Kyle Schwarber Was Born to Hit Four

Here’s one of my favorite Kyle Schwarber stories: When he was 20 years old and still at Indiana, he was invited to have a conversation with Cubs president Theo Epstein. He was nervous about it, obviously, and he told himself again and again to keep his cool, to stick to the clichés, to give a good impression.

“Do you think you can catch in professional baseball?” Theo asked him.

“It #&#@&! pisses me off when people say I can’t catch,” Schwarbs heard himself say.

Obviously, Schwarber thought he blew it.

What he’d actually done was convince an already convinced Theo Epstein to make him the No. 4 pick in the draft … Epstein already knew that Schwarber would not make a catcher in the big leagues. What he wanted was fire, and Kyle Schwarber is fire.