Kyle Schwarber Is Not Bad at Baseball
For a guy with just 484 plate appearances, a 104 career wRC+, and 1.4 WAR, Kyle Schwarber gets talked about an awful lot. There are a lot of good reasons for that talk. He was part of a rejuvenation for the Cubs in 2015 that saw the team move from punching bag to NL force. He hit a massive home run in the National League Division Series that year. After missing almost the entire season and playoffs last season, he returned for just the World Series, during which he reached base in 10 out of 20 plate appearances. Those are some impressive feats for such a brief career.
But again, the regular-season numbers aren’t exceptional. Is it possible that Schwarber is overrated due to his performances in big moments? Maybe a tad. He is an offense-first corner outfielder who needs to hit a ton to be a really valuable player. The Cubs’ insistence on keeping him instead of trading him for a potential upgrade elsewhere might play into his perceived value versus actual value, as well. In either case, Schwarber was still a good hitter entering the 2017 season. Whatever his struggles so far, he probably still is a good hitter.
Right now, Schwarber is putting up poor batting numbers, including a .165/.286/.341 slash line and 70 wRC+ in 206 plate appearances. Those marks have rendered Schwarber something worse than replacement level so far this season. If the Cubs were running away with the division right now like they did last year, maybe Schwarber’s results get a bit less scrutiny. (Maybe. Of course, the struggles of Jason Heyward last year certainly drew a lot of attention.) It probably doesn’t help that Schwarber began the season in the leadoff spot, either. In any event, Schwarber’s results have been terrible. Before he makes major changes to his swing or his approach, however — or before the organization does something drastic — it’s probably worth exploring whether Schwarber’s just hit into a bit (or a lot) of bad luck due, simply, to hitting ’em where they are.
First of all, there are actual positives for Schwarber this year. His walk rate of 13%, for example, is quite good and basically the same figure he recorded during the debut season that ratcheted up expectations. His strikeout rate is 29%. That’s not very good, but it is right in line with his debut, as well. Even when Schwarber was tearing up the lower minor-league levels for which he was clearly too good, his strikeout rate was around 20%. A strikeout rate above 25% and close to 30% should be a reasonable expectation for Schwarber. That might not be his ceiling and he might be better at his peak, but right now, those strikeouts are pretty reasonable.
As Nick Stellini noted last month, Schwarber has actually made more contact this season. He’s just done less with it, which somewhat limits his production. Schwarber is a guy who’s swing has holes. Look at this map of Schwarber’s contact percentage. Focus on the areas inside the strike zone. (From the catcher’s perspective.)
At the top of the strike zone, particularly outside, Schwarber swings and misses a lot. Despite those swings and misses, Schwarber still does damage when he makes contact, and if the pitcher misses even a little more toward the middle of the zone, Schwarber capitalizes. Here’s Schwarber’s slugging percentage in the zone, from Brooks Baseball.
The next chart, which depicts slugging by zone in 2017, might have you wondering what’s wrong with Kyle Schwarber and wondering why he isn’t doing damage on pitches he used to crush.
We’re talking about a very small subset of pitches here, so it’s easy to just say “small sample size” and ignore the limited damage Schwarber has done. In this particular case, we should actually just take the easy route — as long as we realize that we should also be ignoring very poor hitting line thus far. Schwarber’s BABIP so far this season is .206, which is much lower than the .293 line he put up back in 2015. There’s some skill to BABIP, of course. For the sake of argument, though, let’s say Schwarber had a BABIP of .293 this season and all of the extra hits were singles. His hitting line would be .223/.337/.400, in that case. His .313 wOBA would make Schwarber a roughly average hitter.
Statcast lends some support to the notion that Schwarber hasn’t actually earned the .204 BABIP causing the .170 batting average. Based on exit velocity and launch angle, Schwarber’s expected batting average is .221, right in line with a BABIP of .293 like he had in 2015. We might attribute some of the expected batting-average numbers to the shift, but his expected batting average on fly balls is 70 points higher than his actual batting average. Even on line drives, where we might expect some shifts to be hurting him, only two of his 18 line drives have been caught by infielders, per Baseball Savant. Of course, even if you buy the BABIP argument, that only makes Schwarber an average hitter. Not a cause for concern necessarily, but not the world-beater for which people are hoping.
