Tag: oscar gonzalez

First Move For Guardians? Anyone Have New Hitting Coach?

In what figures to be a winter with a lot of changes, including the team’s name, the first move for the Cleveland Guardians was the announcement that hitting coach Ty Van Burkleo will not return for the 2022 season.

You can insert your no-hitter jokes here, and certainly getting held without a hit three times (four times if you count the seven inning effort in Tampa), a Major League record, doesn’t speak well for the person in charge of swinging the bats.

On the other hand, there is the old saying of you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken poop, and it is not like Van Burkleo was working with a bunch of Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez, and Jim Thomes.

The front office gave the hitting coach a bunch of hitters with high strikeout and low walk rates, and generally, that doesn’t lead to have a productive offense. Not knowing the strike zone seems to be poison to the theory many hitting coaches espouse, that of getting your pitch, and do something with it.

Occasionally, it works. For us, Tim Anderson of the White Sox is the poster boy of this. Anderson has never had even a decent strikeout/walk ratio. This season, he hit .309 (806 OPS) despite drawing just 22 walks and fanning 119 times.

By the way, those 22 free passes are the second highest total of his career.

Cleveland has a hitter in their system that shows similar numbers, with more power than Anderson, and we wish we would have seen him in September. That man is Oscar Gonzalez.

Playing at both AA and AAA this season, Gonzalez hit .293 with an 869 OPS despite striking out 112 times (in 504 plate appearances) and drawing just 22 walks. Oh, and he belted 31 home runs too.

Sometimes, hitters have that type hand-eye coordination which allows them to put the bat on the ball, it just has to be near home plate. We’ve heard about guys being “bad ball” hitters, so they do exist.

On the other hand, if you are going have a batting average of say, .230 or less, it’s probably smart to be able to draw some walks, and get on base (read that as avoid making outs).

Now, back to Van Burkleo. As we said, it’s not like he was working with this year’s Astros lineup, and since we aren’t privy to his sessions with the players, we have no idea what he is telling them to do.

What we do know, is for whatever reason, the hitters weren’t buying in. The pupils had tuned out the teacher, and sometimes, that happens.

And we have always maintained we would like to see some different voices on Terry Francona’s coaching staff as well. There have been very few changes to the staff since Francona took over in 2013. At times, the message can get stale.

That said, we love Tito’s basic philosophy of the squad going out there everyday and trying to win the game played that day. It’s really all the team can do.

So, a philosophy change with a new hitting instructor is welcome. However, if the front office isn’t going to get some better hitters, we doubt we will see a huge improvement in terms of the hitting next year.

The two things go hand in hand.

Why Not Take A Look At Gonzalez, Kwan Before Season Ends?

It is not a secret that the Cleveland Indians’ offense needs to score more runs, and unfortunately consistency is not in their arsenal.

In two of their last three games, the Tribe has scored double digits, getting a dozen against the Twins on Wednesday night and 11 yesterday vs. the Yankees. That’s the good news.

However, in the last 11 games, Cleveland has been shutout four times, including being no-hit for the third this season, the first time in MLB history a team has done that. Included in that span, besides the no-no, the Indians were one hit, three hit, and four hit.

That’s a whole lot of ineptitude.

On an every night basis, interim skipper DeMarlo Hale trots out a lineup with as many as five or six batters who would at best be called mediocre. Is that in the name of development? Because at this point, we think most people would say players like Oscar Mercado or Bradley Zimmer aren’t going to become players who hit well enough to be in there everyday.

Now, what if we told you the organization has two players at AAA who have OPS of over 875 this season in the minor leagues. Wouldn’t you think the organization would like to take a look at these guys as the regular season winds down?

Cleveland is 7th in the American League in home runs, but in 9th in runs scored, mostly because they rank 13th in the league in on base percentage and batting average.

And down at Columbus, the organization has a player who has compiled a .413 on base percentage in 66 games between the AA and AAA levels in 24-year-old Steven Kwan, a fifth round pick in 2018.

A left-handed hitter, in his minor league career he has reached base 38% of the time, but the only year he’s been under .400 was in 2019 at Lynchburg. He hit .337 at Akron this year (950 OPS) and .339 in 15 games with the Clippers.

He also has a little pop as well with 28 extra base hits in 287 plate appearances. The big club has only two players (Myles Straw and Jose Ramirez) who get on base more than 35% of the time, so they could use more hitters who avoid making outs.

They could certainly use an outfielder who hits with power and has a good batting average, and Oscar Gonzalez, who is just 23, certainly fits that bill.

A right-handed bat, Gonzalez has hit .300 with 28 homers and 76 RBIs (886 OPS) in 112 games, 63 of them at the AAA level. He has a .548 slugging percentage and has struck out just (relatively in today’s game) 97 times in 459 plate appearances this season.

As a comparison, Bobby Bradley has fanned over 148 times in four different minor league seasons.

What is Gonzalez’ problem offensively? He simply doesn’t walk. He’s drawn just 21 free passes this season, and that’s a career high! However, he continues to hit for a solid batting average, .276 in Columbus this season, and a lifetime minor league .282 mark.

Although we are a big believer in strikeout/walk ratio as a measure of success in the big leagues, there are guys in the majors who succeed despite not walking. Tim Anderson of the White Sox comes to mind.

Anderson averages 166 strikeouts and 24 walks per season, yet has a career .284 batting average, and won a batting title in 2019, hitting .335. Another weird stat about Anderson is that the year he set a career high in walks (2018 with 30), he had his lowest batting average at .240.

Why didn’t (or won’t) the Indians take a look at these two players, who might have helped the offense because their skill set in the minor leagues seems to be the very thing the parent club could use.

Quite frankly, wouldn’t it make the last two weeks of the season more exciting if we could watch this duo get some big league time instead of seeing players who have been decidedly mediocre for two or three years running.

This organization lives in fear at times, and this is one of those times. Kwan and Gonzalez deserve a shot these last two weeks. It would be good for them and the organization moving forward.