The Cleveland Guardians started last week with a bang, and ended it with a whimper.
Last Monday saw them beat up All-Star pitcher Joe Ryan as Cleveland would mash six home runs off of him over the course of 4 innings. The Guards would add another homer off of the Minnesota Twins’ bullpen on their way to a 13-4 victory.
They would follow that success with another comfortable 5-2 victory the next night against the Twins. At this point, feelings were largely positive, and even more positive when the team announced that Jose Ramirez would be activated before Wednesday’s tilt. Back-to-back wins against a division rival and the reappearance of the team’s franchise player should bode for the highest of returns.
Except what has followed have been five games of frustration. The Guardians dropped the final two games of their series vs. Minnesota at Progressive Field. They’ve since been swept by the American League-best Tampa Bay Rays in St. Petersburg over the weekend.
There has been some tough all-around baseball along the way. The Guards committed three errors and allowed six unearned runs in Wednesday’s loss against the Twinkies. But what has been even more noticeable is how lethargic the Guardians offense has been in the last few days.
As I write this on Monday evening, Cleveland series opener in Cincinnati has been postponed due to rain. That means they still have will not have scored in three days, having been shutout in each of their last two contests. Additionally, the Guardians have not scored more than three runs since last Wednesday. They’ve scored three or fewer runs in six of ten games since the All-Star Break. Their record over the same period has been 3-7. They’ve gone from being tied for the lead in the AL Central at the break to now 2.5 games behind. They clutch the last Wildcard spot in the AL by a mere one game over the aforementioned Twins.
Overall this season, the Guardians offense has been a weak point. They rate 25th in baseball offensively by weighted Runs Created+. If you’re not into that type of new-fangled stat, just know they are even worse by more basic measures. Cleveland is 29th in runs scored this season. They’re 26th in home runs and 24th in On Base %. No matter how you slice it, the offense hasn’t been very good.
And that’s two years running. The Guards were 28th in wRC+ last year, 28th in Runs, 20th in homers and 29th in OBP. Again, by nearly all of these measures over the last two seasons they have been in the bottom third of the sport in offensive potency. These struggles have some fans (particularly online, of course) calling for the firing of Hitting Coach Grant Fink.
Fink has been the team’s Hitting Coach for the last year and a half after working his way up through the Guardians organization over the last decade. At face value, you can lay the offensive ineptitude that Cleveland has displayed at his feet. In the 18 months that he has been the most prominent hitting-related instructor on the Guardians staff, a lot has been left to be desired.
His predecessor was Chris Valaika. Valaika was the primary Hitting Coach for the Guardians under manager Terry Francona and then Stephen Vogt for three seasons, 2022-2024. While no one would confuse the Guardians’ lineup for Murderer’s Row in any of those seasons, in two of those campaigns Cleveland was a perfectly league average offense by wRC+. They would finish 15th and 14th in Runs in all of MLB in those seasons as well. Lo and behold, the team made the playoffs in both of those years, getting as far as the ALCS in 2024.
While there was room for improvement, a combination of a league-average offense with Cleveland’s reputation as one of the best pitching organizations in the sport was an effective and repeatable recipe. One would think then that when Valaika decided to leave to join Francona’s new staff in Cincinnati for 2025, Guardians fans may not have been devastated, but at least they’d be somewhat disappointed to lose out on someone that was helping cook that recipe. However, while I can’t portray the opinion of all fans, there was happiness expressed by some of the fan base when Valaika departed as well.
Valaika was preceded by Ty Van Burkleo. Van Burkleo was the primary Hitting Coach for Cleveland from the beginning of Francona’s tenure here in 2013 through 2021 (with a exception of most of the 2020 pandemic season). He was in the role for the Indians’ World Series run in 2016 and three other playoff appearances as well. Cleveland was 8th in wRC+ between 2013 and 2021. They finished worse than 16th in the stat only once during that time period, and that was in the small sample 2020 season where he wasn’t even with the team. They often found themselves in the top 10 in offense. And yet, fans were clamoring for his departure in his final years on the staff.
Three Hitting Coaches. Three different levels of success. Same fan sentiment. People in this city love the idea of firing the hitting coach nearly as much as they love the idea of starting whoever the backup quarterback is. Said a different way, if you’re the Guardians’ Hitting Coach and someone hasn’t called for your job yet, just wait five minutes.
Some fans seem to have this idea that the Hitting Coach wields the power to turn dreadful at bats into automatic home runs. This isn’t football. The hitting coach isn’t an Offensive Coordinator who is shaping a game plan by deciding which personnel is on the field based on down and distance and then calling a play.
This is just my opinion, but hitting coaches matter in the sense they are part of a support coaching staff for the manager. They likely hold pre-game meetings to help players go over the scouting report and help break down the hitters’ data both in the cage and in the game. They help players prep, but once the lights come on, its all on the player to perform.
That’s it. That’s the role. No play calling. No telling a hitter to “swing now” or “don’t swing” or “try to pull the ball” or “this is going to be a change-up”. It doesn’t work this way. It shouldn’t. It would be a detriment. Hitting a ball being fired at you at 100 mph from 60 feet away is hard enough without having a coach in your ear after every pitch. And while I’m being hyperbolic, I’m trying to make a point. There is only so much that a hitting coach controls, and that’s very little.
