CLEVELAND - Steven Kwan spent part of late June staring at the kind of season that can swallow a player whole. The weak grounders were piling up.
The popups were worse. Stephen Vogt had moved him out of the leadoff spot and down to the bottom of the Guardians’ order.
And in Kwan’s head, the possibilities kept getting uglier.
Could he lose playing time? Could he wind up in Triple A, making that long drive to Columbus and sitting alone with the noise? Could Cleveland decide it had seen enough and move on?
Kwan didn’t say much about it inside the clubhouse, but he admits he got pulled into that spiral. He kept asking himself what the next bad turn might look like, and then the one after that. It wasn’t that long ago - late June, he realized while looking back through his journal - that he was writing down those discouraging thoughts.
Two months later, the picture looks completely different.
Since July 1, only Pete Crow-Armstrong has been better than Kwan by fWAR. The Guardians’ outfielder has hit, walked and defended at the level that made him such a steady presence in the first place, and the panic that hovered over his season in the spring has been replaced by something simpler: a push to finish strong.
The turnaround didn’t start with mechanics. It started with how he was thinking.
Kwan went back through old journal entries from past slumps, including 2023 and the second half of 2024, trying to understand what his head was doing when his swing wasn’t working. What stood out to him this time was how brief those notes had been.
He wasn’t digging into the mess. He wasn’t processing it.
He was just recording it.
That mattered, because this time he needed more than a quick postgame line or two. He needed to get past the silence and write through the frustration instead of holding it in.
Kwan has never been shy about his own tendency to undercut himself.
“You’re either a deprecator or you’re delusional,” he said.
He’s used that self-check before, including during his hot start as a rookie in 2022 and again when he flirted with a .400 average in July 2024. But this season got different fast.
His average fell below .200. His OPS dipped under .600.
His hard-hit rate, already low, dropped to levels Statcast had never tracked.
That’s when he realized he needed the other version of himself.
“I tried to get myself to that delusion of, ‘I need to remember who the f- I am, all these things I do well,’ and just leave it there,” Kwan said. “You start (off) delusional, and then you start poking holes in it, and you start deprecating again. You just have to be delusional and just let it ride.
“I don’t love that, because at the end of the day, you’re probably lying to yourself a little bit, and you’re not going to get much done doing that,” he added. “But there were tough days where it was like, ‘F-, how much longer is this going to keep going?’
And it’s like, ‘Shut the f- up. You can’t think like that.'”
The long season gave him room to reset. Kwan pointed to the simple idea that every day offers another chance, another at-bat, another game to change the shape of the year.
“It’s understanding that every single day is a new day,” he said. “I preach that. It’s just a long season.”
The numbers since then tell the story of a player who found his footing again in a hurry.
Through June, Kwan was hitting .212/.318/.257 with a 70 wRC+. Since July 1, he’s at .371/.464/.455 with a 168 wRC+.
Over that stretch, he leads the majors in on-base percentage, ranks first in walk-to-strikeout ratio, second in batting average, sixth in OPS and third in wRC+, behind only Yordan Alvarez and Crow-Armstrong. He’s done it with just two home runs all season, leaning on singles, doubles and a huge walk rate to keep his production rolling.
In the last two months, he has gone without reaching base in only five games. He has reached base three or more times in 19 games, with 31 walks and 20 strikeouts.
Kwan says he has tried not to stare too long at the numbers because that can become its own trap.
“If you fall in love with the daily results,” he said, “you’re going to drive yourself crazy.”
He was careful not to declare himself back when the July surge began, even if teammates were more willing to say it for him. “Cautiously optimistic” was his lane.
But the Guardians have their familiar leadoff hitter back, and the swing is showing it. His timing is cleaner.
His attack angles are better. He’s driving outside pitches to left field and turning fastballs in toward right field, doing the things that looked out of reach when the season was at its lowest point.
Once he stopped staring at what might happen if everything went wrong, the baseball started to come back to him.
“There’s beauty,” he said, “in the 162.”
In Other News...
Brayan Rocchio Is Putting Cleveland In A Tough Lineup Spot
Brayan Rocchio spent the first half of the season giving Cleveland a real boost with the bat, but the second half has looked nothing like that version of him. The downturn was severe enough to send him to Triple-A in early 2025, and it has turned what once looked like a stable middle-infield situation into a much trickier decision for the Guardians as they sort out their infield plans.
Stephen Vogt now has three names in the mix for those spots, with Rocchio competing against Angel Genao and Travis Bazzana. If the offense does not turn back in Rocchios favor, Cleveland could lean toward Genao and Bazzana and leave Rocchio in a reserve role, a sharp shift for a player who not long ago seemed positioned to hold a much more prominent place in the lineup. [Read more 🡒]
Parker Messick Is Giving Cleveland Fans A New Reason To Believe
Cleveland has stayed in the thick of the race for most of the summer, with a postseason path still very much alive and the club again proving it can hang around deep into September. A big reason for that is rookie starter Parker Messick, who has quickly moved from promising arm to one of the more dependable pieces in the rotation, giving the Guardians a fresh lift as they chase another playoff berth.
Messicks rise has also pushed him into the conversation for AL Rookie of the Year, a reminder that Clevelands recent success is being driven by more than just veteran steadiness. The Guardians still have work to do in both the Wild Card hunt and the division race, but Messicks arrival has given fans something beyond the standings to watch, with the Kalshi odds reflecting just how much his season has started to matter. [Read more 🡒]
Guardians Playoff Push Just Ran Into A Frustrating Defensive Problem
The Guardians playoff push took a jarring hit at Progressive Field, where a lopsided loss to Toronto was made worse by a defensive lapse from a pair of rookies. Cleveland had already been chasing the game after Dylan Cease carved through the lineup over six scoreless innings, but the bigger problem came when Joey Cantillos outing unraveled and the defense behind him could not clean it up.
A sloppy second inning turned into the kind of inning that lingers, with Travis Bazzana and Angel Genao both involved in the breakdown that opened the door for the Blue Jays to pile on. Cleveland wound up staring at an 11-0 defeat, and the frustration was not just the final score but the way the Guardians kept giving Toronto extra life when they could least afford it. [Read more 🡒]