THE CLEVELAND GUARDIANS thought they knew Stephen Vogt; then came April 13, and a doubleheader loss to the New York Yankees. The day was long and disappointing, and before it ended, Vogt gathered his coaches and told them he was about to call a team meeting to make the day even longer.
It was the first time the Guardians had lost consecutive games, and the losses dropped them into second place in the American League Central, one of six days they’ve spent out of first place this season.
The news of the meeting drifted through the clubhouse like an airborne disease. It challenged everything the Guardians thought they knew about their rookie manager. Just one year removed from his playing career, Vogt had played with or against nearly each of his players, and pitcher Ben Lively says, “His mindset is still in the clubhouse. He wants to be in here more than in that office.” Through six weeks of spring training and 14 games of the regular season, Vogt had created a breezy culture with his sturdy sameness. “He’s the opposite of panic,” backup catcher Austin Hedges says. “Every time we hit a little bit of a skid, there’s still a smile on his face, and his message is, ‘We’re going to win tomorrow, and we’re going to enjoy it.’
“Losses are going to happen but they’re going to be on our terms. We might lose but we’ll play a clean game.”
It’s impossible to define chemistry. The Guardians, however, swear they can see it, and it looks like groups of guys playing cards after games until clubhouse attendants — jingling their keys and pointing at the clock — tell everybody to go home. “You know how you can tell we’ve got something good going on?” Hedges asks. “We hate leaving the ballpark after games.”
But now the players, awaiting their manager’s arrival, were left to exchange confused looks. Vogt preached joy and professionalism, and this meeting felt like neither. David Fry quietly asked a teammate, “This can’t be about our play, can it?”
Eventually, Vogt strode into the clubhouse like a cop approaching the passenger side window. He set his jaw and stiffened his voice the best he could. “All right,” he said. “We’ve got to clean this stuff up.” He watched their faces, letting his words sit.
“Just kidding, guys,” he said, laughing. “You really think I’d be upset over two losses?”
The true reason for the meeting was that Vogt wanted to gather the team to present Hedges with his MLBPA gold card, which he’d earned that day by hitting eight years of service time. “Hedgy” is a clubhouse force. He is constantly talking, constantly exhorting, constantly there, and his ability to frame borderline pitches into strikes and cajole a pitching staff through tough innings are deemed valuable enough to offset his sub-.450 OPS. (He can bunt, though, in a nearly bunt-free world.) Basically, he’s a louder version of Vogt. Hedgy had his service time celebrated loudly and profanely, the exuberance infused with a touch of relief; their guy Vogt was still who they thought he was.
And now, three months later, with the Guardians having spent much of the first half with the best record in the American League, the story of the team meeting remains durably instructive: With these guys, even the most insignificant crisis needs to be manufactured.
IT’S NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to imagine a sequence of events that would make Vogt angry enough to display an emotion stronger than bemused calm. He has yet to be thrown out of a game as a manager, and he says the only time he was tossed as a player was as a minor leaguer, for arguing a called third strike. Before a recent game in Kansas City, he was asked if he ever thinks about the circumstances that might lead to his first ejection. He does, he says, but every time he gets close enough to see it, he takes a deep breath and comes to the realization that he is always angry at something other than the umpire.
This is, to be sure, a level of self-reflection that is not endemic to the position.
There is an assuredness to Vogt that comes from his willingness to embrace his limitations. He has a squarish head accentuated by close-cropped hair and eyes that smile even when his mouth doesn’t. He’s the second-youngest manager in baseball at 39, and he spent just one year as a bullpen coach for the Mariners before being hired to replace Cleveland legend Terry Francona. From his first day, Vogt disarmed his players with his sense of humor and self-deprecation, openly declaring that he does not have all the answers — “I don’t know what I don’t know,” he likes to say.
He learned in spring training that, for a slow game, baseball can sometimes accelerate before a manager can react. In a split-squad game against the Cubs, Vogt found himself in charge of pitching changes, the running game and the defense. “It went from low pitch count to nobody on to high pitch count and runners on first and third like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “‘Oh, crap, I’ve got to go get the pitcher, but what about the run game?’ It was a good lesson for me: Just be the manager.”
