A decade into his time in the bigs, Kyle Schwarber is having what you might call “a career year,” which is pretty impressive for a slugger who’d already put together quite the career ever since he was drafted No. 4 overall by the Cubs way back in 2014. At 32 years old, Schwarber is currently showing career highs in slugging percentage, OPS+, and runs driven in; with a full month left to go, he’s just two homers short of his personal best of 47, set two seasons ago.
He’s probably going to become just the second Phillie ever to hit 50 homers in a season. Only 13 Phillies have ever hit more total homers for the team – and he’s been there just four seasons. He’s the only player ever to hit at least 38 homers in each of his first four seasons with any team. To say that the four-year deal he inked with Philadelphia ahead of the 2022 season has worked out is something of an understatement.
That’s all great. It’s helping the Phillies win. It’s not what we’re doing today. As it turns out, and this is all related to the very good stuff above, Schwarber is doing something that might be just as impressive, because for a long time it seemed like it simply might not be possible: He’s hitting the ball hard more often than Aaron Judge.
If it’s not clear how noteworthy that is, it’s because it hasn’t happened in a full season even one time since Judge made his debut. Way back in 2016, then-Mariner Nelson Cruz led the sport in hard-hit rate, in part because Judge spent most of the year in the Minors before a late-season call-up. The next year, Judge came up, hit 52 homers, and established himself as baseball’s preeminent slugging god. (The sluggers he topped that year in hard-hit rate: Khris Davis, Joey Gallo, and Alex Avila, in case you’re wondering how long ago this was.)
Judge led in 2017, and 2018, and 2019, and ultimately in each of the seven full seasons played between ’17 and ’24, which is another way of saying “every full season of his entire career.” Until now. Until Schwarber.
While Judge has been slowed recently by an elbow injury, this isn’t exactly a “down” year either, not when he’s still in a neck-and-neck race with Cal Raleigh for the AL MVP award. (He’s slid all the way down to fifth-best in hard-hit. He’s still extremely good at this.)
That means it’s less about Judge ceding the crown than it is about Schwarber taking it, upping his hard-hit rate from 49% two years ago to 56% last year to nearly 61% this year. That means that six out of every 10 balls he connects with leave his bat with at least 95 mph or more, and if you care more about the outcomes than the exit velocity, realize that our handy metrics context chart shows you that hitting it hard leads directly to great outcomes – a hard-hit ball is worth about 260 points of batting average and nearly 700 points of slugging over a softly-hit one.
You want to do it a lot. Schwarber does it a lot.
Schwarber was of course already a powerful hitter, since this is his seventh 30-homer season already, but what he’s done this year is something else entirely – to the point that of the 2,000 or so player seasons since 2015 where a batter has taken at least 400 plate appearances, this particular Schwarber season is the fourth-best in hard-hit rate. It’s better than anything Shohei Ohtani has done, or Giancarlo Stanton, or Juan Soto, or absolutely anyone other than multiple Judge years.
Best hard-hit rate seasons, 2015-pres. (Min 400 PA)
He is, as a bonus, doing this with his lowest strikeout rate since 2019, his last great season as a Cub.
So: what’s different this year, as opposed to the last several? How does an already-excellent slugger take a bigger step up? It’s not bat speed, because even though he swings one of the 10 fastest bats in the Majors, that was true in the previous seasons as well. It’s not even really about lefty pitching, where he’s shown almost no platoon split this year after years of struggle, because he basically did that last year, too.
It’s not about chasing less, as that’s been consistent for a few years, or being aggressive on the first pitch, or trying to pull it in the air more, because none of that is terribly different from other times in his Philadelphia tenure.
It is, almost certainly, an oversimplification to pick one reason out of many. But we can’t help but highlight this fact: It’s about fastballs, particularly the four-seam variety. Schwarber, like most good hitters, has long feasted on four-seamers, because his fast bat allows him to not be beat by high velocity. This year, however … is something else entirely.
Schwarber has done so much damage against them that the +27 in the Run Value column there isn’t just the best by any batter against any pitch type, though it’s also that. It’s the best by a massive gap over Juan Soto in second place, and his +17 runs of value compiled against four-seamers.
If Schwarber was good against four-seamers in the past, then he’s elite against them this year. Consider this: Schwarber’s slugging percentage against every single kind of pitch not including four-seamers – you name it here, we’re into sliders and sinkers and changeups and eephuses and whatever else – has increased by 15 points from last year, which is to say, “barely at all.”
Against four-seamers, though: he’s added 260 points of slug. In the heart of the zone against them, he’s slugging a wild 1.277, which is merely the third-best of any player-season going way back to the start of pitch tracking in 2008. (Judge, in 2017, tops the list, unsurprisingly.)
That’s not all of the story, but it is most of it. (That, and that you might not want to throw him fastballs down the middle.)
Schwarber isn’t just having a good year, he’s having a great year. He’s one of the very, very few players over the last decade who can say they’re hitting the ball harder than the great Aaron Judge. It’s a big part of why he’s mashing so much – and why the Phillies are in first place.
