PHILADELPHIA — A few innings before Kyle Schwarber hit what his college coach still calls “the farthest ball that I’ve ever seen,” two of his teammates glanced into the stands and spotted Theo Epstein sitting behind home plate, a black cap tucked low on his head.
But when they looked back after Schwarber’s home run cleared the 40-foot center-field batter’s eye 402 feet from home plate, Epstein appeared to be gone.
“I’m pretty sure that was Theo Epstein being like, ‘I’ve seen all I need to see,’ ” former Indiana pitcher Kyle Hart said by phone this week, recalling the 2014 game at Louisville’s Jim Patterson Stadium. “And then, a month later, the Cubs take [Schwarber] with the fourth overall pick. I would love to ask Theo someday if that was the swing that got him drafted 1-4.”
This much is true: Eight years later, tales of Schwarber’s Popeye-like strength are part of millennial-era baseball folklore. He famously launched a ball onto the top of the right-field scoreboard at Wrigley Field in the 2015 playoffs. In 2016, he tweeted at an auto glass repair company to help an unwitting Arizona man replace his windshield after it got smashed by a Schwarberian batting practice clout in spring training.
And as Schwarber nears the end of one of the most homer-filled first halves of a season in the Phillies’ 140-year history — he entered the weekend series in St. Louis with a league-leading 27 homers in 83 games, a 52-homer pace — it’s a good time to unearth long-lost stories of his prodigious power.
So, how about it, Theo: Is it true that Schwarber once hit a homer that made you disappear?
“Cool story,” Epstein, the Cubs former president of baseball operations, said this week, “but I wouldn’t have left early — not when you’re talking about a pick that high. Maybe they saw me going to get something to eat or hit the restroom?”
OK, but Schwarber’s titanic three-run shot did come in the ninth inning and gave Indiana a 7-2 lead. Under the circumstances, Epstein conceded that he “probably would have left in the top of the ninth,” but he doubts he would’ve made up his mind to draft Schwarber based on one swing.
“We ended up so convicted about Kyle’s power bat and his makeup that he became someone we wanted to build with,” said Epstein, who attended several of Indiana’s games that year and credits late scout Stan Zielinski for the Cubs’ procurement of Schwarber. “Normally you wouldn’t consider a player with a pick that high who didn’t profile up the middle or with plus athleticism, but the probability of being an impact power bat was so high and the makeup profile was so positive that he rose up our board.”
There’s more to the backstory of the Louisville slug, and this part is not at all apocryphal.
During batting practice before the game, Indiana coach Tracy Smith mentioned to Schwarber that some scouts were buzzing over a homer to dead center that Kentucky’s A.J. Reed had hit a few weeks earlier.
“I made sure to tell him about it, and well, he hit one, I mean, a center-to-[opposite field] shot,” Smith said. “It was a tight game and it was a big home run, but it was one of those that, even the home crowd in Louisville, they were awe-inspired by it.”
Said Epstein: “That homer was pretty epic. Hard to judge against homers in big league parks, but arguably the longest.”
There were others that rival it.
The real deal
Through Thursday, Schwarber had 180 career major league homers, 10 of which were estimated to have traveled at least 450 feet. He went deep in 6.1% of his plate appearances, the seventh-highest home-run frequency among 115 players with at least 100 homers since 2015, trailing Giancarlo Stanton (6.7%), Aaron Judge (6.7%), Pete Alonso (6.7%), Joey Gallo (6.4%), Mike Trout (6.2%), and Nelson Cruz (6.2%).
It’s also nothing new.
“What blows my mind about the whole evolution of Kyle Schwarber is people are like, ‘When did he start doing this?’ ” said Hart, a pitcher in the Boston Red Sox farm system. “Well, he’s been doing this for 15-plus years now.”
Hart grew up playing summer ball with Schwarber in the Cincinnati area. The homer that stands out to him: At a 17-year-old wooden-bat tournament, Schwarber crushed a low-90s pitch off the facade of Fifth Third Arena, the University of Cincinnati’s basketball gym that stands just beyond the right-field fence.