To take things a step further, we can look at the batted balls on which we’d expect Schwarber to have done some damage. Based on exit velocity and launch angle, Schwarber has recorded 19 batted balls classified either as a “barrel” or “solid contact” by Statcast. These balls typically fall for hits 65% of the time; the league wOBA is 1.058. Schwarber has gotten a hit 58% of the time and put up a 1.039 wOBA on such batted balls, which might lead one to the conclusion he’s been slightly unlucky on average and pretty close to the league in overall hitting. However, launch angle and exit velocity show an expected hit 76% of the time and an expected wOBA of 1.324. That’s just bad luck. In 2015, his wOBA and xwOBA were within 10 points of each other.
Schwarber’s has recorded a .343 xwOBA for the season. That’s a good bit above average and would produce about a 110 or 115 wRC+ after park adjustment. It remains to be seen whether Schwarber returns to the monstrous production of 2015. He’s going to walk a ton, though, which should keep his on-base percentage afloat. He might always strike out a lot, too, which will limit his upside some. Even if he hits the rest of the season just like he has so far, that’s going to make him a roughly average baseball player, assuming he runs into less bad luck. If the wind blows out a little bit more this summer at Wrigley, we might see something closer to the 2015 version of Kyle Schwarber. The stat line screams slump and the eye test might deceive due to a game that involves a lot of strikeouts, but Schwarber hasn’t been as bad as he’s shown. There’s little reason not to expect substantially better results going forward.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
The “Kyle Schwarber” who is “good at baseball” described in this article sounds a lot like Rob Deer. And when you start comparing him to Rob Deer instead of Jeff Bagwell, it makes sense why people are down on him.
At this point he’s untradeable. Everyone thinks he’s gotten bit by Heyward’s bug, and they don’t want their guys to catch it from Schwarber.
It’s hard to reign in expectations with a guy who had such an explosive and exciting debut. Add that to a unique name, legendary college career and catcher eligible – everybody just jumped on the hype train.
‘It’s hard to reign in expectations with a guy who had such an explosive and exciting debut.’
I too remember Brett Lawrie.
Now imagine Brett Lawrie playing in a mega media market as a fantasy darling based on position eligibility.
Note, let’s also hope Schwarber turns out better than Brett Lawrie…
Brett Lawrie is not the worst possible outcome for a guy who might fit that sentence. It would beat Jeff Francoeur, at the very least.
Francoeur’s had a job in baseball for 15 years. Lawrie is already out of baseball. Jeff Francoeur has had a much better career than Lawrie.
Quite amazing that Jerry Sands is still playing baseball.
With respect the Toronto media has a nefarious reputation of their own. A very tough market.
I too remember JP Arencibia D:
Gordon Beckham!
Jorge Soler did the same thing. The Cubs were lucky to still get something for him considering how consistently mediocre he’d been since his debut.
Nobody wearing a major league uniform is bad at baseball.
Always a good reminder. But as far as 2017 goes, he hasn’t been “Good” at Baseball as far as Major League players go.
He’s actually the worst player in major league baseball
He is actually the 50th worst player in Major League Baseball. Not good but definitely not the worst
Weird framing for a guy now projected to be something like a 1-2 WAR COF. And that xwOBA basically matches his projections, so not sure how this really implies a return to 2015.
that’s because it doesn’t (imply a return to 2015)
The “Kyle Schwarber” who is “not bad at baseball” described in this article sounds a lot more like Rob Deer than the multi-year all-star/possible Hall of Famers he usually gets compared to.
They really should send him to AAA for a month or so, can’t help but to think how he skipped it then went back to it but only for a small amount of time. If the Cubs weren’t expected to be good I’d say keep him in the majors but we’re talking about a team that just won a WS and is expected to go to another.
Don’t fret! Ol’ hepster doofus grandpa Joe Maddon will solve this like he did in Tampa on that seven-year World Series Championship run!
What Tampa Bay has done in the Al East over the past 10 years is nothing short of miraculous. When one factors in the wealth and strength of the Al East, the fact that the Rays are competitive in that league says a lot about the management there, and Maddon was an integral part of that.