Through the season’s first 97 games: so far, so good. The Guardians have a five game lead over the persistent Minnesota Twins in a division that is experiencing a sudden bout of competence. The Guardians have the game’s least-recognized superstar at third base in Jose Ramirez, and maybe the best defensive second baseman since at least Roberto Alomar in Andres Gimenez. They’ve got the best leadoff hitter in baseball in Steven Kwan, whose batting average (.351) looks like a typo, or a figure from a 30-year-old stat line. And he’s got the best bullpen in baseball, filled with enormous late-inning relievers, ending with All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase, who look as much like bodyguards as baseball players.
The back end of the season figures to be a test, though. The Guardians wobbled heading into the All-Star break, losing 11 of their last 18. Kwan, hitting .390 on June 25, slid from a 1.023 OPS to .911. The bullpen has been used enough to worry about overuse. Of the 25 big league relievers who have appeared in at least 43 games, five are Guardians. The usage is a direct reflection of the sketchy starting pitching, and while championship teams are often built like this one — power, defense and a stout bullpen — it’s taxing to backfill with four or five bullpen innings a night through an entire season. To make the season’s final 65 games as much fun as the first 97, the starters will have to eat more innings, and Vogt may have to sit back and let them.
“I don’t ever pretend to have answers,” Vogt says. “I have ideas. I don’t know if they’re good or not, but I have a staff that tells me. I just know you can’t be on edge for 162 games. You can’t be grrrr, pedal-to-the-metal all the time. The old way of getting in there and yelling at the team doesn’t work well anymore, in my opinion. There are a lot of ways I can get my messaging out, or I can just stay out of the way and let them play. That’s been my biggest go-to.”
During his playing career, Vogt developed a reputation as a somewhat quirky character, known for his spot-on impersonations of NBA referees and former “Saturday Night Live” star Chris Farley. He remains something of an icon in Oakland, where he made two All-Star teams as a catcher, befriended fans in the right-field bleachers and spawned the mesmerizing “We Believe in Stephen Vogt” chant that echoed off the Coliseum’s concrete walls and into the soul for the better part of six seasons. He was also the type of player who studied the dynamics of each coaching staff and filed his observations for future reference.
“I loved that stuff,” he says, in a tone that comes close to confession. “I’ve been in some really good dynamics and some OK dynamics. I’ve learned to let the coaches coach, let the players play, let the front office front office, and let the manager manage. I’ve also learned this: Nobody wants the manager around all the time.”
RAMIREZ HAS THE best walk in baseball. It’s not a walk, really, that’s just what we call it because language is limited. It is a strut and a swagger and a statement, shoulders rocking forward and back, hips keeping time, head bouncing as if along for the ride. He is wide and short, and he walks like he’s trying to make up for it by taking up as much space in the world as possible; if you encountered him in a hallway, something would have to give.
He fizzes through the lineup like a shaken soda, batting third, switch-hitting, driving in runs at a rate only Aaron Judge can understand. His swing is quick and sudden, like hitting the switch on a blender, and even when he’s fooled, he can manage to defy the laws of kinesiology by keeping his hands back and the bat through the hitting zone while the rest of his body remains free to do its own thing.
“It’s incredible how good he is,” Fry says, “but he gets on runs where you think, OK, close game, we’re down late, he’s probably going to hit a home run and we’re going to win. And most of the time he does.”
Fry was on deck in the fifth inning against the Orioles on June 25 when Ramirez went to the plate with runners at second and third. Fry started walking toward the plate, assuming the Orioles would apply logic and walk Ramirez intentionally. (Ramirez and Paul Goldschmidt are the only two hitters since 1955 to be walked intentionally three times in a game.) When the Orioles decided to take their chances with Ramirez, Fry headed back to the on-deck circle, two words rolling through his brain: Oh, dumb. “One pitch later…” — Fry holds it here a moment — “three-run homer.”
It’s difficult to cherry-pick the best moments from the Jose Ramirez Experience, but here’s one: on June 29, a hot and sticky Saturday late afternoon in Kansas City, he hit a scorching liner off Cole Ragans that left fielder MJ Melendez loped after as if it were routine. It kept going, though, low and fast, with Melendez adding gears too late to fix his mistake. By the time he picked it up as it rolled on the ground, he wore the look of a man who knows full well what he just saw but still refuses to believe it.
