Kyle Schwarber Is Back, Wreaking Havoc
Kyle Schwarber was the show, or at least the story, in last night’s Game Two of the World Series. After five plate appearances in April without a hit — followed by a six-month layoff that prevented him from facing even one major-league pitcher in a game situation — Schwarber has been up to the plate nine times on the biggest stage baseball has to offer. In those nine plate appearances, Schwarber has reached base safely more often than he hasn’t, and has yet to be retired when hitting the ball in play. Last night, his hits proved timely, producing the second and fourth runs for the Chicago Cubs as they evened a series that now heads back to Chicago. How has Cleveland approached him, and how has he responded?
It’s often said at the beginning of spring training that the pitchers are ahead of the hitters; batters don’t yet have their timing back and can have difficulty recognizing pitches. The chart below depicts all 40 pitches Schwarber has seen this postseason, color-coded by the result of the pitch. From Baseball Savant:
Of the 20 or so pitches clearly outside of the box above, Schwarber has offered at just three of them.
One of those swings occurred in the first inning of last night’s game. The pitch was an inside four-seam fastball just off the top of the zone against Trevor Bauer, an offering that he fouled off. He would end that same at-bat by swinging at and missing a pitch in almost the exact same spot, as shown below.
That isn’t necessarily rust. That’s the book on Schwarber. Last season, Schwarber saw 408 four-seam fastballs and he whiffed on 69 of them (16.9%), per Baseball Savant. When the four-seamer was up in the zone, he swung and missed on 41% of his swings and whiffed on 22% of all four-seamers in that area despite many of them appearing outside the strike zone. The chart below from Baseball Savant shows Schwarber’s swings on four-seamers up last season.
Those pink dots are the swings and misses, and they are heavily represented. The green dots are the foul balls, which leaves a remainder of just 16% — that is, the portion of swings resulting in an actual ball in play. Schwarber has struggled to get around on high heat even when he hasn’t spent six months away from the game. His batting average on those pitches last year was .073 (3-for-41), with just two singles and a home run, although he added another home run on an outside fastball from Matt Harvey in the playoffs last season.
As for the other two outside pitches from this World Series at which Schwarber has swung, both were sliders against Andrew Miller. On one, he fouled the pitch off; on the other, he swung and missed, which seems par for the course against Miller’s sliders. Schwarber faced Miller twice, walking his first time up and striking out the second time, both in Game One. Against Miller, Schwarber fared better than most.
Schwarber has taken six called strikes so far, which could be another sign of rust. One of those pitches was a 3-1 sinker in the upper half of the zone and just a little inside of the heart of the plate. It was probably a better pitch to hit than the next pitch from Corey Kluber, which went to Schwarber’s trouble spot.
Of the other five pitches Schwarber took, three were located in the middle of the strike zone, but all occurred in the first pitch of the at-bat. Schwarber has taken the first pitch of an at-bat seven of nine times up, but pounding a pitch in the strike zone to get ahead isn’t necessarily a great strategy, even with an offspeed pitch. In Game Two, Schwarber fouled off the first pitch he saw from Trevor Bauer, a curve, and in the fourth inning of Game One, Kluber tried to sneak a sinker over the heart of the plate.
During the regular season, 146 balls were hit with the same exit velocity (96 mph) and launch angle (27 degrees) as that batted ball. Of those, 52 were hits according to Baseball Savant, including 33 doubles, one triple, and 18 homers. This particular batted ball traveled 378 feet. To get out of the park, it either needed to benefit from a warmer temperature or hug the right-field line more closely.
Of the other two called strikes on Schwarber, one was a slider on the outside corner from Andrew Miller on a 1-0 count, a very understandable take. The other one came on a 2-2 count from Dan Otero. Otero had gotten a whiff on a 1-1 change earlier in the count and set up the 2-2 pitch with a sinker that was just off the outside corner. Otero threw the pitch just a little bit closer to the plate and got the call.
Schwarber didn’t like the call, but replays showed it was a near-perfect pitch over the black of the plate. We’ve shown some of Schwarber’s failures. These have been the exception more than the rule. He has shown a very good grasp of the zone.
Schwarber has that double against Kluber as well as two run-scoring singles, but his most impressive plate appearance might have been one of his two walks. His walk last night against Danny Salazar wasn’t particularly impressive; Salazar had a little bit more difficulty shaking off the rust than Schwarber and the former walked the latter on just four pitches. Schwarber’s plate appearance against Andrew Miller was also impressive. The pitch sequence is shown below.