This goes without mentioning that while in the past teams only had one main hitting coach for the Major League club, teams now have several hitting coaches. For instance, the Guardians have two Assistant Hitting Coaches as well as a Hitting Analyst on their staff, all of whom work with the players. Also, in 2026 many players, regardless of the team they play for, have their own personal hitting coach not related to their organization.
What I am trying to convey is the dilution of impact that an individual like Grant Fink specifically has on a lineup of hitters. I am not saying he is entirely insignificant, but I am saying his impact is a tiny piece of what makes a Guardians’ hitter have a good at bat or a bad at bat. When you look at things through this lens, I think specifically calling for Grant Fink’s job is rather silly. As outsiders, we don’t have any knowledge of if Fink has any bearing whatsoever on the downturn Kyle Manzardo has taken this season, or if he has anything to do with Bo Naylor struggling so much that he’s ended up at Columbus. I can say with a pretty high level of certainly that the didn’t personally break Ramirez’s hamate bone.
That isn’t to say that there should be no accountability for the clear regression that the Guardians’ have seen at the plate over the last half-decade or that we shouldn’t talk about it. In fact, I’d like to offer a suggestion on how we got here rather than the overly simplified ideas of “Must be the hitting coach’s fault!” or “The Dolans are cheap!” (as if the latter wasn’t the case in 2017 when the Indians were 3rd in offense).
Organizationally, Cleveland made one big misstep following their accomplishments in the mid to late 2010s. My perception is that the front office saw the success they were able to create in athletic, smaller-in-stature, middle-of-the-field players and wanted to use that as a formula. Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez turned into stars for Cleveland. One of them still is. Neither of them were expected to hit 30 home runs in a season when they were playing in the minors, but to the players and the development team’s credit, both have shown that level of power while still showing the ability to put bat to ball at a high rate.
While Cleveland couldn’t clone Lindor and Ramirez, they wanted to replicate them as much as possible. They wanted to take young, athletic talent that was capable of putting bat to ball and teach them to pull and lift the ball in the air. They thought they could mold this type of player to hit for power, and they thought this because they had proof of concept already.
Since 2020, Cleveland’s top prospect lists have been rife with players that fit this mold: Bo Naylor, Tyler Freeman, Brayan Rocchio, Gabriel Arias, Jose Tena, Angel Martinez, Will Brennan and Juan Brito all have come through the Guardians organization in recent years resembling this archetype. So many of them were middle infielders that the Guards’ staff needed to teach them other positions at the Major League level.
A couple of them have worked out. Rocchio seems to finally be coming into his own this season. He’s been hitting clean-up recently (although, that was partially during this most recent lethargy period). Martinez led the Guardians in slugging before going on the Injured List in June. On the other hand, most of these players haven’t stuck with the Guardians or haven’t stuck in the Majors at all after moving on to new teams.
The organization is at fault for this failure, but it isn’t because they couldn’t succeed at teaching hitters to pull the ball in the air. Believe it or not, the Guards rank 3rd in MLB in pulled fly balls this season. The problem is that they are among the bottom teams in Exit Velocity on these pulled fly balls. Driving the ball and hitting extra base hits is not a matter of simply yanking balls in the air, you have to be able to hit them with some baseline level of authority in the first place.
The strategy didn’t work out and they know it. Cleveland has pivoted since. Chase DeLauter is proof in himself. Some consider Ralphy Velazquez the team’s current best prospect and he is a thumping first baseman. The Guardians took power-first hitters in Jace LaViolette and Dean Curley in the first two rounds of the 2025 draft last year.
While I think the failure needs to be recognized, I don’t blame the Team President Chris Antonetti, General Manager Mike Churnoff and the rest of their staff for trying. Baseball teams are always looking for the next competitive edge. Cleveland had thought they had hit on a development strategy that would set them apart. Had they been able to continue to generate players in the ilk of Lindor and Ramirez, that would have been incredible. Quite frankly, that was an avenue they were right to explore given what had transpired. It just didn’t work out. Everyone remembers Research and Development successes. No one remembers the ten other things that got tried and tested and didn’t work.
I commend them for realizing it wasn’t working and moving on. They have held themselves accountable in this way. This organization’s track record is fairly sparkling. They haven’t won the big trophy, but they have been in the running in eight of the last thirteen seasons. They continue to do compete while working with less of a budget than most other teams. Their ability to make chicken salad is outstanding, even if they don’t always get every single ingredient right.
But this also means that when you look at the team’s less than desirable placement in the offensive leader-boards, a lot of this is because of the philosophy from a few years past. We’ve seen Antonetti and company be much more aggressive with their promotion of players like DeLauter and Travis Bazzana, among others, in the last year or so. We are changing from one generation and philosophy to another, and the change is coming at a quicker pace and with decisiveness.
So when someone says that the fix to the Guardians offense is to fire Grant Fink, I disagree. It is not that simple. A successful offense isn’t right around the corner by just replacing the hitting coach. The problem has been deeper than that. It’s been organizational, even philosophical.
The good news is that these problems very well could be on the mend, but it will take time to transfer from one generation of thinking into another. I would trust that the organization can get this right. They’ve already taken the first steps.
Pick-Up Sports Talk: Cleveland 