What’s That? You’ll Have to Speak Up, I Can’t Hear You Over the Sound of Kyle Schwarber’s Home Run

It’s not often that men who are paid to speak about baseball are struck dumb or taken aback by something that takes place on the diamond. Of course, it’s not often you see someone do the things Kyle Schwarber seems to do on a regular basis. In the case of his most recent home run, though, I suppose it’s more appropriate to say you don’t often hear someone do what this kid does.

Blind folks knew this was a home run. Jim Deshaies was in the middle of a conversation for which I’ve since lost context, but it really didn’t matter anyway. Not that JD doesn’t have some good things to say, just that the report of WAR Bear’s bat as it connected with a hanging slider from Matt Cain erased all capacity for rational discourse.

It was something like this: “But not that much lost, as [unintelligible words]…OH, boy!”

Len picked up the slack, calling “Schwarber crushes one deep to right (the ball reaches the seats atop the wall right about nowish) center…GONE!”

That’s all it took, just 8 syllables in 6 words, for the ball to go from home plate to the fans seated 397 feet away. You can get places pretty quickly when you’re traveling 108 mph though. At the risk of overplaying my hand, I just can’t get over the way SchwarBeast just mauls mistakes. Cain’s pitch was only moving 86 mph, so it’s not as though the rookie just caught a heater on the screws.

But as soon as I start to think maybe it’s me being an IU homer or just some starry-eyed blogger who never had the skill to play the game at a high level and is thus confined to his mother’s basement, I look to the Cubs dugout to see the reaction of other highly-paid baseball players. These guys also do what Schwarber does, but they don’t do what Schwarber does.

Just seeing how fired up those guys are makes you understand that it’s not just a treat for all us fanboys and girls. Speaking of treats, I’m going to sit back and enjoy this video a few dozen more times. Fair warning though: you might want to turn your speakers down at the at the :03 mark.