Just like when he was a kid, Dante Nori has Kyle Schwarber to help him. This time he’s a Phillies teammate.

CLEARWATER, Fla. — On a recent early morning in camp, shortly before the Phillies were scheduled to depart for a road game in Lakeland, Fla., Dante Nori passed through the clubhouse.

The 2024 first-round pick had been called up from minor league camp as a reserve for the Phillies’ Grapefruit League game against the Tigers that March 1 afternoon. He had a bus to catch, but had someone he wanted to say hello to first.

The clubhouse at BayCare Ballpark was filled with major league regulars and can be an intimidating place for some prospects, especially ones experiencing their first professional spring. But it helps when one of the veterans on the team is your occasional offseason hitting partner.

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Nori made a beeline for Kyle Schwarber, who was not scheduled to play in the road game that day, to tell him the news.

It was a quick greeting. As a backup outfielder on the travel roster, Nori wasn’t guaranteed to get on the field that day — and sure enough, he didn’t — but Schwarber told him to be ready no matter what.

Schwarber and Nori have known each other since 2012, Schwarber’s freshman year at Indiana. Fred Nori, Dante’s grandfather, was an assistant baseball coach there and recruited Schwarber to play for the Hoosiers. Fred is known as “the local baseball legend” in Schwarber’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio.

“[Fred] coached in the area for a long time, high school and stuff. And I got to know him when I was probably in middle school,” Schwarber said. “[Dante’s] grandpa lives just 10 minutes down the street from me. I go in and shovel his driveway when it snows, go take my side-by-side and plow off his driveway.”

When Dante started to get more seriously into baseball, Schwarber took him under his wing. Throughout Nori’s four years at Northville High School in Michigan, he would hit with Schwarber in the offseason when he visited his grandfather in Ohio.

Nori is now 20. This winter, they did the same thing. But instead of a high schooler working out with a pro, it was two members of the Phillies organization hitting together.

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“He’s got a lot of resources around him to be there, to have conversations,” Schwarber said. “Me, his grandpa, other people that we all know. All this kind of help along the way, if there’s any help that he needs.”

At the plate, Nori and Schwarber don’t have many similarities. Nori’s approach is geared toward contact, while Schwarber is known for his pure power and towering home runs. But that also means Nori has a lot he can learn.

“It’s a cool experience. You get to hear his way and how he thinks about hitting,” Nori said. “I mean, we’re two different types of hitters. One hits balls as hard as anybody in the world. But just hearing what he has to say, his routine, see what he does, and just try it all out.

“[I’ll ask], ‘Hey, what do you do in the box here? What are you thinking here?’ Types of pitches, types of pitchers, what he’s thinking in counts. So just picking apart what he has to say.”

Schwarber is no stranger to dispensing hitting advice, but he’s also not trying to overwhelm Nori with instructions as he embarks on his first full professional season.

“You don’t want to just try to tell them, ‘That’s how it’s done,’ because everyone’s different; everyone’s going to have their own experience,” Schwarber said. “You need them to have those experiences. You can’t just say, ‘This is how you do it. This is how you don’t do it.’ Everyone’s got to figure out their own walk, right? Just like any other profession, you’re going to have successes. You’re going to have failures you’re going to have to learn from.”

Nori has been in Clearwater since January, arriving early to participate in the Phillies’ High Performance Camp and get the lay of the land before minor league camp officially opened the first week of March.

While Nori didn’t play in the Grapefruit League game that day, he already has his professional debut under his belt. A month after the Phillies selected him 27th overall, Nori joined low-A Clearwater for 14 games at the end of the 2024 season. During that brief stint, he hit .240 with a triple, and had a 24% walk rate.

Nori, whose speed is one of his best attributes, also stole four bases.

He is ranked the Phillies’ No. 6 prospect by MLB Pipeline, and is set to participate in the Spring Breakout showcase on Friday at BayCare Ballpark. The game will feature some of the top prospects in the Phillies’ and the Pirates’ farm systems.

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“I think the maturity is there, the aspect of understanding the hitting stuff and knowing himself,” Schwarber said. “I think that’s a big thing in our game, is being able to know yourself and be honest, and be a good self-evaluator. He has that. I think the biggest thing is just not backing away from any sort of challenge. And I don’t think he’s going to do that.”

Nori is younger than Schwarber was when he was drafted by the Cubs as a junior out of Indiana in 2014. But he’s also equipped to deal with the pressures that come with being a first-round pick. Dante’s father, Micah, is no stranger to the limelight of professional sports, as a longtime NBA assistant coach.

And, of course, Dante is the grandson of one Middletown baseball legend, and is friends with another.

“I remember when I got drafted, that everyone’s always going to have an opinion, right?” Schwarber said. “It’s your job to go out there and just keep those away from your head, and just to bury your head and try to find a way to keep getting better and better each day. And I feel like he’s got that mindset.”