Bigger Bat, Bigger Weekend: Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber Steal the Spotlight vs. Mets

In case you didn’t know, baseball’s a weird game, baseball players are weird people, and pitchers are as weird as they come, respectively, though irrelevant to the rest of my point. Hitters have their own things that keep them sound of mind for 162 games of a season, and superstitions are often part of it.

Some guys put their left sock and shoe on before their right sock and shoe, some have a lucky pair of underwear, and most have consistent pregame routines.

On Saturday afternoon, Bryce Harper trotted up the first-base side dugout for an early batting practice session. The first baseman rarely takes batting practice early on the field and sometimes never makes it out there by hitting in the cages.

But something needed to change. Entering Saturday, Harper was on a 1-22 skid, which dates back to the start of the Brewers series.

So, he switched his routine up. The lefty took early batting practice and knocked more than a few home runs into the second deck and another into the third. Harper was swinging a 34-inch, 35-ounce bat — the same one he uses in batting practice before every game, which weighs 3.5 ounces heavier than his normal game bat.

And after a conversation with Kevin Long, he decided the 35-ounce bat would be his slumpbuster.

“Man, I want to swing this thing in the game,” Harper had told Long in May. “And I finally was like, ‘Screw it, I’m gonna do it today.’”

Harper proceeded to hit for the cycle that night, with a pair of hustle-extra-base hits, and helped the Phillies to a 15-3 win. His OPS rose nearly 40 points from the ten bases he collected that night, except he wasn’t the only lefty slugger in the headline — next to him was Kyle Schwarber.

The designated hitter was recently moved back to the second spot in the batting lineup behind Trea Turner, who has struggled mightily this season. Throughout June, Schwarber, while hitting lead-off, made an adjustment to his approach and exchanged power for contact; his batting average shot up nearly 20 points, but he only slugged two home runs from the top spot.

In his fourth game back in the two-hole, he eclipsed that number; Schwarber notched three home runs, and two of them came in the same inning. He hit another the following night, just as Harper would three innings later on NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast.

“He’s one of the best power hitters if not the best power hitter in the game and it’s fun to watch,” Harper said. “Just like anybody, I’m a fan. I enjoy watching him hit the baseball. When he takes a swing, it changes the whole momentum of a game, the mindset of our team and the fanbase and everything else. It’s a lot of fun.”

The two took the spotlight in both nationally televised games and carried the Phillies lineup to a weekend series victory, which all started with a change in Harper’s bat.

“I thought we had great at-bats the whole series,” Harper said. “I thought the pitching was good. As a whole, I thought we played great in this series.”

With their 17th and 28th home runs on Sunday night, Harper and Schwarber have both hit home runs in 35 games as members of the Phillies. They rank third in Phillies history behind Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, who had done it 51 times, and Greg Luzinski and Mike Schmidt, who did it 39 times.

Additionally, the two are on a faster home run pace than each of their previous seasons. Contextually, Harper has missed a lot of time with injuries over the last two seasons, but in year 15, he is on pace for 36 home runs. Schwarber, with 28 through 76 Phillies games, is on pace for just about 60, and has hit five in his last five games.

“Great overall approaches from our line-up,” Schwarber said postgame Sunday night. “Harp[er], great day, Trea, great day. You can go through the line-up and see guys having some really grindy at-bats. There’s no complacency, even if we’re going great, guys are in there on an everyday basis trying to get better, trying to figure out the next game plan.”

Between the last two nights, the Phillies are hitting .253, which clears their season average of .232. They’ll look to keep rolling into their next series against the Washington Nationals.

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