Examining Steven Kwan’s Slump

From pushing .400 to below .300, Kwan’s struggles have been a mystery

It wasn’t that long ago that Steven Kwan was returning from injury looking like a robot built to hit baseballs. The wait for him to re-qualify for the batting title was a highlight of the first half of the season as Kwan was putting together more multi-hit games than he was total strikeouts. Then the calendar flipped to July, and that all changed.

Kwan isn’t the biggest guy. His bat speed and exit velos won’t wow anyone, but what he does possess is elite bat control. Running the league’s highest squared up rate regardless of this current slump, his prowess of getting the bat to the ball in a competitive manner is second to none. With that being the case, however, why is this slump stretching across what’s now two months of play? Let’s dig deeper.

When beginning to examine a slump of this magnitude, the immediate thought is how differently are teams beginning to pitch to him? The short answer is they’re not. The longer answer is what we’re about to get into.

Here is Steven Kwan through the end of June against the four main pitch groups versus how he’s done against them since. There are minor discrepancies in pitch rate over the two spans. He’s seeing slightly more sliders and struggling mightily with them, especially against lefties, but overall, they’re pitching Kwan in the zone at roughly the same rate overall. Let’s dig even deeper here then. Where does Kwan do most of his power damage? On pitches inside. Could it be that teams are pitching Kwan inside differently? Not entirely that either.

I’ve used attack zones many times before on CTC, and we’re going to do it again!

Here, we are going to look at the inner shadow of the plate. This area represents what would be borderline pitches in the strike zone inside to left-handed hitters. Through June 30, there was nobody better than Kwan in this area. Across all three sectors, Kwan hit a gaudy .520 with a 1.000 slugging percentage and a trio of homers. He ran a 37.5% hard hit rate in this area as well, and 54.2% of balls Kwan put in play were considered “sweet spots”. Sweet spots are simply a batted ball hit between 8 degrees and 32 degrees of launch. Batted balls in that launch range are considered the most optimal to result in a hit.

In the span ending on June 30, Kwan saw 85 pitches in these three sectors. This accounted for 7.7% of all pitches thrown by right-handed pitchers and 10.5% of pitches thrown by lefties. Across all of those pitches, 74.1% of them were fastballs. He hit .500 with a .955 SLG against them with a .616 wOBA and 52.4% sweet spot rate.

Let’s flash forward to games since June 30. Same three sectors. Fastball usage against Kwan is down from 74.1% to 70.1%. He’s still having tons of success against the heaters though, batting .385 with an .846 SLG and .540 wOBA. Kwan’s hard hit rate has even gone from 38.1% up to 50%. One thing that hasn’t changed is that he simply doesn't swing at anything that isn’t a fastball in this area. One thing that has changed? Kwan’s sweet spot rate has been cut in half and then some, tumbling down to 23.5% from 50%. I single out Kwan’s “nitro” zones and areas where he really sees the ball well because even here, he’s not optimizing his contact like he had been for most of the first half.

I stress on this point for one main reason. Kwan has to optimize his contact in order to see sustained, long-term success because he doesn’t hit the ball hard. In Major League Baseball in 2024, there are 31 batters averaging an average exit velocity of less than 88 mph off the bat. Steven Kwan is in that group. I broke down all qualified hitters this season into three subsections: those who average less than 88 mph EVs, those who sit between 88-89.9 mph, and those who average 90+ mph. I then took those groups and found their statistics for when they hit line drives and flyballs this season. The results aren’t shocking, in fact, they’re exactly what you’d expect, but visualizing it may help you understand where Kwan is at and why he’s struggling.

Steven Kwan’s pulled line drive plus flyball rate has gone from a 20.3% mark through June 30 all the way down to 11.3% since. His overall pulled line drive rate has fallen from 10.5% to 5.2%. It’s become increasingly suboptimal, and it’s continued to get worse as the second half has pushed on. Kwan’s sweet spot rate went from 100th percentile 43.5% down to 36%, over a 7% drop.

Kwan’s swing length is identical across these two spans, so it isn’t like he magically changed his swing, he really is just hitting more groundballs. The final major area of struggle I want to look at is Kwan against sliders and how it’s contributing to this major drop-off in sweet spot rate and spike in suboptimal contact.

Seeing Kwan’s struggles against sliders has been new territory with him. Whiff rates going from 3.8% to above 24% in just mere weeks is staggering, regardless of how much the numbers said his regression was due to hit. Kwan’s sweet spot rate has dropped 20.9% against sliders all while his swing rate has jumped 5% despite the zone rate dropping. He’s seeing more sliders, but it’s very apparent against left-handed pitchers.

Kwan has seen exactly 100 sliders versus lefties since the start of July. He is running a 30.8% whiff rate against them. This is compared to just a 9.5% whiff rate against sliders from lefties from the start of the season to June 30. It’s pretty staggering. His average exit velo against those sliders is 77.4 mph. Lefties are attacking Kwan with slider types 32% of the time whereas righties throw them to him just 14.6% of the time. This is up 7% from the early span. While it’s a stark disparity, it lines up with how the league attacks handedness matchups. Pitches that fade away from the batter are best. With Kwan, however, it’s become a very noticeable trend.

Since August 25, Kwan is batting just .158. He’s put 46 balls in play, and of those, just 30% of them have registered as sweet spots. Of the 46 BBE, 30 have been flyballs or groundballs. He has yet to register a hit on any of them. Kwan is a batter who thrives on creating optimal contact through patience and zone command. For Cleveland to have any success in October, they’re going to need the old Steven Kwan back.