Steven Kwan burst onto the scene in 2022 as a rookie with the Cleveland Guardians, and quickly joined the Julio Rodriguez talks for AL Rookie of the Year. Even though he didn't win the award, he showed skills this past season that would warrant plenty of RoY votes (he came in third behind J-Rod and Adley Rutschman), based on my Rookie of the Year article I wrote back when the award was given out to Rodriguez and Michael Harris. The SparkNotes version of that article is that Rookies of the Year should represent what the future of baseball should look like. With rule changes and lower power numbers in full swing (pun intended), being bullish on Kwan is the way to be. Why, you ask? He’s ushering in the new age of contact hitting.
If you were to categorize the eras of understanding baseball better, you could go from Moneyball to the infield shift to WAR to exit velocity/launch angle/wOBA/expected statistics to where we are now: plate discipline dynamics. What I mean by that is the way a hitter’s plate approach looks can be just as indicative to their true value and skill as their output statistics like on-base percentage and home runs. As I’ve said before, baseball is all about isolated strategy, meaning that every pitch matters. For a hitter to be at a true advantage in a reactionary role, they must manipulate their plate appearances through plate discipline. This “revelation” isn’t much of a revelation at all, but it’s starting to affect how front offices and managers construct their rosters and starting lineups. You can see this idea with Andrew Benintendi signing with the White Sox for $75 million over five years, the largest contract the ChiSox have ever given out in free agency. Per FanGraphs, Benintendi’s 8.9% swinging strike rate ranked 43rd in all of baseball in 2022, while his 73.4% outside-the-zone-contact rate ranked 21st, and according to Baseball Savant, his walk rate, strikeout rate, and chase rate all ranked in the 74th percentile or higher across the majors. Putting together great at-bat after great at-bat made Benintendi’s stock rise during the Trade Deadline, when he went to the Yankees from the Royals, and increased his monetary value as he was putting pen to paper with the South Siders.
But compared to Steven Kwan, Andrew Benintendi might as well be Javier Baez when it comes to plate discipline. Kwan started his rookie year by seeing 116 pitches and not swinging and missing at any of them and ended the year ranked in the top percentile in terms of chase rate and strikeout rate. Kwan ranked second in baseball in both swinging strike rate and outside-the-zone contact rate behind AL batting champ Luis Arraez, already cementing himself as one of the premier hitters in terms of plate discipline that we have seen in the American League in quite some time. In standard baseball terms, Kwan played in 147 games in 2022, collecting 168 hits and batting .298 (and won an AL Gold Glove in left field). He was also one of only six hitters in baseball this year to walk more times than he struck out.
What surprised me the most about Kwan in my research, besides the fact that he literally didn’t swing and miss until a week into his career, was his above-average walk rate (67th percentile), very respectable OBP (.373, 75 points above his batting average), and an almost shockingly good OPS+ (124). Those last numbers are what makes him better than someone like Isiah Kiner-Falefa, whose swing rate outside the zone is almost 10 percentage points behind Kwan, resulting in a walk rate in the 29th percentile and a .261 2022 batting average. In other words, Kwan is so good when it comes to plate discipline that his contact approach mimics a power stroke, despite only slugging .400 this year with six homers.
The Guardians are a team that’s built around these sort of metrics, which led them to an AL Central title in 2022. They are one of the most uniquely-concocted experiments in baseball right now, and the lead scientist on said experiment is Steven Kwan. Contact hitting tends to age well in baseball, so as long as Kwan can stay healthy, he never has to hit homers to compete against baseball’s most prolific sluggers. Want to understand that deeper? Of all hitters who hit at least one home run in 2022, Steve Kwan ranks first in terms of fWAR per homer (4.4 fWAR compared to 6 dingers). The new age of contact hitting is, quite simply, an emphasis on plate discipline without the necessity of power.
The 25-year-old has a bright future ahead of him.
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