Did you happen to see the videos of Kyle Schwarber that the Cubs posted last week to their Snapchat story? I wouldn’t know a Snapchat story from a hole in the ground, but even I caught glimpses of the still images from those videos that made the rounds.
Working out at the team facility in Mesa, Arizona, Schwarber looked, well, incredible. Fitter and trimmer, by a long shot, than we’ve ever seen him. Like a baseball player — perhaps even, dare I say it, an outfielder — and not a longshoreman or a guy with a moving truck.
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By God, don’t trade the man! It could be I’m a rube, but that’s what screamed inside my head as I took in those images and imagined what a 24-year-old player — coming off a bad, terrible, horrible season in which he still belted 30 home runs — might do after reinventing himself physically.
“We brought it up with him,” president of baseball operations Theo Epstein said of Schwarber’s offseason work, “and he told us that he had already made it a priority that he was going to get into the best shape of his life and that he realized now that, to be the left fielder that he needs to be and to be the hitter that he needs to be, this is something that he wanted to do.
“You can control what kind of shape you get into in the offseason. There’s a lot in this game that you can’t control. He’s looking to dominate everything under his control.”
As I reach for my cynic’s cap, the images of Schwarber and the words of Epstein begin to look and sound like an elaborate sales pitch to use this week at baseball’s Winter Meetings in Orlando, Florida. Could it be that the Cubs are hoping to trade Schwarber? There were reports that the Yankees and Red Sox were interested in the left-handed slugger, who always has made clear sense as an American League designated hitter.
The Cubs kind of make sense without Schwarber, too. Albert Almora Jr. is ready and good enough to take on an every-day outfielder’s load. Jason Heyward’s contract leaves no real choice but to keep him right where he has been. Ben Zobrist, Ian Happ, Jon Jay if the Cubs re-sign him — there are plenty of others who’ll need at-bats.
Besides, this is no time for sentimentality. Not when the Yankees are throwing nearly $300 million at Giancarlo Stanton. Not when Bryce Harper is driving toward a contract that will make Stanton’s look puny. Sentimentality? No, it’s go-for-the-throat time if the World Series-minded Cubs think they can make themselves even a little bit better.
Still, don’t they need another year to know what they truly have in Schwarber? Don’t we all need another year — a best-shape-of-his-life year — given the knee injury that cost Schwarber the 2016 regular season is still so close in the rearview mirror?
One more time, please: Let the man rake. Let’s see if he can be the one who makes the Cubs better.
Let him chase 30 home runs again. Or 40. Or 50, where Stanton roams. Let Schwarber bumble in the outfield on occasion as long as he continues to get better out there. He’s no closer to a Gold Glove than he is to Olympic gold in the 100 meters, but the images from Mesa don’t lie. At a critical crossroads in his young career, this dude isn’t playing around.
Kyle Schwarber appeared in the Cubs’ Snapchat story Wednesday. | Cubs/Snapchat
“People are always going to have an opinion about you,” Schwarber said late last season, “but there’s always room to improve. I want to be the best possible player I can be — being a better hitter, being a better baserunner, being a better defender, being a better teammate. Anything like that, I want to be. And that takes constant work.”
The Cubs have seen a lot of that side of Schwarber. He worked tirelessly and was a terrific teammate in 2016 as he slowly fought back from a severe knee injury. When he wasn’t rehabbing, he was diving into scouting reports with his teammates. When he wasn’t doing that, he was offering a helping hand wherever he could.
And the way Schwarber handled an in-season demotion to Class AAA Iowa in 2017 was beyond impressive.
“You can’t just shut down on yourself because adversity hits,” he said then. “That’s not me. I love the challenge.”
Epstein has long been a big fan of Schwarber, maybe more so than anyone else. It might be that there’s next to no chance at all the Cubs will trade him. For at least one more season, anyway, that would be a fine way to go.
Either way, we’ve all learned by now that Schwarber isn’t a Babe Ruth-style “Schwarbino,” isn’t a cartoon character, isn’t going to just spit out long home runs and clutch hits all the time like he did during the 2015 postseason and the 2016 World Series.
And now there’s visual proof: those images of a lean, mean fighting-for-his-career machine. Yeah, I want to see what that guy can do.
Follow me on Twitter @SLGreenberg.
Email: sgreenberg@suntimes.com