Kyle Schwarber’s lack of hustle following a left field misplay was uncharacteristic. It shouldn’t be expected to happen again this year, and Schwarber, of all the guys in the clubhouse, seems to most likely to respond well to an in-game benching. Nobody’s worried about Kyle Schwarber’s effort going forward. But as the Cubs return yet again to the scene of his halfway-to-Morgantown home run in the 2015 Wild Card Game, it’s fair to be concerned about Schwarber for another reason:
He just isn’t hitting all that well.
| Year | wRC+ | HR | BB% | K% |
| 2017 | 103 | 30 | 12.1% | 30.9% |
| 2018 | 115 | 26 | 15.3% | 27.5% |
| 2019 | 120 | 38 | 11.5% | 25.6% |
| 2020* | 89 | 10 | 13.3% | 31.1% |
On the year, Schwarber has an 89 wRC+, worse than even the close-to-average 103 he posted in 2017, a year he spent partially in Des Moines due to his early-season struggles. He has ten home runs—not out of line with what one would expect from him over 60 games—and his walk and strikeout rates aren’t terribly far from their norms, though his K’s are slightly up this year. Strikeouts are part of the problem, sure, but they don’t seem large enough to be driving this regression.
| Year | Exit Velocity | Launch Angle | wOBA | xwOBA | xSLG |
| 2017 | 89.6 | 18.6 | 0.333 | 0.349 | 0.490 |
| 2018 | 90.9 | 12.3 | 0.343 | 0.352 | 0.473 |
| 2019 | 93.5 | 15.5 | 0.357 | 0.378 | 0.559 |
| 2020* | 93.6 | 10.4 | 0.301 | 0.348 | 0.469 |
It also doesn’t appear to be an exit velocity problem. Schwarber’s hitting the ball as hard as ever. He’s among the top three percent of MLB hitters in hitting baseballs hard. His launch angle’s down, but not by so much so as to be definitively real, as opposed to a small-sample phenomenon.
Instead, it really just looks like Schwarber, though not hitting at last year’s level (or that of 2015, when he posted a 131 wRC+ over his 273 plate appearances), is getting somewhat unlucky. His BABIP—for which league average is normally somewhere in the .300 range—is .227. That’s the 11th-lowest among the 145 qualified hitters. So, while Schwarber does tend to post below-average BABIP’s (his career BABIP’s .269), and while it’s fair to say that he isn’t hitting at his normal level (his .348 xwOBA is slightly lower than those of 2017 and ’18), it’s also true that he’s been at least a bit unlucky. Which is a good sign for the next two or three or more weeks.
***
The Cubs clinching the NL Central is not inevitable. The Cardinals trail by only two in the loss column, and while St. Louis has ten more games to play (compared to seven for the Cubs), it’s hard to imagine the last two for the Cards being anything but games in which the Cardinals are massive favorites, seeing as they’d come against a lame duck Tigers team (if the standings are close enough that two games could make a difference, the report is that the Cardinals will make up their postponed games with Detroit in a doubleheader Monday, a week from today). With the Cardinals playing an appetizing-for-them three in Kansas City to open the week, there’s still pressure on the Cubs to close this out, preferably by taking three of four in Pittsburgh. In other words, while the Cubs have seemed to slide into clinched mode, and they do have a 95%+ chance of winning the division, this is not the time to take the foot off the gas.
As Kyle Schwarber knows well.
