Steven Kwan and Chandler Simpson are not built like the hitters most teams spend the year trying to find.
That’s the fun of this ALCS matchup between the Guardians and Rays: two players who barely resemble the modern power template, yet keep finding ways to get on base and do damage anyway. They’ve also been two of the toughest hitters to miss after the All-Star break. Among 164 qualified hitters, Kwan hit .353 and Simpson hit .344 over that stretch.
No one is trying to crown them the two best hitters in baseball over those 2 1/2 months. But the numbers do show how unusual this pairing is. Kwan’s 155 wRC+ marked him as the more elite of the two on a broader offensive level, while Simpson’s 107 wRC+ still made him valuable despite a 3.1% walk rate, one of the game’s worst.
The strangest part is how they do it. Neither guy is out there taking violent cuts and launching the ball all over the yard.
Kwan ranked last among 206 qualified hitters in bat speed at 62.4 mph, and that was the slowest average bat speed by any qualifier in a single season since Statcast began tracking bat speed after the 2023 All-Star break. Simpson wasn’t far behind at 65.1 mph.
The league average was 72.1 mph.
Fast swings are the rage for a reason. Statcast defines them as 75-plus mph bat speed, and the league hit .308 with a .613 slugging percentage on those swings in 2026.
Kwan had only two fast swings all season. Simpson had three.
By comparison, Junior Caminero - the fastest bat in baseball - had eight fast swings in Game 1 of the ALCS alone, including on his 111.2 mph RBI single in the first inning.
So if it’s not bat speed, what is it?
It starts with contact. Simpson, very much in keeping with the Rays’ contact-first identity, posted the third-lowest swing-and-miss rate among qualifiers at 10.8%. Kwan was even better at 8.2%, tying his career low in a single season and matching Luis Arraez for contact quality in that department.
But contact alone isn’t enough if the bat doesn’t find the barrel. That’s where these two separate themselves.
Kwan and Simpson live in that upper-left corner of the graphic: slow swings, but excellent square-up ability. Most hitters can’t survive there.
If you don’t swing fast and you don’t hit the ball on the sweet spot, you’re probably not sticking in the majors.
Simpson’s game is the simpler of the two to understand. Everything he does is shaped around his speed.
He’s not trying to lift the ball. He hits ground balls at a higher rate than all but one qualified hitter.
He’s not trying to hit it deep, either. The average distance of his 175 base hits - 106 feet - is the shortest of any player in a single season in the Statcast Era among hitters with at least 100 hits.
His swing is built for that style. Simpson’s average attack angle is three degrees, one of the lowest in baseball, which fits a ground-ball or line-drive approach.
He stays under the ball, sprays it around, and lets his speed do the work. Only four qualified hitters let the ball travel deeper than he does.
Even there, he’s unusual. Simpson has the second-lowest launch-angle sweet-spot percentage in baseball, meaning almost none of his balls in play are struck in the ideal 8-32 degree window for damage.
That’s not the point of his game. He’s not trying to mash like a traditional power bat.
Kwan’s path is a little different. He doesn’t have Simpson’s speed - his sprint speed is league average - so a ground-ball-heavy approach wouldn’t serve him the same way.
He’s also spent time trying to add more thump. In the offseason, he worked through a bat-speed program that involved swinging heavier bats.
The idea was simple: swing faster, hit harder. Kwan had already been open in past seasons about wanting to slug more, and he has done that at times.
But the first half of this season was rough. Through June 30, Kwan was hitting .212 with a 78 wRC+, which made him one of the eight weakest qualified hitters in baseball. His bat speed stayed the slowest in the game, and he had just 24 hard-hit balls, 12 fewer than the next-lowest qualified hitter.
Since then, he’s looked like a different hitter. He went from the eighth-weakest qualified hitter to the eighth-most productive. Some of that is tied to a better batting average on balls in play, but the way his bat is moving also points to a real adjustment.
His attack direction has shifted more toward the opposite field. It started at three degrees to the pull side in March and April, then finished at four degrees the other way in September.
He has also moved back in the batter’s box, standing nine inches farther back in October than he did in April. The result is that he’s seeing the ball longer and letting it travel deeper before sending it the other way.
That works for Kwan because his barrel is geared to spray line drives to all fields, not to yank the ball in the air. His launch-angle sweet-spot rate is fifth-best in baseball. That’s a very different profile from Simpson’s, but the outcome is familiar: both hitters find ways to keep the line moving without matching the power bats around them.
It would not work for most players. The industry has good reasons for preferring hitters who catch the ball out front, lift it, and drive it to the pull side.
Kwan and Simpson don’t really play that game. They’ve got their own version, and right now it’s on display in the same playoff series, one quirky at-bat after another.
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