That might not seem impressive, but that is exactly the same type of pitch sequence that Miller has used to strike out 24 of the 51 batters he has faced in the postseason. Miller has walked just four batters this postseason and Schwarber’s walk was the first that Miller has issued to a left-handed batter since arriving in Cleveland.
Miller seems frustrated by his execution here, perhaps locating the ball a bit lower than he would have preferred. When facing Schwarber again in the next inning, however, he showed slightly more respect for Schwarber’s knowledge of the strike zone after getting to two strikes. (Miller also might have simply executed a bit better).
This pitch is an example of Miller just doing what he does best, and Schwarber couldn’t get a hold of it.
We’ve taken a bit of a meandering tour of Schwarber’s plate appearances without discussing his hits last night. In his first plate appearance against Trevor Bauer, Schwarber was aggressive, swinging at the first two pitches in the zone, taking a high fastball well out of the zone before whiffing on the next pitch. Perhaps hoping to capitalize on Schwarber’s aggressiveness, or perhaps due to Bauer’s inability to throw strikes, Bauer threw three straight balls to Schwarber before grooving a 3-0 pitch down the middle. Schwarber stayed aggressive in the strike zone.
That ball was a hit 65% of the time this season based on exit velocity and launch angle, per Baseball Savant, so it wasn’t luck-induced by any stretch of the imagination. Schwarber’s other hit was less impressive, a hard grounder hammered up the middle that made its way through the drawn-in infield with a runner on third, but nevertheless did reveal a solid approach by Schwarber. After taking strike one and swinging through a cutter for strike two, Schwarber laid off the high-and-inside strike, and then on 1-2, needing to make contact with the runner at third and one out, Schwarber took an outside pitch back up the middle.
There you have it. The full Kyle Schwarber experience. He has shown good knowledge of the strike zone and been aggressive with pitches to hit. As the four strikeouts indicate, there are still some flaws in his swing and he can be gotten out. Eric Longenhagen took two looks at Schwarber in the Arizona Fall League and concluded that Schwarber’s bat and feel for the strike zone were sufficient to help the Cubs, regardless of the layoff. The Cubs agreed and have now benefited from that risky decision. Schwarber’s comeback has been remarkable, and there’s no reason to think he can’t make a difference in Chicago, even in fewer plate appearances.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
I believe Schwarber’s walk off Miller was only the 2nd walk Miller has given up to lefties in 2016. Great post, thanks Craig!
Yep. I was wrong.
Schwarber is super human. Expect him to take the field in at least one of the three games in Chicago. My bet is game 4 and then go from there.
Silly medical professionals. I’ll revise my prediction. Schwarber will hit a walk off bomb in game 5 to clinch the series!
(And I’m rooting for the tribe!)
“His walk last night against Danny Salazar wasn’t particularly impressive”
…the fact that each guy was playing at all is pretty damn impressive. that makes it quite the match-up.
2 singles off a #5 starter. WREAKING HAVOK.
Don’t forget the booming double, that just missed leaving the yard, off of one of the best starters in the AL as well as drawing a walk against the best reliever in baseball who also happens to be left handed. If you’re going for snark, at least make it fair minded snark.
Remember when Mike Trout couldn’t hit the high fastball? Good times, say pitchers wistfully.
Any group of hitters who are “hot” will necessarily have seen more than their share of favorable pitches and favorable counts, collectively (one reason why being hot or cold has little predictive value – some of it is predicated on “bad” pitching).
Interestingly if you look at Schwarber’s pitches in the post-season it is a favorable collection, by chance alone. it is likely that any hitter would have done well against them. Most of the pitches are either well off the plate or right in the heart. By chance alone there are few that are on the corners but in or very near the zone. It is not s typical collection of pitches by any means.
‘Most of the pitches are either well off the plate or right in the heart.”
Before it’s possible to know what to make of that, it’s necessary to know (a) how is “well off the plate” defined; (b) how is “right in the heart” defined: (c) what percentage of pitches thrown to the average hitter are in categories (a) and (b)?
I don’t have an opinion about whether Schwarber’s seen unusually hitter-friendly pitches in the World Series, but this particular assertion comes dangerously close to sounding like, “Schwarber’s just gotten lucky, because most of the pitches he’s seen have either been balls or strikes.” For it to be more than that there needs to be some quantification of what constitutes a ball most hitters would have laid off, and what constitutes a strike that most batters would have turned into a hit.
