Kyle Schwarber, Bryce Harper OK with changes to batting order: ‘Wherever my name gets written, I’ll play’
Rob Thomson said he will play around with his batting order this spring. Just don’t expect Harper to lead off.
CLEARWATER, Fla. — Kyle Schwarber might be on the move from his domain atop the Phillies lineup.
Manager Rob Thomson expects to play with his batting order when spring training games begin Feb. 22, which means Schwarber could be penciled in anywhere from No. 1 to No. 4 in the lineup.
Schwarber, who bashed 15 leadoff home runs in 2024 to set the MLB single-season record, said Saturday that his spot in the order makes no difference to him.
“Wherever my name gets written, that’s where I’m going to hit,” he said. “I’m player No. 12. I’m not a manager; I’m not a coach. I get paid to play baseball for these guys, so wherever my name gets written, I’ll play. I want to win. I just want to win the World Series, and wherever we think our best lineup is to go do that, continually win baseball games, that’s what I’ll do. I really don’t have a personal attachment to where I’ve hit. I just want to go out there and make sure we’re winning baseball games.”
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That’s a sentiment shared by fellow lefty Bryce Harper, who has spent the majority of his career hitting in the No. 3 spot, including all 149 games he played in 2024. Harper said Thomson hasn’t talked to him yet about switching things up, but his overall priority is winning.
“Obviously, I’m a three-hole hitter, and I have been, but whenever they’ve told me to hit two or four, I’ve done that in the past,” Harper said. “I want to win. So I don’t care what that takes.”
Some managers use entirely different lineups depending on whether they are facing a right-handed or left-handed starter. Thomson is unlikely to go that far, at least with the top of the order.
“With Harper’s ability to hit left-handed pitching and Schwarber’s ability to hit left-handed pitching, I want those guys getting as many at-bats as we can, so I don’t think I’m going to mess with the front, whatever the front is,” Thomson said. “... I think the top four or five guys are going to be pretty consistent.”
Schwarber hit .300 against lefties in 2024, a significant improvement from his .188 split against left-handed pitching the previous season. Thomson is confident that the adjustments he made last season will carry over.
“I think he really believed in it, being able to use the field and stay closed and let the ball travel,” Thomson said. “He knows he’s strong enough to hit the ball out of any part of the ballpark. So I think he’ll maintain that approach.”
But even with those improvements, Thomson said he still prefers to alternate lefties and righties in his lineup as much as possible, as he did for most of the 2024 season with right-handed Trea Turner sandwiched between Schwarber and Harper. But since the Phillies are left-handed heavy, having two lefties in a row may turn out to be unavoidable.
One configuration it’s pretty safe to say won’t be happening is Harper in the leadoff spot.
That was an idea Thomson floated at the winter meetings based on the concept that whoever hits first in the batting order gets the most total at-bats. On the 2024 Phillies, the No. 1 spot in the Phillies’ lineup had 759 regular-season plate appearances, compared to the No. 3 spot, which had 717 plate appearances. It’s the logic that Dodgers manager Dave Roberts uses when penciling in Shohei Ohtani atop his lineup.
But Harper isn’t so convinced by that argument.
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“I like to see pitches before I hit, seeing what the guy’s going to do,” he said.
That’s why when Harper played for the Nationals, he liked hitting behind Jayson Werth. Over his 15-year career, Werth saw 4.40 pitches per plate appearance, higher than the MLB average of 3.80. Schwarber averaged 4.12 pitches per plate appearance in 2024, which ranked second on the Phillies behind Brandon Marsh (4.19).
Harper did concede that leadoff hitters are only guaranteed to hit first once in a game and that any part of the order can come up to the plate in a prominent spot. He pointed to his “Bedlam at the Bank” homer against the Padres in the 2022 National League Championship Series, when he was hitting fourth in the order and came up in the eighth inning with J.T. Realmuto on first.
“If I weren’t hitting in the four-hole, I probably wouldn’t have got the moment,” Harper said. “If I was hitting in the three-hole, I’m leading off that inning instead of J.T. So anything can happen in the game. It’s just being in the lineup.”