Schwarber ranked among the slowest 6% of runners in MLB this season, but his trademark power (Schwarbombs!) and on-base percentage give the Philadelphia Phillies an unfair advantage at the top of their lineup
PHILADELPHIA — The Phillies are one win away from advancing to the National League Championship Series for the second consecutive season, even as their catalyst has stayed mostly silent at the plate.
Philadelphia bludgeoned the best team in baseball on Wednesday night, exploding for 10 runs, 11 hits and a whopping six home runs in a 10–2 win over the Atlanta Braves in Game 3 of the NLDS. The Phillies even added two stare downs from Bryce Harper as he rounded the bases. Curiously, the man who has led the team in home runs in each of the past two seasons — 93 total, with an NL-best 46 last year, and 47 this year, the second most in the NL — wasn’t part of the longball parade at Citizens Bank Park.
Kyle Schwarber went 0-for-4 with a strikeout before reaching base via hit by pitch in his final plate appearance. Over the first three games of the Division Series, he’s just 2-for-13 with one extra-base hit. This only makes the Phillies that much more dangerous as they try to close out the Braves, who won an MLB-best 104 games this season but are on the brink of elimination entering Thursday night’s Game 4 in Philadelphia.
Schwarber’s propensity for going yard is historically great. He averages one home run every 13.69 at bats. That ranks sixth among all players with at least 3,000 career plate appearances, a top-10 list that includes four Hall of Famers, three MVP-winners, Mark McGwire and, amusingly, Joey Gallo. More to the point: Schwarber is due. He hasn’t homered in his last 25 at-bats dating back to Sept. 30. In last year’s playoffs, he went homerless in his first 21 at-bats before going yard six times during the final two rounds of the postseason.
Lest you mistake the 30-year-old outfielder/DH for a traditional power hitter, he might be the most unusual leadoff hitter in baseball.
Schwarber has been at the top of the Phillies’ lineup since June 2. At the time, Philadelphia was six games under .500 and wallowing in fourth place. Schwarber wasn’t doing any better himself. He was batting .160 and striking out in nearly 30% of his plate appearances, hardly the production you’d want at the top of the order.
But manager Rob Thomson was looking for a way to ignite the club, and Schwarber had thrived batting first last season. (He was only moved to the heart of the order to start this season because the Phillies had acquired shortstop and prototypical leadoff man Trea Turner during the offseason.)
The Phillies lost that first night with Schwarber batting leadoff before rattling off two six-game winning streaks over the next 16 days, with another win sandwiched between the two losses in the middle of the surge. Over those 16 games, Schwarber went 17-for-63 (.270) with seven home runs and a 1.061 OPS, earning him a permanent stay atop the lineup.
“There’s a fear factor there when he steps to the plate as the first batter of the game,” Thomson said of Schwarber during that stretch. “It puts the other team on guard.”
In true leadoff at-bats to start games this season, Schwarber slashed .241/.389/.667 with a 19.4% walk rate. He also hit 11 leadoff home runs, a feat that has been done only nine times in MLB history and one that is more impressive considering Schwarber didn’t become the full-time leadoff man until June. Only Brady Anderson in 1996 hit at least that many leadoff home runs (12, in Anderson’s case) in fewer games (102) than Schwarber’s 108.
“I love it,” Phillies righthander Aaron Nola said this week of Schwarber batting first. “How many times have you seen him hit a leadoff home run and we're up 1-0, right? He's not a guy who gets on and steals bags and stuff like that, but he can hit the ball out at any time. I think that's tough for a pitcher, especially to lead off a game.”
For much of baseball history, a leadoff man would put the other team on guard by slapping singles and swiping second. Think Cardinals legend Lou Brock in the 1967 World Series, tormenting Red Sox pitchers with seven steals, a Fall Classic record that he would repeat the following year against the Tigers.
Modern leadoff hitters are built more in the mold of Rickey Henderson, speedsters with power who take their walks and hit for a relatively high average. Look no further than the top of the lineups on the three other NLDS teams: Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr., Mookie Betts of the Dodgers, and Diamondbacks rookie Corbin Carroll.
Schwarber, meanwhile, is a burly three-true outcomes king who ranks among the slowest 6% of runners in baseball this season, according to Baseball Savant. He stole a career-high 10 bases last season, and added three more in last year’s playoffs, including the one in the World Series that famously won everyone in the U.S. a free taco from Taco Bell. But prior to those 13 swipes, Schwarber had stolen just 12 bases total over the previous seven regular seasons. This year, he went 0-for-2 on stolen base attempts.
