The Guardians Have Gone Retro—And It’s Working

Stephen Vogt may be one of the youngest managers in MLB—with the youngest roster—but his Cleveland team is off to a sizzling start thanks to a throwback style of baseball.

First-time manager Vogt has Cleveland atop the AL Central and with the second-best record in the league through 37 games. / Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports

One of the better stories of the first quarter of the season, the first-place Cleveland Guardians are not re-inventing baseball. They are playing a throwback version of it. With the way their hitters put the ball in play and run the bases and how their pitchers thrive with the lowest fastball velocity in the game, Cleveland is to baseball what vinyl is to an audiophile.

Retro is cool. And it’s working. Despite the youngest roster in the American League and second-lowest payroll, the Guardians have the second-best record in the league at 24–13. You must go back 23 years to find a Cleveland team that jumped to a better 37-game start.

If you want an apt visual for the Guardians’ throwback style, check out manager Stephen Vogt during any game. Despite never having managed before, Vogt gives the impression of a seasoned chess grandmaster. He is calm, studious and observant, typically seated with nothing in his hands. Most obviously in today’s data-filled game, Vogt is not seen rifling through binders or studying computer cheat-sheet printouts taped to the dugout wall.

“I watch the game and trust my coaches,” Vogt says. “As a manager you know the bullpen and possible pinch-hit situations. That’s really my area. I make little notes on my [lineup] card that I bring into the game with me for game situations, but outside of that I try to do all of my studying ahead of time.”

Vogt, 39 and two years removed from playing with one year of coaching under his belt, was the youngest and least experienced of the eight managers hired last winter. He is thriving despite taking over from future Hall of Famer Terry Francona and inheriting a team that last year lost 86 games and hit the fewest home runs. 

When Cleveland president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti announced the hiring of Vogt, he dropped some corporate-speak, explaining, “First and foremost, we were looking for a collaborative partner. We were looking for someone who is a caring connector and finally a self-confident learner.”

Translation: Vogt is a cool dude whom people like being around. He engenders trust. A former catcher, he also played 10 years—only two as a full-time player—with six teams, the kind of hard-knock journey that prepared him for the dugout.

“All my experiences as a player, being a catcher, all those things helped me,” he says. “But I don’t want to discount how much playing for the managers and the coaches that I did helped me become who I am. I asked more questions than probably the average player did. I needed the help. I wasn’t the most talented player.

“Picking the brains of the managers I played for, I asked them a ton of questions. ‘Hey, why did we do this?’ or, ‘Why did we do that?’ And it wasn’t me questioning. I wanted to learn why we did this. They were all great to me, putting up with my questions and giving me good answers.

“I’m myself and I do this job my way, but I’ve taken a lot of pieces from the people I worked with in the past.”

How about this roster of his former managers: Joe Maddon, Bob Melvin, Craig Counsell, Bruce Bochy, Torey Lovullo, Brian Snitker and Mark Kotsay. Vogt spent last season as bullpen coach in Seattle for Scott Servais, a job he says helped him prepare for the LSAT equivalent for the modern manager: pitcher usage. How is he doing? He is running the second-best bullpen in MLB (2.44 ERA). He has forged an atmosphere in which relievers know they can pitch at any time and hitters can move around the lineup.

“That’s the Joe Maddon in me,” he says. “It’s about how do we beat the starter? That’s how we construct our lineup.”

The Guardians began the year by losing their ace, Shane Bieber, and they don’t have much star power. It takes watching the Guardians play series to series to fully appreciate how his team wins with fundamental baseball.

Besides their excellent bullpen, the Guardians are fourth best in hitting with runners in scoring position, have the sixth-lowest strikeout rate and are rated ninth in defensive runs saved. Their best player is 5-foot-9 and 170 pounds. Steven Kwan was hitting a league-best .353 when he went on the IL this week. Such a wizard with the bat is Kwan that he has swung and missed at only one fastball in the zone all year. (Emerson Hancock of the Mariners, take a bow.)

Is this style sustainable? Yes, because solid fundamental baseball avoids deep slumps. They are 13–8 against winning teams and 6–2 in extra innings. But the most worrisome Jenga piece here—as for most clubs—is the compound effect of not getting length from starting pitchers. Only the Washington Nationals have had fewer quality starts.

No matter what comes, Vogt won’t be ruffled. He always did have that “manager-in-training” aura as a player. His position, his sense of humor, his inquisitiveness and his mentors created this preferred template for a modern manager. 

In another era, managerial wizard Gene Mauch said a manager manages a game three times: before, during and after. Now the front office is involved in the before and after. When asked how he wound down after a game, for instance, Vogt says, “Usually you kind of do a little breakdown with the front office, bench coach … just go through the steps. We don’t really talk about in-game decisions. We just kind of talk about tomorrow.”

And then?

“I go home and usually I have a decent time going to sleep,” he says. “And then about 2:30 in the morning, the seventh inning will pop into my head, about 3:30 the eighth and 4:30 the ninth. You never turn off. That’s probably the thing I’ve really learned the most—is that there is no turning it off. You’re on.

“You’re always thinking. You have 26 guys. You’ve got 19 staff members. You’ve got 80 people on your mind 24–7. So, there’s really not a whole lot of time to turn it off.”

I remind him the game has gotten so much bigger. The layers of personnel. The media. The responsibilities.

“I love it,” he says. “I’m having an absolute blast. The staff, the front office, everybody here in Cleveland has been great. Just phenomenal people helping me out. So, I feel like I’m in good hands.”

Good months can happen to even bad teams. The Nationals lost 91 games last year and finished in last place, but they did go 17–11 in August. The true test for a team and its manager is the length of the season. One hundred sixty-two games do not lie. Vogt is only 37 games into his first such test. In the meantime, if you want a quarterly report card on how this rookie manager is doing, the answer is right in front of you. Just watch how the Guardians play baseball.