While Schwarber has a .343 xwOBA, we should do exactly what Tony Blengino does with guys who pull to extreme extents on the ground, which is to use his actual wOBA on those grounders instead of his xwOBA.
For his career, Schwarber has hit 92% of his grounders either to the pull side or up the middle. He’s also very slow. This doesn’t bode well for his results on the ground, which means his grounder xwOBA is likely a less accurate number than his actual wOBA on grounders.
I’m not sure what his xwOBA would be if you used his actual wOBA on the ground instead of expected, but I’d imagine it puts him between the .300-.320 wOBA range, which still isn’t very good
Yes and to zoom out from the stat microscope a bit…let’s just look at some facts:
Pretty much only pulls the ball- not good
Pretty much useless against lefties- not good
Pretty terrible at defense- not good
Slow- not good
Strikeout rate is pretty high- not good
I feel bad for him being compared to Babe Ruth. Poor guy, that wasn’t fair to him with all his red flags.
I got a lot of heat from Cubs fans when I compared Schwarber to Joc Pederson. turns out he’s likely a worse hitter. Pederson makes more contact and at least SOMETIMES can hit the ball the other way on the ground.
by the way, i attempted to calculate his xwOBA if we use his actual grounder production instead of his expected. I’m not sure if I did it right, but basically i just took the difference between his xwOBA and wOBA(about 5 in 51 batted balls) on the ground, and subtracted that difference from his total xwOBA(69/206). this gave me a .313 xwOBA*
i think i did that right? so yeah, basically a decent hitter but nothing special.
Pederson has a career wRC+ of 116 (not based on xwOBA) and plays CF. Schwarber may still become a monster hitter. He’s in a slump like Joc was second half 2015. Joc’s a better player and to date has been a better hitter based on results. A year older. Hopefully Joc recovers nicely from his concussion symptoms. Been a tough year for him, too.
Last season Dave Cameron wrote a long post looking at Schwarber, including a list of 20 young hitters with similarly low Z-contact %’s since 2008 – http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-value-of-kyle-schwarber/
Almost half of those hitters had career wRC+ less than 100, and exactly one (Kris Bryant) has turned into a consistently great hitter. Chris Davis has had a couple great seasons, and George Springer borders on being a great hitter.
That list, though, suggests that there’s a good chance that Schwarber settles in at something like a 110 to 120 wRC+ hitter because he has a lot of swing and miss in his game and also isn’t likely to post a high BABIP. Depending on just how bad Schwarber’s defensive shortcomings are in the corner OF, that’s something like a 1 to 3 WAR per year player: a nice player to have, but hardly a franchise cornerstone.
In comparing his current swing path to previous, there is notable deterioration. In addition to the path issues, his body appears to have lost flexibility relative to his swing last year (could be mechanical or physical). So BABIP and results are not going to change significantly unless his path changes significantly. In terms of the path issue, consider his IFFB% of 16% is greater than his LD% of 12%. Mid-season changes are difficult, but it would be a big mistake IMO for him to just keep “plugging away” hoping things improve.
To me the issue with Schwarber right now is that it seems the struggles (which were a lot of bad luck) have gotten to his head, and he’s in a mindset where he’s trying to 450+ foot homer his way out of the slump. Over the past couple of weeks, his walk rate has tanked, his K rate is north of 35%, and he’s just looked awful. A couple of weeks at Triple A might be a huge help for him, just to hopefully get his head right.
In his last 38 games of the 2015 regular season, Schwarber hit very much like this year — .178 BA, .685 OPS, .197 BAbip, 30% K, 14% BB.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to freak out when it repeats itself.
You discuss Schwarber’s results per batted ball type. But the bigger problem is his distribution — specifically, his extremely low line-drive rate.
Career to date, Schwarber’s LD% is next-to-last among those with 400+ ABs since 2015, whether per batted ball (19.7%) or per AB (13.1%).
Among the bottom 30 in LD/AB, the average OPS is .746; Schwarber’s at .744. The only one in that group over .830 is Sano (.869), whose LD% on contact is way above Schwarber.
Better results per batted ball type can only get him so far. He has to hit more line drives.