“He's not the Rickey Henderson-typical leadoff guy,” Thomson said. “But he's so effective in that spot.”
What makes Schwarber such a good, if unorthodox, leadoff batter?
In the words of Jonah Hill’s Moneyball character, baseball analyst Peter Brand: “He gets on base.”
Indeed, despite his .197 batting average this season, Schwarber finished with a .343 on-base percentage thanks to his career-high 17.5% walk rate. His unique skill set at the top of the lineup made him the only Phillies player — and just one of eight in the majors this season — to score at least 100 runs while driving in at least 100 runs.
“As we turn the lineup over, guys at the end of the lineup, they get on base and now we've got this power threat coming,” Thomson said this week. “So not only has he scored a lot of runs, but he's created a lot of runs.”
Or, as outfielder Brandon Marsh, who batted in the eighth or ninth spot 71 times this regular season, puts it: “We know Kyle is gonna put one up over the McDonald's sign. My job is to get on first so he can do that.”
Power has always been Schwarber’s most tantalizing tool, and he’s deployed it in every MLB postseason round and then some: NL Wild Card Game (2015), NLDS (2015), NLCS (2017, 2022), AL Wild Card Game (2021), ALDS (2021), ALCS (2021), World Series (2022) and the World Baseball Classic championship game (2023).
One of the most fascinating things about Schwarber’s power is how he generates it. He is strong, but he is hardly among the biggest players in baseball. His official listing is 6 feet and 229 pounds, though that might be giving him an extra inch or two. (If the Automated Ball-Strike System becomes the strike zone in the majors during his career, as it is in the minors, we might get a chance to find out his exact height, as Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs reported last month.)
“He really creates a lot of power from his lower half, working into the ground,” says Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long. “His hip torque is tremendously fast, and that's what creates bat speed.”
Long says Schwarber can trigger and snap his hips so well because he has such a strong core and lower half. Catcher Garrett Stubbs says it more bluntly: “He’s got a great ass.”
However you describe his assets, Schwarber uses them efficiently. He does not have a big load or swing. Standing in a slight crouch and resting his bat near his back shoulder, the lefty rocks subtly as the pitch approaches and unloads into the baseball. He doesn’t have a leg kick or any dramatic arm movements, allowing him to let the ball get deeper before deciding to swing. His swing is so compact that he wastes no energy as he transfers the force from his sturdy body through the ball.
When it comes to advanced metrics, Schwarber is profiled as an above average to great player based on his chase rate, walk rate, hard-hit rate, barrel rate and average exit velocity. Including the postseason, he has hit 65 home runs at least 430 feet, more than all but three other players since 2015.
“People always ask me why, or how far, or things like that,” Schwarber says of his dingers — aka Schwarbombs, which have become something of folklore in Philly to the point that Wawa, the regional convenience store, has a Schwarbomb drink. “And, you know, I don't have the answer. I only know that I'm going out there and I'm trying to put on a quality plate appearance and trying to put the barrel of the bat on the ball.”
The literal definition of a Schwarbomb, the home run not the drink, according to outfielder Nick Castellanos is, “Kyle Schwarber hitting a ball over the fence.” However, the Castellanos version doesn’t account for the majestic destruction of Schwarber’s most towering blasts. The way Marsh explains it, a true Schwarbomb is not just observed but felt, inspiring a sense of awe in even the most powerful of players.
“Do you remember the one he hit off Darvish last year in San Diego?,” Marsh says. “Dude, you saw Bryce’s face after it, right? That's a Schwarbomb. When you see dudes like Harper that are amazed like that, that’s a Schwarbomb.”
“I admire all of that guy’s homers,” Marsh adds. “But when Harper drops his jaw like that and is shocked, speechless like that, that's a Schwarbomb.”
That Schwarbomb off Padres ace Yu Darvish was the 488-foot blast in Game 1 of last year’s NLCS in San Diego that snapped the homerless streak that began postseason. Hurlers beware.
Most starting pitchers will tell you that it’s crucial to begin the game with a first-pitch strike. But when it comes to facing Schwarber, one of the worst things they can do is groove him a fastball just to get the game underway.