The Guardians sure left an impression on their new manager while he was coaching with the Mariners last season.
“So I was with Seattle last year, and we played the Guardians seven out of the first 10 games of the year, and they kicked our butts,” Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said on The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima on Tuesday morning. “I remember leaving (and thinking), ‘That’s a good baseball team. They do the little things right. They play hard. They throw strikes. They catch the ball.’”
Vogt was officially named the Guardians’ new manager on Nov. 6, just more than a month after longtime manager Terry Francona retired after leading Cleveland for 11 seasons.
The 39-year-old Vogt is just a couple years removed from a playing career that ended after the 2022 season. He spent the 2023 season as the Mariners’ bullpen coach. A former catcher, Vogt had a 10-year MLB playing career, which included a pair of All-Star seasons in Oakland in 2015 and 2016.
He’s early in his tenure in Cleveland and his first spring training as a manager hasn’t even started, but Vogt has a vision for what he wants to change. He wants to help his team produce more power, as the Guardians ranked last in MLB with 124 homers in 2023. They were 27th with a .695 OPS.
“For me coming into this, I think what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get our guys to hit the ball harder, impact the baseball more,” Vogt said. “It’s teaching guys, especially with these younger players, ‘Hey, when it’s a 2-0 count, take a shot. I don’t care if you swing and miss at a slider in the dirt 2-0. I want you trying to do damage.’ And really helping them understanding trying to impact the baseball, it’s OK to swing and miss before two strikes. That’s OK. We’ve got to take some shots to hit the ball in the gap. Getting our guys to kind of hit for a little more power (is a goal). We have a lot of power potential on this roster.”
The Guardians are coming off a 76-86 season. Prior to that, they had reached the playoffs five times in the past seven seasons.
“Our expectation is to win the World Series,” Vogt said. “It always will be. If you don’t show up to spring training believing you can win the World Series, you might as well not show up. If we all do our job and we all play well and we do the little things right, we’re going to be right in contention. And I think we have the group that can do it. It’s going to take a lot of work, and it’s going to take some guys have really good years.”