How DOES he do it?
Slightly less than two years ago I wondered if Steven Kwan possessed a hidden power: namely, hidden power. I followed up last year by revisiting that article and seeing if his 2023 season matched the pattern.
Reader (I can’t believe there are any of you, that’s not an insult, I’m just still confused after eight years) Vlad1m1r suggested using ISO instead of SLG for the analysis. I took a look and there isn’t really much difference. I understand that this means our data is polluted by singles but my English degree just fell off of the wall again, hang on a second.
Cool, I went ahead and added more string. Anyway, when I come to this space to share analytical musings it is very rarely something that would pass muster in any serious analytical space. What I think I may be good at is identifying patterns. I am not always going to be able to tell you how or why that pattern emerged.
I blame Joe Posnanski for writing curiously long posts about WAR and Baseball Prospectus for sliding into an endcap at the Barnes & Noble where I worked in college. They let you sign out hardcovers for two weeks at a time and somewhere in a drawer is an incredibly long list of stuff I read and partially or wholly forgot. Heck, life is wild.
The Stats!
Did Steven Kwan finish last in hard hit rate among all qualified position players in baseball as presented by FanGraphs (A True Institution, These Capitals Are Not In Jest, Thank You Again For Everything That You Do)?
No, no he did not. He finished with the ninth-lowest with 25.1%. This is the first time in his three-year career that he transcended the 20% hard hit rate barrier.
I encourage you to view the lists sorted by lowest hard hit percentage. There is no great way to share how I perused the stats within this post, so here is the URL for 2002.
My path through the sheets was to manually edit the URL such that the year numbers incremented by one. As such, you can replace “2002” with “2003” both times it appears within the URL to get 2003’s hard hit rates. Please give me the business if there was no need to point this out, but as someone who was taught to manually type URLs when first using a computer I realized it was second nature to me and perhaps not to others.
Now, the numbers. 20% appears to be the typical hard hit rate floor for a typical everyday player. It is not an absolute floor; For example, Ben Revere accomplished hard hit rates around 16% most years. In 2011 alone twenty players posted a hard hit rate below 20%. Yes, that’s Derek Jeter with exactly 20%. Older Ichiro dipped to his career-low of 12.1% and was (gasp) replacement level. Going back each year the names – Billy Hamilton, Willy Taveres, Dee Strange-Gordon, post-Pittsburgh Jason Kendall – are not at all surprising to see. The first year for which FanGraphs offers the statistic is 2002, in which twenty-six players fell below 20%. That was 16% of the 155 players that qualified that season, the highest total (tied, 2003) and percentage.
While the lowest numbers in baseball fluctuate over time there is something that seems to be salient about 20%.
How should we describe the set of players, then, who are capable of posting a hard contact rate below 20% yet still take enough at-bats to qualify for year-end statistics? I want to reach for a phrase that is both descriptive and kind: they are typically excellent fielders but not good hitters. This is true of most players who fail to make hard contact at least 20% of the time. Some excellent fielders are also exceptionally good at getting on base; Luis Castillo is a wonderful example from this subset. None of this goes against our expectation so far, but Steven Kwan? He does.
Kwan, 2024 SLG: .425
MLB, 2024 SLG: .399
Kwan, 2024 xSLG: .385
MLB, 2024 xSLG: .405
Kwan, 2024 BABIP: .304
MLB, 2024 BABIP: .307
He was worth a delightful 131 wRC+, and may have done even better if not for injuries.
He outslugged the average Major Leaguer by .026 points of slug. He outperformed his expected SLG by .040 points of slug. Here is another clear instance of Steven Kwan outperforming his expected slugging percentage and this time he did it while hitting the ball a bit harder as well.
There is something that he consistently and repeatedly does that allows him to outperform his xSLG. It accounts for enough of his value offensively that it deserves additional focus, and I would be lying if I did not think that Cleveland’s Front Office already knows what it is. I don’t. I just think it’s neat.
These are very real bases that he is “stealing” because the baseball just cannot lie. His batted ball outcomes predictably outpace what expected slugging says he deserves. I can’t imagine that it won’t continue. This is not a particularly large “hole” in how we evaluate expected stats but it is important to always consider what a player actually did in addition to the expected statistics. In the case of Steven Kwan, I am now pretty convinced that something he does while leaving the box, rounding the bases, or looking at Sandy Alomar is the cause.
The only other player that, to me, stood out in the lists like Steven Kwan? Jeter. Derek Jeter. Yeah, that guy.
What is it, Steven?! WHAT IS THIS STRANGE POWER YOU POSSESS WITHIN THE POWER THAT YOU ALREADY POSSESS? SORCERY WILL BE TOLERATED ONLY WHEN USED FOR GOOD PLEASE REMEMBER.
REMEMBER, STEVEN. REMEMBUHHHHHHHHHH
(gust of wind dissipates blog post but leaves “QED” in the clouds)
