The Phillies are surprised banning shifts hasn’t helped Kyle Schwarber. Is it just a matter of luck?

For eight seasons, opponents defended against Kyle Schwarber’s tendency to pull the ball to the right side by putting an infielder in shallow right field. It mostly worked. Even though he has averaged fewer at-bats between home runs (13.93) than only six players in baseball history, he’s still a .229 career hitter.

So, when MLB outlawed extreme defensive shifts as part of sweeping rules changes for this season, everyone — from the statheads to hitting savants — assumed Schwarber would be among the biggest beneficiaries. The Phillies slugger wasn’t suddenly going to win a batting title, but .250 seemed within his reach now that more balls would be out of the defenders’ reach.

Instead, Schwarber lugged to the plate Thursday night a .173 average, the lowest mark among 146 players with at least 200 plate appearances.

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“I am surprised. Yeah, I am,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said. “He’s walked and he’s hitting home runs, but I did expect his batting average to go up. And it will, I’m sure.”

That’s a safe bet. For one thing, Schwarber is batting .174 on balls in play. The league average is .300. For another, his hard-hit rate (exit velocity of 95 mph or more) is 48.9%, second-best among Phillies hitters and well above league average (39.5%).

It isn’t only the bleeders, then, to the more-wide-open right side that aren’t getting through. Hits haven’t dropped in anywhere for Schwarber, who might begin to wonder what he did to deserve such rotten luck.

“Nothing’s really falling for him,” hitting coach Kevin Long said. “I guess we’ve got a bunch of good fortune coming. I really look at it that way.”

But it’s still worth wondering if the abolition of the shift will ever pay appreciable dividends for Schwarber, the epitome of baseball’s modern “three-true-outcome” hitter in that he produces primarily homers, walks, and strikeouts.

Since he arrived in the majors with the Cubs in 2015, Schwarber has made 3,509 plate appearances, 47.8% of which resulted in a homer (6.1%), walk (13.3%), or strikeout (28.4%). When he does make contact, he tends most often to pull the ball, like a majority of hitters. And this season, his pull rate is up to 53.3% from his career average of 44.7%.

But Schwarber doesn’t regard himself as a dead pull hitter. He believes he’s at his best when he uses the middle of the field and insists he hasn’t changed his approach because there’s no longer an extra defender on the right side.

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If anything, Schwarber said he has noticed a larger hole to the right of second base because opponents must position their infielders in a more traditional alignment.

“I’m not going up there trying to say I want to hook, yank, whatever it is,” Schwarber said. “For me, when I’m at my best, I just stay through the center of the field. If I’m a little bit late, I go to left-center; on time, center; a little bit early, right. That’s what helps me be my best.”

Given his power and relative lack of speed, Schwarber also has never sought to hit the ball on the ground and suggested that “everyone’s trying to hit line drives.”

But Long conceded that Schwarber shouldn’t feel as allergic to grounders as he may have during the shift era. Long has even worked on flattening Schwarber’s bat path and shortening his swing, at least in certain counts, to take advantage of more holes on the infield.

It’s an idea that runs counter to the launch-angle approach that was drilled into Schwarber and many contemporary hitters.

“He’s got to use the ground a little bit more and maybe keep the ball out of the air a little bit more,” Long said. “There’s pull-side holes now where there wasn’t before. In order for him to exploit that, he’s going to have to attack the ball a little bit differently. He’s really working on his bat angle right now, and I think that’s a good sign.

“It’s more just staying on top of the baseball a little bit more. Because he’ll be shorter to contact, and any time you’re shorter to contact, you should see dividends, on the opposite side of the field, too.”

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But the Phillies also don’t want to turn Schwarber into a singles hitter. His strength is, well, his brute strength. Couple that with his knowledge of the strike zone and his discerning eye, and the Phillies will live with the strikeouts and low batting average, just as the Cubs, Nationals, and Red Sox did before them.

“I’m not as concerned about the batting average as long as he’s walking and he’s driving the ball,” Thomson said. “He strikes out. He always has. But I think his at-bats have been better than what the batting average looks like. He’s not a .160 hitter or whatever it is, I can tell you that.”

Indeed, although Schwarber is hardly piling up hits — in 26 games in May, he remarkably notched only 10 hits, including two(!) singles — he’s walking at a higher rate (16.9%) than in any full season in his career.

It’s another indication that his luck is due to eventually turn, even if it doesn’t translate into a flood of base hits through shift-less defenses.

“I still think [no shift] should help out,” Schwarber said. “It’s only natural to think that. But we’ll see. We’ll see at the end of the year where we’re at and go from there.”

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