Chicago Cubs: Kyle Schwarber – How One Man Could Be Changing Baseball
After having a total of five at bats during the regular season due to an injury, Kyle Schwarber was given the go-ahead to resume baseball activities shortly after the season ended. After taking a few cuts in Arizona, he stepped right into the Chicago Cubs lineup to start Games 1 and 2 of the World Series. As a result of his success, baseball may be witnessing a change in the nature of how injured players consummate the end of their rehab.
What’s the Need for Rehab Games?
Look at it this way, just for a second, to make a point. We learn how to walk and then we learn how to run. But then, let’s say we get a job as a postal delivery person and it requires a lot of walking, but no running. Then one sunny day, we arrive at the beach and we are instinctively driven to run headlong into the surf with no looking back. We didn’t forget how to run, did we? Even though it had been a long time since we had or wanted to.
What’s the difference between that and hitting a baseball? Bear with me. In the time he was repairing his body, did Kyle Schwarber forget how to hold a bat? Did he forget how to stay back on the ball to generate power? And did his brain suddenly forget how to recognize the spin of a slider versus a two-seam fastball? Not likely, and if that happened, he probably wasn’t big league talent to begin with.
Make no mistake, Schwarber is doing something remarkable. He’s hitting .429 and has knocked in two runs for the Chicago Cubs in this series. He’s “on the pitch” with each one thrown and has yet to be fooled by anything the Cleveland Indians have launched his way, indicating that the so called need to regain his “timing” would have been a false premise if he had been excluded from the Cubs roster for the World Series.
This is an important development because Kyle Schwarber is not Babe Ruth. At least not yet. He may be better than most and he sure looks like it now. But based on what he’s doing, you can be sure that eyes are being opened around baseball.
Here’s a glimpse of all it took for Kyle Schwarber to be “back”…
Is Kyle Schwarber the Oddball or a Sign of the Future?
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General managers and managers may be asking themselves about now, why does my player have to spend a week or more hitting .795 against Class A pitching when I send him for “rehab” games after he has been cleared for baseball activities, when he could be taking those same swings and helping our big league team? To be sure, that minor league team likes it because it’s a tradition for the guy in “the show” to put on a big catered spread, but what other value is there?
It’s a legitimate question and it’s bound to get more attention in the near future. To be clear, though, we’re only talking about position players and not pitchers. Because when they come back from a injury, they need time in the minors to progressively stretch their arms out.
Schwarber has not been cleared for full baseball activities which would include playing in the field, so he will only be available to the Cubs as a pinch hitter for the next three games in Chicago without the DH.
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But there’s enough here for those in charge of making these rehab decisions to munch on. And we shouldn’t be surprised if we see this happen with other players who go directly back to their team as soon as they are cleared by team doctors beginning next season.
And who knows, Kyle Schwarber may have unknowingly changed baseball.