But the most illustrative example of the experience, surprisingly, came on a strikeout. The day before Ramirez faced Ragans, it was Royals right-hander Alec Marsh, whose fastball hadn’t topped 94 until he got two strikes on Ramirez with two on and two out in the third inning and threw 98 right over the top of Ramirez’s bat. Ramirez stood in the batter’s box and stared out at the mound long after Marsh had left it.
“After every pitch, he’s calculating,” Vogt says. “That time, he was wondering what happened. Jose doesn’t miss fastballs.”
After shaking his head one last time and heading out to play third base, he began to rock his shoulders harder than ever. It took a few strides, but before long, his hips and head were back in rhythm. The hallway was, once again, full of Jose. It’s clear that music runs through his body, music only he can hear. I have no idea what it is or how it sounds, but I suspect we’d all be better off if we could hear it.
KWAN KNOWS WHAT he needs to know, which is another way of saying he knows what he doesn’t want to know, which might be far more important.
Baseball is just like the rest of society, refusing to accept the concept of too much. There’s too much swing data, too much pitch data, too much data on what a guy might throw in a certain count. There’s too much dissection of where the bat hits the ball and how far it goes afterward. There’s so much that can get in the way of performing the acts it purports to assist.
For the most part, Kwan, 26, would like to be left alone, free of the onslaught of numbers, assessments and prognostications. The information, when it gets overwhelming, can slow him down, leave him thinking instead of reacting, doubting instead of believing. He fought that battle once before, when he left high school in Fremont, California, for Oregon State’s powerhouse program and immediately felt inadequate among the bigger, stronger and more touted players on the roster. His doubts were lies, then and now, but the mind believes what it wants.
Aside from some of the more existential questions surrounding the Guardians — why, for example, does 260-pound first baseman Josh Naylor wear a long-sleeve shirt, a sleeveless sweatshirt and a ski cap during infield and batting practice when it is 91 degrees in Kansas City? — how the 5-foot-9, 170-pound Kwan has emerged as a top-flight MLB star is among the most intriguing.
“He doesn’t take one pitch off,” Hedges says. “There are so many guys who take at-bats off, or whole games off. At the plate, in the field, on the bases, Steven doesn’t take pitches off.”
He plays the outfield with a meticulousness that becomes clear only after repeated observation, and he has won Gold Gloves in each of his first two seasons, a significant feat for an award that is often earned over time. He is a left-handed thrower playing left field, which invites awkwardness on any ball hit to his right. But Kwan, reminiscent of Barry Bonds and Rickey Henderson, quickly gets to balls hit down the line, positions his body exquisitely and routinely turns doubles into singles by the sheer force of his work ethic.
Known mostly for his microscopic strikeout rate in a high-strikeout world, Kwan went home last offseason with the intention of turning his swing into a more pugilistic endeavor. He went through a regimented bat-speed program that included thousands of swings with a heavy bat to gain strength, a light bat to gain speed and his normal bat to bring the two together. Even with his recent slump, the result is a slugging percentage of .507 (up from .370 last year) and a top-15 OPS of .911 (up from .710). He hit 11 homers in his first two seasons combined and hit the All Star break this year with nine. Perhaps most remarkably, he has done all that while maintaining the second-lowest strikeout percentage in the big leagues.
Kwan grades his swings. They’re count-dependent, which means the A+ swing comes out on 2-0 and 3-1; the grades get worse the more disadvantaged the count. “The offseason work taught me how to get my A swing off more often than not,” he says. “It also brings up the floor with overall bat speed. With two strikes, I’m definitely not trying to take that A swing, but even my C or D swing with two strikes is going to have some slug potential. Last year I would just put it in play and see what happens.”
(To be fair, and to add perspective, even his A+ swing will never be mistaken for the one belonging to fellow All-Star Josh Naylor — a massive undertaking that seems to begin somewhere underground before rumbling through the earth’s surface and appearing in the left-handed batter’s box.)
“I don’t want to know scouting reports, but I’m almost positive the scouting report on me last year was just, ‘Throw it down the middle and let him hit it somewhere,'” Kwan says. “They hoped I would hit it right at someone, but if not, it’s probably just a single. Pitchers can live with that.”