“That was the moment when I was, ‘All right, none of this has been a dream. This guy can hit,’ ” Hart said. “Going into it, I was like, ‘Man, this is going to be interesting to see him with a wood bat and how much that handicaps him with his power.’ But that was the moment I realized this isn’t a joke.”
Calling his shots
Schwarber batted .300 with eight homers and a .903 on-base-plus-slugging percentage as a freshman at Indiana in 2012. A year later, the Hoosiers opened Bart Kaufman Field, part of a sparkling $19.8 million baseball/softball complex.
Upon request, Schwarber once led a ballpark tour.
With his bat.
“He walked me around the yard one time hitting home runs,” Smith said, chuckling. “So, I’m throwing to him, it’s batting practice, and he’s like, ‘I’m going to hit one out to left,’ and he hits it out to left. Then he goes, ‘I’m going to left-center. I’m going to center field. Right-center.’ And he literally walked me around the ballpark doing that. It was almost humorous.”
OK, sure. But it was batting practice, right? A lot of hitters goof around and call their shots in batting practice.
“But the different piece of that with him was he was swinging as he said it,” Smith said. “Some guys, yeah, they’ll say, ‘I’m going to hit it here.’ But he would tell me where he was going to hit it as he was swinging, and he took me from left field all the way around the park. That power was pretty remarkable.”
Indiana’s ballpark isn’t a bandbox, either. It’s 330 feet down the left-field line and 370 to left-center, hardly easy shots for a left-handed hitter. But testing the limits of Babe Schwarber’s power was a popular game for the Hoosiers.
“There’s a fence beyond left field that separates it from the softball facility, so guys said, ‘All right, Schwarber, if you hit beyond that second fence’ — which nobody had done yet — ‘we’ll go out to dinner tonight and have a really nice dessert for the team,’ ” Smith said. “Well, sure enough, he’d crank it out there. He was pretty classic. You could tell early in his career that he was just different.”
The man in the Cape
Like many collegiate prospects, Schwarber played summer ball in the Cape Cod League. In 2012, between his freshman and sophomore years, he batted .343 with eight home runs and 38 RBIs in 44 games and helped lead Wareham to the best-of-three championship series against Yarmouth-Dennis.
But midway through the decisive Game 3, he was shaping up to be the goat.
Playing left field rather than catcher at Smith’s request to rest his knees, Schwarber dropped a fly ball that led to an unearned run and struck out in each of his first three at-bats. Wareham was trailing by three runs in the eighth inning when coach Cooper Farris noticed Schwarber sitting at the end of the bench.
“I walked up and squeezed his knee and I said, ‘Can it get any worse than this?’ ” Farris recalled by phone. “And he said, ‘No, sir.’ And I said, ‘Well, are we going to do something about it?’ He said, ‘Yes, sir. I got this.’ ”
Sure enough, Schwarber led off the top of the ninth with a homer to right field. Wareham rallied to force extra innings, and with two out in the 10th, Schwarber smashed a two-run homer off Y-D reliever Bryan Verbitsky to open a 7-5 lead in an eventual 8-6 victory.
“I saw him hit some big ones, and those were some big ones,” Farris said through a Mississippi twang. “And they weren’t cheap, either. They were blistered. After that, it got to where nothing surprised me.”
It would’ve been the perfect Cape Cod walk-off for Schwarber, especially once his plans to return in 2013 were scuttled by his selection to the Team USA collegiate national team.
But after returning from a summer tournament in Japan, Schwarber called Farris.
“He says, ‘Coach, I’ll be there tomorrow,’ ” Farris said. “I go, ‘Kyle, you’ve been playing all summer. You probably need a rest, don’t you?’ He said, ‘No, Coach, I’m coming. I want to hit some with you.’ ”
Schwarber flew to Providence, R.I., and got a ride from his father, who drove from Cincinnati to meet him. He rejoined Wareham and went 4 for 4 with a game-tying two-run homer in the ninth inning of his first game.
“Craziest thing I’d ever seen,” Farris said. “He couldn’t get enough. All he wanted to do was hit.”
