For all the burdens that a three-true-outcomes king carries in his public perception, Kyle Schwarber's appeal remains very easy to grasp. He's a big man who hits big homers. The onomatopoeic realm of home run vocabulary is very vast. Some people hit dingers; others hit dongs, blasts, bombs, things of that nature. Kyle Schwarber is a man who jacks taters with a completely placid expression, and he has a sense of urgency about it: On Tuesday night, he broke the MLB record for most leadoff home runs in a season, with his 14th.
In modern baseball record–breaking fashion, it's specific, but it's not too contrived. If someone opens up a game with a home run, you remember it. If MLB's official channel puts out an "EVERY leadoff homer from Kyle Schwarber's historic season!" video, I click on it.
Basic home run statistics are fun to think about. Not exit velocity or distance or anything fancy, but the very base knowledge that, say, a 50-homer season in MLB means roughly, averaged out, a home run in 30 percent of games. This is not how home runs are actually distributed, but contextualizes the consistency that the great home run hitters have.
Schwarber is not Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani. His recent surge of homers has brought him to 35 home runs so far in the season—only good for a tied seventh in MLB, the chump—but of them, 14 have taken place during leadoff at-bats. Part of the uneven distribution can be explained by Schwarber being guaranteed a first-inning at bat by virtue of being a leadoff hitter, but it's still striking at a glance. And because of the sheer volume with which Schwarber jacks taters, and the fact that you can't hit two leadoff homers in a single game, so far this year, it means that Schwarber legitimately leads off a game with a home run once every 10 games. Which really doesn't feel like it should be possible, but there you are.
Depending on what conventions you reference, Schwarber is either the least to-type leadoff guy in existence, or exactly who you want up there. He's not very fast—even if his baserunning is much improved this year, compared to last—but he does [Billy Beane voice] get on base. My guess is that the actual reason why Schwarber bats leadoff not is because of analytics or old wisdom, but because he just kind of likes it there. Like a happier version of whenever people say that some closers have to come out in the ninth inning for mindset reasons: Because he likes it there, he hits tons of leadoff home runs, so Q.E.D. No need for any more optimization here, folks; Schwarber is busy making history.