What they’d prefer not to live with is a guy who’s not only difficult to strike out but has the ability to drive the ball into the gaps, or further. They’d prefer not to have to think about how to pitch him, or where he’s vulnerable, or if they even know anymore. No offense to the new Steven, but they liked the old one better.
BEN LIVELY LOOKS like a pitcher from an instruction manual. He is efficient and balanced, with everything important — front foot, arm, chest, head — pointed in a straight line directly at his target. His arm begins to come forward at the precise moment his lead foot lands. He repeats this delivery, a geometric marvel, over and over, each one an exact replica of the last. If there is a solution to the injury crisis among big league pitchers, it could be this: throw 90 mph, throw strikes and throw like Ben Lively. His delivery should be endorsed by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.
The idea of the Guardians turning last season’s disappointment — 76-86 in baseball’s worst division — into this season’s success seemed plausible in just one respect: starting pitching. Any turnaround would have to start there, with former Cy Young winner Shane Bieber and promising young guys such as Tanner Bibee, Gavin Williams and Logan Allen. Bieber is out for the season, and Bibee recovered after a slow start, but Lively — a 32-year-old on his fourth team in seven years, not counting three campaigns in South Korea — has been the rotation’s anchor. Teams such as the Guardians need guys such as Lively, someone whose unexpected success serves as a rallying cry.
“Our ultimate goal is to win the World Series,” Hedges says. “And how do you win a World Series? You start at the end and work backwards. A lot of teams treat the regular season like the regular season and the playoffs like the playoffs, but we treat the regular season like the playoffs. It’s all out, all the time.”
Lively lives the mantra. His was a well-traveled path, bouncing around three different organizations, including an 18-5 season with a 2.69 ERA at Double-A and Triple-A with the Philadelphia Phillies as a 24-year-old, before he hopped over to South Korea to spend three seasons in the KBO. He had to go more than halfway around the world to find himself, to break free of the over-instruction in the American system and be immersed in a foreign culture where the language barrier might turn a trip to the mound into a few shrugs and the age-old question, “Maybe a curveball?”
“I was totally on my own, and it helped me grow up,” Lively says. “In the past, when things would go bad, I’d just be absurd, getting mad, even during the game. Now, I lock in — next pitch, next pitch, next pitch.”
Everyone has a story. Vogt was studying hierarchical dynamics and Chris Farley. Kwan was doubting himself without understanding just how good he can be. Ramirez was back and forth from Cleveland to Triple-A, bouncing from position to position, before he became too good to send down and then too good to believe. Lively left South Korea and signed with the Cincinnati Reds, with whom he faced the reality of being a Triple-A pitcher at age 30 and 31.
The way Lively tells it, he had a heart-to-heart, Ben to Ben. He told himself, “All right, dude, you either figure this out now or you’re going to be fishing a lot sooner than you thought you were.” Figuring it out consisted mostly of “stepping on the gas pedal. I just stayed on that mindset, and the only thing that stuck in my head was, ‘If anything bad happens, f— it. Let’s go.'”
Lively is 32, with his foot still on the pedal. He isn’t a full-time fisherman, and his team-leading eight wins and 3.58 ERA mean he probably won’t be anytime soon. He is averaging 5.5 innings per start, which doesn’t sound like much until you look around and see that he and Bibee are tied for the team lead. Lively lives for the sound of victory: loud, cacophonous, to the uninitiated even a bit angry. “The coolest thing about baseball is having music on in the clubhouse after wins,” Lively says. “There’s nothing cooler.”
The Guardians won just one game in a four-game series against the division rival Royals. It came on the last Saturday in June, and it came in large part because hulking rookie Jhonkensy Noel — dubbed “Big Christmas” by Vogt — hit a two-run homer that left the ballpark so fast (115 mph) nobody, including Noel and the league’s replay cameras, could tell that it was foul.
After the game, as Vogt spoke to a small media contingent outside the entrance to the clubhouse, Duke Dumont’s “Red Light, Green Light” (yes, I had to look it up) throbbed through the room. The bass pounded at the threshold of feeling, and Big Christmas ran through a tunnel of human happiness.
It sounded like victory, and in a lot of ways red light/green light — the children’s game, not the song — is the perfect metaphor for a 162-game season. It’s the pinnacle of simplicity: You just keep going, pedal to the metal, until someone either tells you to stop or kicks you out.