Looking for the WAR in SchWARber
With Kyle Schwarber and his fellow Phillies hitting bombs right and left in October, it’s a good time to take a closer look at Schwarber’s 2023 regular season. By some traditional statistics, he had a terrific season. He hit 47 homers, second-most in baseball, scored 108 runs, which was tied for eighth, and had 104 RBI, eleventh-most in the game. He was one of just eight players to both score and drive in 100 or more runs.
He also had a .197 batting average, which was the lowest in baseball among qualifying hitters, and struck out 215 times, the most in baseball in 2023 and fifth-most in a season ever. Fans who care strongly about traditional numbers might wonder how that all fits together. How good was Kyle Schwarber, really?
Setting aside the traditional numbers, Schwarber’s prodigious power and ability to get on base—he walked 126 times, second only to Juan Soto’s 132—allowed him to put up a .343 OBP and .474 slugging percentage. Ignore the .197 batting average. On-base percentage and slugging percentage are the key ingredients to offensive production and Schwarber’s .343 OBP and .474 slugging percentage were both higher than the MLB averages of .320 and .414. He was a good hitter.
According to FanGraphs, Schwarber had a 119 wRC+, which means he was 19 percent better than the average hitter after league and ballpark effects were taken into account. Two hitters with the same 119 wRC+ as Schwarber were Baltimore’s Anthony Santander and the Dodgers’ Will Smith. Santander is an adequate outfielder who was worth 2.6 Wins Above Replacement (WAR), per FanGraphs. Catcher Will Smith, playing a much more demanding position, was worth 4.4 WAR. Schwarber, despite being the same quality hitter as Santander and Smith, was worth 1.4 WAR.
Wait, what? The “R” in WAR stands for replacement, as in replacement-level player. Schwarber was better than a replacement-level player, but didn’t reach the 2 WAR that denotes an average player, making him a below-average player overall. How can a guy who launched 47 dingers, scored 108 runs, and had 104 RBI be a below-average player? It doesn’t seem possible.
We know the hitting value was there. So where did Schwarber come up short? Baserunning was a small part of it. He didn’t steal a base and wasn’t particularly adept at getting around the bases because of his tortoise-like speed. His Baserunning value was slightly negative.
The main issue was his spectacularly bad fielding. Schwarber ranked at the very bottom of the list in the FanGraphs defensive metric among the 140 players with 800 or more innings in the field at any position. His buddy in the Philadelphia outfield, Nick Castellanos, ranked 138th (Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was 139th). The following chart is from the FanGraphs glossary:
Rules of Thumb
| Defensive Ability/Performance | Def |
|---|---|
| Excellent | +20 |
| Great | +12 |
| Above Average | +4 |
| Average | 0 |
| Below Average | -4 |
| Poor | -12 |
| Awful | -20 |
Schwarber is down there in the “Awful” portion of the scale. Not average, not below average, not even poor. Awful.
Defensive metrics vary among different sites, so let’s get another opinion. Baseball-Reference uses a different metric for measuring defense, but the results were pretty much the same. Schwarber ranked 30th of 30 left fielders with at least 60 games played in the Baseball-Reference Defensive WAR metric (dWAR). And his -2.8 dWAR wasn’t even close to the two players directly above him on the list, Bryan De La Cruz (-1.4 dWAR) and Jurickson Profar (-1.4 dWAR). That’s a massive gap from second-worst to worst.
Baseball Savant has a Statcast-based defensive metric that utilizes trackman cameras to create catch probabilities. Their metric is Outs Above Average. Schwarber’s Outs Above Average was -19, which ranked in the 1st percentile. The player closest to him on this list for left fielders was again Jurickson Profar, at -13.
According to Statcast, the main issue with Schwarber’s defense is a total lack of range. He has 7th percentile speed and doesn’t read fly balls well, so his range is in the 1st percentile and he doesn’t make up for it with his throwing arm, which is also well below average.
Statcast fielding ranks for Kyle Schwarber:
Range—1st percentile
Arm value—8th percentile
Arm strength—23rd percentile
Three different metrics from three different sites agree that Kyle Schwarber was terrible in the field in 2023, but could he really have been so bad that his 47 homers and 119 wRC+ wasn’t enough to make him an average player? Let’s take a look at some of Kyle Schwarber fielding attempts, courtesy baseball savant.
This should have been an easy fly out to left.
Catch probability: 99%
Opportunity time: 3.2 seconds
Distance Needed: 11 feet
What’s the opposite of a Gold Glove? Maybe Schwarber should get the Cast Iron Skillet Award.
Catch probability: 99%
Opportunity time: 3.7 seconds
Distance Needed: 40 feet
“He’s got no range.” Truer words have never been spoken.
Catch probability: 99%
Opportunity time: 4.5 seconds
Distance Needed: 53 feet
Catch probability: 95%
Opportunity time: 4.1 seconds
Distance Needed: 53 feet
Trea, I’m gonna let you take that one. Oh.
Catch probability: 90%
Opportunity time: 5.8 seconds
Distance Needed: 104 feet
So much hang time, so little speed.
Catch probability: 85%
Opportunity time: 5.8 seconds
Distance Needed: 105 feet
The half-dozen plays shown here is a sample of Schwarber at his worst, but his defensive value at the various sites was based on all the plays he did and did not make throughout the season and they all agree that he was really bad. Because of the injury to Bryce Harper that limited him to DH for much of the season, the Phillies were forced to play Schwarber in left field much more often than they would have liked.
The Phillies knew he was bad, but didn’t have a choice. When Harper was healthy enough to play first base regularly in September, Schwarber was shifted to DH. From September 5 through the end of the season, Schwarber started five games in left field and 19 at DH. He’s also started every postseason game at DH because that’s where he and his cast iron skillet glove belong.
