Welcome to The Opener, where every weekday morning during the regular season you’ll get a fresh, topical column to start your day from one of SI.com’s MLB writers.
It was at 4:02 p.m. CT on Tuesday afternoon that Guardians rookie outfielder Steven Kwan did the unthinkable: he swung at a pitch and missed. Except not really—the Cleveland social media team just said that he did, as some sort of clever joke. The real seismic event occurred the next day—except not really, depending on your definition of the word “whiff.”
Kwan’s bat-to-ball skills are so elite that he actually made contact on his first career swinging strike, foul tipping a ball into the catcher’s mitt in his first plate appearance on Wednesday against the Reds. The official ruling of a swing and a miss begs the question of what even is a miss if the batter, you know, doesn’t actually miss the ball.
