Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber is hitting lefties better than he ever has. Here’s why.

Baseball players like to tease each other, and the Phillies are no exception. It brings levity to a long, grueling season. No one is safe, including Kyle Schwarber, who was recently the target of a few well-meaning jabs.

Earlier this week, hitting coach Kevin Long and some of Schwarber’s teammates decided to look up his right/left splits this season. They quickly found some material they could use.

“He was statistically one of the worst batters against right-handed pitching,” Long said. “We know that’s not going to last, but we were kind of joking, ‘Well, Kyle, if you ever figure out how to get to righties, you’re going to be pretty good.’”

“We always joke that he’s a slappy leadoff hitter now,” said assistant hitting coach Dustin Lind.

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Entering Sunday, Schwarber — a left-handed hitter — was batting .333/.442/.517 against lefties, and .175/.315/.341 against righties. It is a stark difference from his right/left splits of the past.

Last year, Schwarber hit .188/.328/.430 against southpaws. The year before: .193/.301/.386. In 2021, his splits were mostly even, which Schwarber credits to the work he did with Long when they were both with the Washington Nationals.

In fact, Schwarber says that work laid the foundation for the success he’s having against lefties in 2024. When the Nationals acquired Schwarber as a free agent in 2021, they intended to use him part-time.

He wanted to play every day, but to do that he had to hit lefties.

“I said, ‘Well, right now they’re planning on platooning you,’” Long said. “‘So, unless you figure this out, it’s going to be an issue.’”

They went to work. Most hitters hit straight-on in the indoor batting cage — meaning that the pitching machine isn’t angled one way or the other — but Schwarber began doing daily work from both the right- and left-handed sides.

“Left-handed angles, left-handed arm, left-handed flips — the more that he could face lefties, the easier it was going to be,” Long said. “My assistant at the time was Pat Roessler. He literally pulled Schwarber every single day, and he’d say, ‘Hey, let’s go get your 50 breaking balls off the machine.’ So, he did that every single day, as well. Anytime that a lefty had to throw an intrasquad game in spring training, we had Schwarber face him.

“So, we just pushed one lefty after another on him, and he just got better and better.”

Schwarber is still doing most of this work on a daily basis. He still faces lefty pitching every day, and lefty breaking balls almost every day. He puts in extra work if he knows that he’ll face a left-handed starter, but regardless, he wants to be prepared for whatever kind of pitcher he encounters.

“I think it would kind of be irresponsible to [hit in the cage] straight-on all the time, because no one really throws straight-on, right?” Schwarber said. “Lefties are going to be mostly coming from a different angle than a righty would be coming from.”

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Both Long and Lind say that the Phillies DH has gone above and beyond to improve his splits. Now, three years later, they are seeing the benefits of that work.

“It’s just constant, every day,” Long said. “The battle of being good against lefties. He’s just on top of it. I mean, we really address it every single day. It’s not like, ‘Oh, today’s a lefty, let’s work on it.’ We work on lefty stuff every single day.”

Schwarber is not one to tout his accomplishments, but he can concede that he has grown in this area.

“In 2021, I had a big chase rate against lefties, because I just didn’t know what to do,” Schwarber said. “I didn’t know where I wanted pitches to start from, I didn’t know why they were doing that. I didn’t know why they were using certain pitches. So, when you get a better grasp of that, you can form a better game plan when you go out there and face them.

“I had a good grasp on what I wanted to do against righties, but I didn’t face lefties that much. You kind of keep mixing, mixing, mixing until you really find what you really want to do. And now I feel like I’ve got a decent grasp on it this year.”

All of this is coming at the perfect time for the Phillies. Before Sunday, 25 of their 59 games had been against left-handed starters. If manager Rob Thomson had the Schwarber of 2022 or 2023, that might have been hard to overcome. But not so much in 2024.

“They’re going to put lefties on us every time they can once they get to the top of the order,” Thomson said. “Harper’s always hit lefties pretty good. So, with [Schwarber] hitting lefties well, that really helps the offense.”

In an ideal world, Schwarber would like to have even splits. He hopes to finish his season with success against pitchers on both sides. But he does take some joy in challenging the notion that left-handed hitters can’t hit left-handed pitching.

“Everyone always makes a big deal about left-handed hitters and left-handed pitchers,” Schwarber said. “It’s kind of been the stigma in the game — lefties don’t hit lefties. I get it; the best left-hand pitcher is going to be up in the big leagues. And you’ll run into prospects and everything like that in the minor leagues. But the majority of pitchers you see are right-handed.

“So, everyone kind of has that stigma, that once you get to the big-league level that lefties can’t hit lefties. But you know, I feel like I’ve put in that time, a lot of time, into working on that, starting with the work I did in 2021 with Kevin.”