You bring up some interesting and good points. Let me see if I can clarify my comments.
“Schwarber’s just gotten lucky, because most of the pitches he’s seen have either been balls or strikes.”
I actually don’t know what his wOBA is for the 2 games he has played but let’s forget about him for now.
For any player that has been, let’s say exceptionally hot or cold over some short period of time we KNOW that the overwhelming majority of that is indeed “luck” (for brevity and lack of a better word). All we mean by that is that the batter’s true talent over that period was not anywhere near his performance. How do we “know” that? Because if that were true then if we look at an unbiased sample in close proximity to that hot or cold period we would find similar hot or cold performance if much of that performance were a manifestation of some temporary and large change of skill. IOW if a player hits .600 in his last 20 PA to presume that much of that were a drastic change in skill would also necessitate presuming that in his very next PA or the one prior to the 20 hot ones would show a similar skill level. It is implausible to think that a batter steps up to the plate after being incredibly skillful for his last 20 PA and on the average he loses almost all of that skill for no apparent reason. What we would expect is for that exceedingly high or low level of skill to gradually return to “normal” OR if in fact skill abruptly changes every X number of PA (unlikely) there would be no reason to expect that point to be “in the very next PA.”
Anyway what we do see in the very next or prior PA is a slight carryover from that .600 wOBA or OBP or BA to the tune of a few points.
So as I said, the overwhelming majority of a torrid or ice cold streak is considered to be anything but batter skill.
Interestingly (although EXACTLY) what we would expect, what we do find is that during that (say, hot) streak, we find that the batter has played in slight hitter’s parks, warmer weather, against lower quality pitchers, etc. Anything variable that a batter faces during the season would be slightly in the batter’s favor during a hot streak (and against him during a cold streak). That is Bayesian inference 101. If I reach into a bag of balls and pull out a red ball we must presume that the ball has more red balls than any other color. it might be slight and it might be large depending on what “guesses” we make about the possible percentage of red balls in the bag before I reach into it.
So rather than, “X player got lucky because he saw better than average pitches (from the batter’s perspective),” it is really, “Some portion of the luck (we know it’s mostly luck) achieved by the batter was from favorable pitch locations.” That is true by definition. As I said, there are a multitude of things we can say that about. All of them are provable, BTW.
Take a large sample of hot and cold streaks and then look at all those things during the streak, pitcher quality, parks, weather, umpires, pitch locations, fielders, etc. You will always find a bias with anything you can think of that varies and that influences performance.
The interesting thing is how much does each of these things contribute to the luck? That depends on the variance of those things with respect to the performance and with respect to the sample size of the effect in question. Something with a high degree of variance, such as pitch location in a small sample of pitches is going to have a large effect whereas something like umpires effect on batter wOBA is not because that simply won’t vary much. Park factors are probably somewhere in between.
So yes, random pitch location probably has a huge effect on whether a batter is hot or cold in a small sample of performance because of the variability of pitch location in small samples. If any readers take away one thing from these comments it is that last sentence.
Now, getting back to your point about actually quantifying the value of a bunch of pitches, you ar absolutely right. Ideally we would want to do that and we can! We simply add up the individual values of each pitch based on the league average pitch in that location! Now, we want to consider the count, game situation, runners, specific batter and pitcher too, but all that can be done.
If we were to do that for those Schwarber pitches, would we come up with a hitter favorable number? I don’t know. It looks to my somewhat trained eye that we would but I am not nearly sure. It would be a great project for an aspiring saberist!
If we plot the combined values of all groups of 40 pitches we will get a normal distribution. It would be fascinating to know the SD of that distribution! That would give us some idea as to how much pitch location effects the “luck” aspect of a hot or cold streak, as I explained above.
If we did make a plot like that, I presume that the human eye would have a hard time picking up on whether those near the center were favorable or unfavorable to the batter while looking at a strike zone scatter plot like the author shows us above for Schwarber. But, the further away from the middle the more we should be able to instantly recognize a bad or good group of 40 pitches. Obviously lots of pitches in the middle of the zone or way out of the zone is bad and lots of pitches on the corners is good.
To me it looks like an obviously (although not outrageously) hitter favorable plot, but I could be wrong and of course, as you say, I have no idea of the size of the advantage if it is an advantage (for the hitter). The larger the advantage for the hitter or the pitcher, compared to an average plot for that pitcher and hitter, the more that the pitch locations contributed to the batter’s hot or cold streak.
Fascinating topic and I’m glad you commented on it!