Steven Kwan posts 178 wRC+ over last 10 games as Guardians head to Kansas City

What happened

Steven Kwan is hitting again — emphatically, at least over a recent stretch — and the question of whether it represents a durable fix or another peak in a jagged wRC+ graph is one that FanGraphs writer Davy Andrews is openly wrestling with in real time.

Per Andrews' piece at FanGraphs, Kwan has posted a 178 wRC+ over his most recent 10 games. That follows a stretch in which he spent roughly two months slowly cooling off from a scorching start to July, when he batted .350 with more walks than strikeouts for a 154 wRC+ dating back to July 1.

Why it matters

The timing is not incidental. Per the newsroom's reporting, Cleveland clinched their third consecutive playoff berth with a late-game comeback, and the Guardians are now preparing for a three-game series at Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium to close out the regular season. A Kwan producing at the top of the lineup is a meaningfully different offensive instrument than the one Andrews was diagnosing back in June.

Andrews is careful not to declare the slump fully resolved. He frames the piece explicitly as a "journey of discovery" — writing the introduction before digging into the numbers — and flags the very real hazard of writing about a hot streak. As a cautionary data point, he notes that after Zack Meisel covered Kwan's turnaround for The Athletic around September 1, Kwan ran a wRC+ of 80 over the following 12 games and struck out twice as often as he walked. The current 10-game surge, in other words, arrives with recent precedent for false dawns.

The numbers

The analytical backdrop Andrews established in a June piece at FanGraphs remains the essential frame. At that point, Kwan had pushed an already extreme contact-oriented profile into territory the Statcast era had not previously recorded. Among qualified players, his zone contact rate of 97.8% was the highest ever recorded in the Statcast era. His squared-up rate ranked fourth highest since Statcast began measuring it in 2023. His zone swing rate was the fifth lowest in the Statcast era — more than four percentage points below his previous career low. He was also running the second-lowest bat speed ever recorded, and the second-lowest hard-hit rate ever recorded, above only 2018 Billy Hamilton.

Andrews' current piece revisits those extremes in the context of the resurgence, and his honest bottom line is that he is not certain what has changed. He raises the possibility that hit-rate variance is doing meaningful work here, and declines to rule it out.

Where the club stands

Cleveland heads into the final weekend of the regular season having already secured a playoff berth, per the newsroom's reporting. Their remaining schedule is a three-game road set against the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman Stadium: Gavin Williams is the probable starter Friday, Tanner Bibee takes the ball Saturday, and Sunday's starter is listed as TBD against Daniel Lynch IV.

The roster picture around Kwan has had its own recent turbulence. The Guardians reinstated right-hander Shawn Armstrong from the 60-day IL and designated Connor Brogdon for assignment. Angel Martínez has been out of the lineup due to injury in recent days, with Petey Halpin stepping in at center field. Colin Holderman's return timeline is also uncertain after he exited a Triple-A rehab outing early with right wrist pain, per earlier reporting.

What we don't know yet

Andrews is direct about the limits of what the numbers currently tell him. He does not know whether Kwan has corrected the underlying mechanical or approach issues that defined the June slump, or whether the recent production reflects a run that may not persist. The wRC+ graph he describes — full of peaks and valleys, with a particularly sharp rise at the start of July followed by a gradual two-month decline — does not make confident pattern-reading easy.

Kwan himself, per Meisel's Athletic piece referenced by Andrews, described reviewing journal entries from previous slumps to find the right mental adjustment. Whether that process has produced something durable, or whether the current 10-game stretch is another inflection point on a volatile curve, is genuinely open.

What to watch

The Kansas City series offers a low-stakes-in-the-standings, high-stakes-for-evaluation window. With the playoff spot secured, Cleveland's primary interest in these final games is health and rhythm — and for Kwan specifically, whether the 178 wRC+ over 10 games holds its shape or reverts toward the mid-season mean. Andrews' framing is the right one to carry into October: curious, not convinced, and watching the walk-to-strikeout ratio as closely as the batting average.