We’ve been doing this for several years now. We reviewed some of the top free agents, as rated by Keith Law in The Athletic and Ben Cleens at FanGraphs, using the contracts FanGraphs suggests they will receive, and asked if we should sign them.
Kyle Schwarber is number 8 on Keith Law’s free agent list and number 6 on Ben Clemens list.
Schwarber is a 32-year-old (33 by opening day), left-handed hitting DH/LFer. 2025 was his best season in an 11-year career. He played in all 162 games, hit .240/.365/.563 with 56 home runs (league-leading) and 132 RBI(league-leading). RBIs depend on runners being on base for you, but still….that’s a lot for a guy who hit 2nd or leadoff in the batting order 110 times (of course, he drove himself in 56 times).
The question is, can he do that again? He’s one of those three-true-outcome types, 56 home runs, 108 walks and 197 strikeouts. That’s one short of half his plate appearances. He’s always been a low-average hitter, but he’s has taken over 100 walks in each of his last three seasons.
Keith Law says:
Schwarber certainly picked the right time to have a career year, and he’s actually set career highs in fWAR two years in a row. This season, he led the NL with 56 homers, just one off the Phillies’ all-time record set by the preeminent Ryan Howard, and finished 10th in the NL in OBP at .365, which helped him end up third in the league in wRC+ behind Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto. The most remarkable part of his 2025 was probably his performance against lefties, where he hit .252/.366/.598, his second straight year of strong production when he didn’t have the platoon advantage in his favor.
That’s all to the good; now for the bad part. Schwarber will play at 33 in 2026, and he’s already a DH, and he’s also at the upper bound of how much a hitter can swing and miss while still being productive. His overall strikeout rate is in the bottom 10 in the majors, and he whiffs on breaking pitches over 40 percent of the time that he swings. His whiff rate on sliders alone was the fourth-worst in baseball this year, behind Ryan McMahon, Byron Buxton and Trevor Larnach; on curveballs, his whiff rate was seventh. He does nearly all of his damage on fastballs, which is great until his bat speed slips a little bit … which happens with age. I don’t think he’s lost any bat speed yet, but it’s coming at some point. I expect he’ll get another four-year deal, given the tremendous platform season, but I’d be very worried about the last half of that.
Clemens:
The only reason I didn’t put Schwarber higher on this list is his age. He’ll be 33 when the 2026 season starts, and that makes a long deal more or less impossible. Older hitters have had a miserable time in the modern majors. In the past decade, hitters aged 35 and over have managed seven seasons of a 140 or higher wRC+. Four of those seven seasons belong to Nelson Cruz. Maybe Schwarber will be the next guy to do it, but if he is, he’ll do so on a series of shorter deals. That’s just how free agency works these days.
Ben figures him to get a three-year contract, at $35 million a year, for a total of $105 million. Three years is as high as I would go, too.
