Dick Stuart And Kyle Schwarber: Decades Apart, Cut From Same Cloth
We compare the careers of two sluggers who aren't known for their defense, one of whom was probably born in the wrong era.
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . Dick Stuart was not known for his defense, or his speed, but he did manage to pull off one of the most exciting plays in baseball: the inside-the-park home run. More than once! On June 11, 1962, he buried a ball underneath the Wrigley Field ivy against the Cubs and chugged around the bases for an inside-the-parker. Then on Aug. 19, 1963, while facing the Indians as a member of the Red Sox, Stuart made the opposition’s defense pay for once when he launched a ball to deep left-center field that took an unexpected carom, hit the center fielder in the head, then rolled far away from the left fielder, and Stuart huffed and puffed all the way home.
. . . Kyle Schwarber is a prototypical slugger and, thus, not a prototypical leadoff hitter. But leadoff is where he’s found himself hitting for the Phillies most in recent years. In 2024, he hit 15 leadoff home runs, which set the single-season MLB record previously held by Alfonso Soriano (13 with the 2003 Yankees). Schwarber also led off the 2024 NLDS with a home run, which was his fifth career leadoff homer in the postseason — extending his own all-time record.
Leading Off
Dick Stuart Vs. Kyle Schwarber: A Tale Of Two Eras
By Russ Walsh
If Dick Stuart, the 1960s slugger for the Pittsburgh Pirates and other teams, is remembered at all today, it is most likely as the butt of a joke. Stuart, a prolific home run hitter, was one of the poorest fielders in baseball history. He earned a variety of nicknames, including Stone Fingers, The Man with the Iron Glove, and, most famously, Dr. Strangeglove, after the Academy Award winning movie Dr. Strangelove. Stuart, a first baseman because managers could find no better place to hide him, led whatever league he was in in errors for seven consecutive years. In 1963, playing for the Boston Red Sox, he led the league in errors for a first baseman with 29. The next closest player, Norm Sieburn of Kansas City, had 12.
It was Stuart’s misfortune to be born too soon, playing in the Majors from 1958-1969. The designated hitter rule came into the American League in 1973. Stuart, the quintessential designated hitter, never got a chance to play his natural position. In fact, Stuart’s style of “home run or strikeout” play was the subject of derision. In a profile of Stuart for Life magazine, written in 1957, after Stuart had hit 66 home runs for the Lincoln Chiefs of the Class A Western League the prior season, baseball writer Mark Harris* said this of baseball and Stuart:
…the game remains one of precise and painstaking skill. Baseball has never capitulated to the slugger. If it does, it will no longer be baseball, and the men who play it will not be baseball players but home run hitters. If … Dick Stuart transforms himself from a home run hitter into a baseball player, he will become a very fine baseball player indeed.
Stuart never made the transformation and thus remained a journeyman home run hitter for six different teams over 10 Major League seasons. He hit plenty of homers, but struck out prodigiously, and never mastered fielding or baserunning to an acceptable level. So, he bounced around from team to team, leaving a legacy as a selfish, “home run or strikeout” player with a nickname to enshrine his defensive futility.
Today, of course, the game has capitulated, in Harris’ words, to the home run hitter. As David Murphy of the Philadelphia Inquirer put it recently, “Dingers win ballgames. Dingers win playoffs. Dingers win championships.” When I read this, I began to wonder how Dick Stuart would fare in today’s game. Here is a comparison of Stuart’s career numbers alongside a comparable contemporary player, Kyle Schwarber.
Kyle Schwarber is considered by most to be one of the top five designated hitters in MLB today. In 2024 he was used almost exclusively as a DH, after spending two years in the Phillies’ outfield because of injuries to Bryce Harper. Like Stuart, he is a defensive liability. Like Stuart, he strikes out a lot. Also like Stuart, his calling card is the home run. The chart above shows both players after 10 years in the Majors. That includes all of Stuart’s career and Schwarber’s career so far. As you can see by the chart, these two players’ offensive numbers are remarkably similar.
Schwarber is the more prolific home run hitter, averaging about six more per season, but Stuart drove in more runs, averaging about 10 more per season than Schwarber. Schwarber shows a clear superiority in on-base percentage, due to his propensity to get walks. By all accounts Stuart disdained the walk. As Mark Harris put it in the Life magazine profile, “…he is so appalled by getting a walk to first base…[that] when a fourth ball is called, he turns to the umpire as if to protest.” Schwarber has over 350 more walks than Stuart, but Schwarber has also struck out over 350 more times than Stuart did.
Comparisons across different eras are tricky, of course, and I don’t mean to suggest that Stuart was just as good a player as Schwarber. For one thing, pitchers were expected to pitch complete games in the 1960s, and Stuart no doubt built up his stats on some tiring pitchers in the late innings, while Schwarber has to face fresh relievers throwing 100 mph bullets in the late going. What I would suggest is this: Stuart, far from being the butt of jokes, would be a valuable member of a Major League Baseball team in 2024 and would likely be pulling a salary north of $15 million.
And then I ask myself, “Is this a good thing?” Returning to Mark Harris and his Stuart profile in 1957,
Baseball is not arm-wrassling. Brute force counts for little. Defense is still half the game, while the vital offensive element is still that steady fellow who in some manner reaches first base. The run he scores counts equally with the nine-mile catapult, and it happens more often.
Harris is speaking of a time long past. Baseball today has given over to the brute force of the home run hitter and the blazing fastball of the power pitcher. In many ways, I lament the old days, but that doesn’t mean that a 450-foot Schwarbomb doesn’t lift me out of my seat cheering every time.
*Mark Harris is the author of what, for my money, is the greatest baseball novel ever written, Bang the Drum Slowly. The essay from Life magazine cited here is from a collection of his essays in Diamond: Baseball Writings of Mark Harris, Primus:New York, 1994.
Russ Walsh is a retired teacher, baseball coach, and writer living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He is a lifelong and long-suffering Philadelphia Phillies fan. He writes for the Society for American Baseball Research and for his blog The Faith of a Phillies Fan. You can contact him through X (formerly known as Twitter) at @faithofaphilli1
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