The Wobbling Kyle Schwarber

When I go jogging, I wrap a rubber band around my keys so they don’t jingle in my pocket. I put my phone in a different pocket, an extra one I sewed into the front of my shorts so it’s close enough that it won’t tug on the headphone cord. I tuck the ends of my shoelaces in above the tongue so they don’t flop all over the place. I go to all this trouble for two reasons. First, I’m a sensitive soul. Second, I don’t really love running. I love the feeling of having run, but every step is a fight against the voice in my head telling me that I should just stop because running is for suckers. After a mile or so, any one of those slight annoyances – jangling keys, slight tugging on my earbuds, shoelaces flapping against my shoes – will start to bother me so much that I’ll give in to that very obvious truth.

I’m sharing this preamble with you because although I normally write about small, obscure subjects, what I’m writing about today is so small and so obscure that I feel like I owe you an explanation as to why I noticed it at all. As I hope I’ve made clear, I noticed it because I’m weird.

I was watching the condensed version of the Sunday’s game between the Phillies and the Guardians. Kyle Schwarber homered in the top of the second inning, and the condensed game actually mixed up the replays. They showed the home run, then three slow-motion replays, but the first replay wasn’t of the home run. It was a replay of a foul ball the other way earlier in the count. That wasn’t the weird thing (or at least that was a different, less weird thing). The second and third replays were both of the home run. That’s when I noticed it. The condensed game is embedded below, and I’ve cued it up to that first home run, so watch the replays and look for something odd, then stop the video. Don’t peek at the clip after the next paragraph:

Did you see it? When I saw it, I wasn’t even sure what I’d seen. It was early in the morning. I was sleepy. I went back and watched it again, but I still wasn’t sure that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, so I went to MLB Film Room to find the clip, then pulled it into iMovie so I could Zapruder it. Here is the weird thing:

Something crazy happened to Kyle Schwarber’s helmet in the middle of his swing. At first, I thought his bat knocked into it on its way to hitting the home run, but then I realized that wasn’t it. As he began his swing, Schwarber’s shoulder (also known as the Schwoulder) rose up and lifted his face guard, and thus the entire right side of his helmet. That was a pretty critical moment. It happened as his hands were firing. At that point, he wasn’t 100% committed to swinging. If he changed his mind right then, he still could’ve held up. While he was finalizing his swing decision, his helmet went all askew. And he hit a home run anyway. As someone who is incapable of jogging when his shoelaces can frolic too freely, I could not believe that Schwarber was able to do that.

Seriously, perform this experiment for yourself. Put on a baseball hat with the bill at a normal level. You can see the bottom of it. Even when you’re looking straight ahead rather than up, you can feel its presence on the periphery. It frames the top of your visual field. Now grab the bill by both hands and tilt it suddenly. I’m doing it as I write this paragraph. Even when you know it’s coming, it’s distracting, right? What about when you don’t know it’s coming? When the thing that’s framing your visual field suddenly goes diagonal, wouldn’t it seem even for just a moment — an extremely important moment — like the whole world is tilting? Even if doesn’t give you vertigo, it certainly wouldn’t improve your ability to track a fast-moving object. But here’s the thing. Schwarber hit another home run in the eighth inning, and before he hit that home run, he did the helmet thing again. He did it again!

The replay isn’t as good, but it’s still plenty clear. His helmet jumps off his head crookedly just as he starts his swing. I started watching more and more Schwarber home runs. They all showed the jumping helmet, so I just started watching random videos of Schwarber swinging. He toyed with wearing a face guard toward the end of 2023, then started wearing it regularly in 2024. He bumped it in every single swing I found. Here’s what I believe to be the first swing he took with a face guard:

It’s like he’s giving you a little salute. So many things separate professional athletes from the rest of us, but this is a reminder that their ability to focus is an awfully big separator too. When I realized that Schwarber did this every time he swung, I figured maybe he wasn’t the only one, so I started checking other players. I went looking through clips of home runs, because they usually have slow motion replays that give a great view of the helmet and shoulder. I found more than a few other players who bump their face guards:

Still, none of them did as often or as extremely as Schwarber. His swing is a perfect storm for this particular oddity. At 5-foot-11, he’s on the shorter side for a ballplayer, with big shoulders and a neck that is maybe built more latitudinally than longitudinally. As a result, his face guard hangs lower than that of most players. This never happens to the 6-foot-6 Giancarlo Stanton because there’s a lot more clearance between his face guard and his shoulder, but Jose Altuve does it a lot.

Second, Schwarber’s swing involves a lot of extremes. His load brings his front shoulder way back, and when he starts his swing, he drops his back shoulder, raising the Schwoulder into the face guard. Juan Soto doesn’t use a face guard, but his head is so still and his swing is so perfectly smooth that he could mash dingers without disturbing a hockey-style catcher’s mask. He could probably mash dingers with a book balanced on his head like a charm school valedictorian. This is just how Schwarber’s swing works:

On nearly every swing, Schwarber (along with a not insignificant portion of the league) tilts his helmet crazily on his head. I’m extraordinarily curious about whether he even notices that it’s happening. It’s very quick. I only noticed because of a slow motion replay. It seems like it’s at the worst possible moment for the batter to be distracted, but that means that at the moment, Schwarber is probably so intensely focused that he’s able to tune it out.

Still, when you watch it happen over and over again, you wonder how this doesn’t affect Schwarber’s equilibrium. Even if it doesn’t affect his vision, the balance of the weight on his head is shifting toward one side. How does that not throw anything off? Think of how often you hear that a batter needs to keep their head still in order to hit well. Having a helmet joggling all over the place doesn’t seem like it would help toward that end. Moreover, players aren’t usually wearing helmets during batting practice and cage work. So it’s not like Schwarber is used to it because it happens all the time during practice. It’s a phenomenon that really only happens during games.

My guess is that Schwarber and all of his helmet-bumping brethren don’t notice it at all. If it bothered them in any way, they’d stop wearing the face guards or find some way to modify them. Still, I bet the helmets would bother them quite a bit if they tried jogging with them.