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Kyle Schwarber has played in Game 7 of the World Series, and homered for the United States in the World Baseball Classic. But he had never walked up to the plate in an All-Star Game swing-off. No one had.
“That’s kind of like the baseball version of a shootout,” he said after homering on all three of his swings, going down to his left knee on the final one, to overcome a two-homer deficit. That held up when Jonathan Aranda fell short on the American League’s final three swings, giving the National League a 4-3 swing-off win after a 6-6 tie on Tuesday night in which the team had wasted a six-run, seventh-inning lead.
Concerned about running out of pitchers in an era where no All-Star throws more than one inning, Major League Baseball and the players’ association made the change in 2022. In baseball’s equivalent of soccer’s penalty-shootout, the game was decided by having three batters from each league take three swings each off coaches.
“It will be interesting to see where [the swing-off rule] goes,” said AL manager Aaron Boone of the New York Yankees. “There’s probably a world where you could see that in the future, where maybe it’s in some regular season mix. I wouldn’t be surprised if people start talking about it like that.”
Boone picked Brent Rooker, Randy Arozarena and Aranda on Monday, and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts picked Eugenio Suárez, Schwarber and Pete Alonso for the NL. Because Suárez was hit on the left hand by a fastball in the eighth inning, the NL turned to the team’s alternate, Kyle Stowers.
Players from both teams stood outside their dugouts, some already in street clothes, jumping and shouting after each long ball from their side. Yankees coach Travis Chapman threw to the AL batters and Dodgers coach Dino Ebel to the NL hitters.
Rooker put the AL ahead by homering on his last two swings, and Stowers hit one. Randy Arozarena boosted the AL lead to 3-1. Ebel had thrown BP to Schwarber two years ago at the WBC.
“He asked me right before, he was like, where do you want it?” Schwarber recalled “I’m like, just middle. And he’s like, ‘I gotcha.’”
He took two pitches and deposited the third just over the center-field fence. Schwarber took another, then hit a 461ft drive over the right-center bullpen. After letting two more go by, he dropped to a knee while pulling the third, craned his neck and held his bat it the air as the ball landed in the fourth row of the Chop House seats.
“I didn’t hit it, obviously, my best, but I was thinking I got enough of it,” Schwarber said. “And I was just kind of down there, hoping, saying: go, go, go. And it went. And it was awesome.”
Aranda followed with a fly well short of the center-field warning track, drove a pitch about a foot shy of the top of the right-field wall and hit an opposite-field pop that dropped in medium left.
Alonso, a two-time Home Run Derby champion, didn’t have to bat and patted Schwarber on the head as fireworks went off at Truist Field.
“I felt like a closer like a closer going into a game,” Alonso said, “and then it’s like, wait, the guy in the field got a double play to end the inning. You’re not going in.”
MLB, after consulting with the Elias Sports Bureau, said in 2022 that All-Star Games ending in a swing-off would be listed as tied, with a notation of the game being decided in a swing-off. MLB’s official postgame notes listed Tuesday’s outcome as a 7-6 NL victory.
Earlier in the game, Ketel Marte’s two-run double in the first had put the NL ahead, and Alonso’s three-run homer off Kris Bubic and Corbin Carroll’s solo shot against Casey Mize opened a 6-0 lead in the sixth.
The AL comeback began when Rooker hit a three-run pinch homer against Randy Rodríguez in a four-run seventh that included Bobby Witt Jr’s RBI groundout. Robert Suarez allowed consecutive doubles to Byron Buxton and Witt with one out in ninth, and Steven Kwan’s infield hit on a three-hopper to third off Edwin Díaz drove in the tying run.
Schwarber earned the MVP award, going 0 for 2 with a walk as the NL won for the second time in their last 12 tries. He became the first non-pitcher MVP without a hit.
