Fun young players on good teams just get more attention. In many respects, the circumstances surrounding Schwarber were similar to those that precipitated Puigmania in 2013. I’m as guilty as anyone, riding the Schwarber hype train since he was a college sophomore, but maybe expectations for Schwarber have always been at least somewhat unrealistic.Ī year after being selected fourth overall, Schwarber arrived in the majors in the heat of a pennant race, as a power hitter with a distinctive name and body, playing for a big-market team that gets enormous media attention. It’s also entirely possible that we’ve been overrating Schwarber as a prospect. Only three times since 1901 has a qualified hitter posted a sub-.200 BABIP, and if Schwarber got to 502 plate appearances with a BABIP of .193, his would be the lowest in major league history. Luck factors into the BABIP drop as well - as a fly ball hitter who can’t outrun continental drift, Schwarber is never going to be a high-BABIP guy, but nobody’s true talent BABIP is that low. This year he’s 67th in HR/FB% out of 211 players with 200 or more PA. Some of that has to do with being a stereotype of a beefy Midwesterner and playing your home games at Wrigley, where the wind is strong and the outfield walls are about seven feet from home plate, but it’s possible he was also getting lucky. In 2015, Schwarber was tied for 11th out of 352 players with 200 or more PA in HR/FB%. His BABIP and HR/FB% rates seem to bear that out. Perhaps something similar is going on with Schwarber. Ben Lindbergh wrote earlier this year about how a similar change in Mookie Betts’s game made last year’s MVP runner-up a worse player during his long strikeout-less streak, but the short version is that unless you’re a young Albert Pujols, there’s a trade-off between power and contact rate. There isn’t much difference, but he’s making more contact and not hitting the ball as hard. Here is a selection of Schwarber’s 20 stats, all from FanGraphs.
It’s a little weird to say this about a player whose young career has already produced so much intrigue, but both the causes and long-term effects of Schwarber’s slump might not be as dramatic as many have feared. Then, Schwarber became the Millennial Kirk Gibson by hitting .412 on one leg in the World Series after he’d missed the previous six months with a torn ACL, the result of a gruesome outfield collision with Dexter Fowler.
Assuming that the book’s still out on Schwarber and Maikel Franco, the worst player on the list is probably Austin Kearns, who still had a 12-year big league career. Mike Trout shows up on that list three times, and Bryce Harper, Albert Pujols, The Mighty Giancarlo Stanton, and Carlos Correa all show up twice. Since 2001, there have been 27 seasons in which a player aged 22 or younger posted a 130 OPS+ or better in at least 200 PA. Schwarber was very good as a rookie in 2015: a 130 OPS+ in 273 plate appearances at age 22. If Schwarber’s timing or mechanics or even his confidence is off, playing every day in Iowa will give him a chance to fix the problem without hurting the Cubs, who are 1.5 games back of Milwaukee in the NL Central. He’ll have a chance to get back into a groove against inferior pitching, in a league where winning doesn’t matter, and in the relative quiet of a state where only Moonlight Graham and Yasiel Puig have ever had a good time. Sending Schwarber to Iowa is the equivalent of rebooting him.
So here we are, at the “Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?” part of the Schwarber reconstruction. Strictly from an offensive production standpoint, it’s not as bad as it looks, but for a player like Schwarber, who not only needs his bat to cover enormous deficiencies in the field, but also was supposed to play a key role in Chicago’s title defense, it’s not good enough.
Last Thursday, the Chicago Cubs sent struggling outfielder Kyle Schwarber down to Triple-A Iowa, a transaction both GM Jed Hoyer and manager Joe Maddon explained by using the word “reset.” That’s a good word to use, because through the first three months of 2017, Schwarber’s hit like a computer that has too many background processes running: .171/.295/.378, good for a 76 OPS+.
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