What happened to Wan Steven Kwan?

Last week, a reader named Kevin submitted a very sensitive mailbag question. I produced it here entirely. This won’t take long:

Dear FanGraphs Team,

Steven Kwan is broke. Should we Guardians fans hope that he can be fixed?

Kevin

In honor of Kevin’s brevity, I think my answer should have been one word, but Kwan has been one of the most interesting players in baseball for years. It’s good to take a closer look at what’s going on with him right now.

Let’s start with the Statcast percentages, because in Kwan’s case, he can paint a confusing picture. If you were to look at slugging percentage, bat speed, multiple rate, strikeout rate, strikeout rate, and strikeout rate — all things that tell you where a hitter lies on the contact and power spectrum — you’d think you’re in for another Steven Kwan season. If you were to throw the walking rate in there as well, you might even think you’re doing better than usual.

But as Kevin discovers, Kwan is broken. The percentiles are misleading because he was already in the first or 100th percentile in many fields. When you’re already the most extreme hitter in the league, percentiles have no way of showing that you’ve pushed the boundaries to new levels, but that’s exactly what Kwan did. Among professional players, his current contact rate of 97.8% on pitches in the strike zone is the highest ever recorded in the Statcast era. His average is the fourth highest since Statcast began measuring it in 2023. And while his strikeout rate isn’t the lowest of his career, Statcast doesn’t provide percentage swing rates specifically for pitches in the area. His is the fifth lowest on record in the Statcast era, and is more than four percent below his previous low. He has the second-lowest batting pace ever recorded. He also has the second lowest average on record, behind only Billy Hamilton in 2018. Think about that for a second. The only player in the last 12 years to post a season with a lower hitting streak than Kwan is currently posting is Billy Hamilton. In four other seasons, Billy Hamilton has posted higher rates than Kwan’s current mark of 9.6%.

Kwan has always built his game around patience and contact skills rather than aggressiveness and power, but this year he’s been on the outside, and the results have been poor. He sports a 67 wRC+, which is tied for the fourth-best mark among professional hitters. What’s going on?

First, we need to remember that having first century bat speed is, to some extent, a choice. Kwan definitely and ability of swinging the bat more than this. But he’s 5-foot-8 and knows full well that he’s never going to put up monster power numbers, so he’s totally into power contact (or at least we thought he was before 2026, when he’s not even in). That means letting the ball go deep, taking a short, quick swing, and hitting it the other way. “I knew at a young 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 touch the game.” That kind of offensive profile is always a bit of a hike. It requires a high level of line drive and a decent amount of batted ball luck, but Kwan made it work the first four years of his career, never putting up less than 3.0 WAR in a season.

It’s easy to see in his spray charts. Past seasons tend to look similar. Kwan’s spray line drives all over the field, and many of them fall in front of the outfielders on singles. He also sneaks a few ground balls or bases for doubles, and turns on a handful of meatballs to hit home runs. That’s the recipe. This season, it doesn’t work.

Kwan doesn’t open the ball to doubles and homers, even singles. Just 19% of Kwan’s at-bats landed on singles, a career low of almost 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 is 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 numbers and wOBA numbers are still the worst of his entire career. Interestingly, Kwan has long expressed that he would prefer not to rely so much on weak liners that go into singles.

Kwan entered spring training talking about increasing his bat speed and hitting the ball harder. In fact, every spring, he comes to camp and tells reporters that he works to do more damage at the plate. On the February 17, 2024, episode of the Cleveland Guardians Podcast, he announced that he had started the bat-speed program. Two weeks later, he explained that he was so committed to transitioning from the spectrum side to the power side that he was purposefully swinging during batting practice, just to get comfortable with the feeling. In 2025, he explained to MLB Network that he was focusing on lifting and pulling the ball like José Ramírez, then told MLB Network Radio that he was working on his bat speed using the Stack System and taking weight room tips from Carlos Santana. This March, Tim Stebbins of MLB.com again reported that Kwan is using a weighted-bat system to increase his bat speed.

It has been three years in a row that Kwan has revealed that he is determined to hit hard. He really improved his power in 2024, hitting a career-high 14 home runs despite playing just 122 games, and posting a career-high wRC+ of 131. In 2025, Kwan hit 11 home runs, but his production dipped in the second half, coincidentally or not, around the same time he admitted he was dealing with a nagging wrist injury.

This year, he once again came to camp talking about doing damage, but this time, every part of his approach screamed the exact opposite. You are letting the hit points go past. He almost never took his A swing off. He is not the person who wants to cause harm! In that sense, I can’t sit here and say that Kwan is really broken. Less than two years ago, we wondered if this guy could hit .400! Unless there’s something wrong with his body that’s destroying his bat speed, and that there’s a lack of self-confidence that explains his never-before-seen inattention, I have to think he’s capable of reversing the old ways that worked for him. I can’t guarantee that it will be successful, but it seems possible to try.

I can definitely say that Kwan needs to change something. Better batting luck will help a lot, and as Patrick Dubuque noted a few weeks ago, it’s only a matter of time before the one bright spot on his profile, his walk rate, fades. Pitchers hit the strike zone against Kwan 49.4% of the time. That’s on the high side, as you’d expect from a guy who doesn’t rush and doesn’t do much damage, but it’s the lowest mark of his entire career and a drop of more than four points from his 2025 level. At some point, pitchers will realize that they are facing a slow Billy Hamilton. They will start to fill the area, and Kwan’s movement rate will decrease no matter how many times he swings.

As for whether Kwan’s brokenness is physical, I think we can’t decide whether it’s possible. I don’t like this bat speed distribution graph from Baseball Savant at all. I don’t see any kind of different situation that indicates a change in approach; it looks like his distribution in years past, he just pulled a tick or two to the left. Only one of the top 20 rushers from the past four seasons has come this year.

As we’ve known for a long time, you can’t look at bat speed in a vacuum. Statcast measures bat speed at the point where the bat crosses the ball, and bat speed increases during the swing. So if Kwan had just made contact deeper into the hitting zone, that would explain at least some of the loss in bat speed. Unfortunately, the opposite happened; he meets the ball 30.1 inches in front of the center of mass, which is the farthest he has ever been. Kwan’s bat speed has decreased compared to fastballs, breaking balls, and offspeed pitches, which are all pitches.

Something is happening here, and the end result is a dramatic three-point drop in average exit speed and an even bigger drop in 90 percent exit speed. Kwan’s fastball this season left the bat at 101.1 mph. In all of his previous seasons, that wouldn’t even have been enough to crack the top 15.

All of this means that I don’t know how to answer Kevin’s question. I’m optimistic in the sense that method should be at least part of the problem here. Kwan has really changed his way of doing things in a weird way, so he can change it again. He takes, a lot, but he still has his gift of communication. You communicate more than ever. Obviously, not all of his physical abilities have given up on him, and that’s encouraging. But I don’t know if this change in direction involves a lack of something new, or if there is something concrete that drives you. I just know it doesn’t work.