Kyle Schwarber hit a three-run shot off Bryan Woo in Seattle on Wednesday for his MLB-leading 40th home run of the season, the 380th of his career. It's the fourth time in five seasons in Philadelphia that he's reached 40, tying Ryan Howard's franchise record, and it puts him on pace for roughly 48 by the time the year is over, with his career-high of 56 (last year) likely out of reach. But with a month left to play, it's worth asking what Schwarber looks like when he actually gets locked in for a stretch, just in case we want to chase a little history and enjoy this Phillies run even more.
Schwarber's hottest stretch, and Darin Ruf: a Phillies farmhand legend
Schwarber's best calendar month by raw home run total came back in 2021 with Washington, when he hit 16 home runs in June, was named National League Player of the Month (alongside Shohei Ohtani of the Angels), and at one point homered in 16 of 18 games. That shouldn't surprise anyone, because Schwarber absolutely rakes in the month of June, as evidenced by a quirky stat where at one point he was the fastest player to 60 homers in the calendar month of June. His career .918 OPS in June, by a wide margin, is his best mark for any month (except small sample sizes in March and October). Point being, when the calendar flips to that window where Schwarber gets going, the results tend to be absurd.
If Phillies fans want a real-life example of just how fast things can snowball, look back to August 2012. Darin Ruf wasn't some hyped prospect at the time — a 20th-round pick out of Creighton, 26 years old, the kind of guy scouts had mostly stopped paying attention to. Then he had a month at Double-A Reading that's still hard to believe, where he crushed 20 home runs in August alone, tying Sammy Sosa's 1998 record for most homers in a single calendar month in professional baseball.
He finished 2012 with 38 home runs overall, breaking Howard's own Phillies minor league system record, and walked away with the Eastern League MVP and the Joe Bauman Home Run Award as the top slugger in all of the minor leagues. Philadelphia called him up that September, and he kept it going in a tiny sample, hitting three homers in 33 at-bats.
Ruf's big league career after that never turned into stardom — he settled in as a useful platoon bat for a handful of teams over parts of a decade, a .239 career hitter with 67 homers. Where he really found it again was in the KBO, where I played with him on the Samsung Lions, and where he hit .315 with 81 homers over three seasons and led the league in RBI in 2017. Different league, same lesson: when a hitter like that gets hot, it doesn't really matter what level he's at.
I'm not claiming Schwarber will go on some Darin Ruf-like stretch and get to 60 homers, by any means. But history says he's fully capable of a June-in-August kind of stretch whenever it decides to show up, and what I am going to say is that it will be fun. With a month to go and a number like 48 homers projected, all it takes is one hot stretch to make this September a lot more interesting than the math currently suggests.
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