more contact than ever. Clearly, not all of his physical skills have deserted him, and that’s encouraging. But I don’t know whether this change in approach is covering for some new deficiency, or whether something physical is driving it. I just know that it’s not working.