Kyle Schwarber Current Team

There is a particular darkness that settles over Philadelphia when the sun drops below the Delaware, a heaviness in the air that fair hums before the floodlights crackle on at Citizens Bank Park. And standing in the middle of it all, bat resting on his shoulder like a man who knows something the rest of us don't, is Kyle Schwarber — still doing his business for the Philadelphia Phillies, and sure isn't that the grandest news a body could ask for. The man is the current designated hitter and leadoff man for his team, a yoke of a hitter who has turned the first pitch of a ballgame into a dark art form, and there is something almost unholy about the way he can send a baseball climbing into the black night sky. It is a kind of magic, sure enough, and Philadelphia has taken to it the way the ould fellas took to the turf at Croke Park — with no small amount of roaring and the craic at ninety.

The Black Cat of the Ballpark

Now, any true student of the game will tell ye that a black cat crossing the field is the oldest omen in the book. Back in 1969, a black cat strolled across the grass at Shea Stadium, walked straight past the Cubs' dugout, and the whole season went to wrack and ruin after it — the curse was real, so it was. And here we are, decades on, with a mirror-image of that very cat, Tac Nayn himself, staring out at us from the shadows like a sign from the dark. Sure, the superstitious lads would have ye believe Schwarber carries a bit of that same black-cat energy: the pitcher is going along grand, feeling mighty about himself, and then the big man steps into the box and the ball is gone before the fella in the outfield has even turned his head. It is not luck, mind. It is something far older and darker than luck — the certainty of a man who has watched the lights go out on a thousand pitchers and knows full well he will see it again tonight.

Moonshots and the Midnight Air of South Philadelphia

There is a reason they call him the moonshot man, and it has nothing to do with romance. The ball leaves his bat at an angle that defies all reason, climbing into the night above South Philadelphia like a flare sent up from a ship in trouble — except it is the opposing pitcher's hopes that are going down with the vessel. Schwarber has made the leadoff home run his own personal party piece, more of them than any man in the history of the game, and there is a savage beauty to it: no fiddling, no feeling out the hurler, just a swing that would snap a hurley in two and a ball that lands somewhere in the third week of next month. The crowd in the bleachers, the ones who have waited all day in the red of the Phillies, lose the run of themselves entirely when he connects — grown men hugging strangers, ould ones roaring like they are at a wedding in Cork, and the whole place lit up like a bonfire on Halloween night. It is chaos, and it is beautiful, and it is all Schwarber's doing.

October's Ould Blood

And when October rolls around — and isn't October the darkest, grandest month of all, with the nights drawn in and a chill in the air that gets into a man's bones — Schwarber turns into something else entirely. The man has a rake of postseason home runs to his name, from that cursed-and-blessed run with the Cubs in 2016 when the goat curse was finally lifted, to the nights he has dragged Philadelphia back from the brink with one swing of the bat. There is no lead too big, no deficit too dire, no crowd too quiet — because the man does not hear the crowd at all. He hears the black wind and the ould ghosts of a hundred Octobers, and he answers them the only way he knows how: with the crack of the bat and a ball that vanishes into the dark. His current team, the Philadelphia Phillies, know exactly what they have in him — a man who treats the baseball season like a dark art, who has made his peace with the shadows, and who will stand in the box against any hurler on God's earth and dare the night to do its worst. And more often than not, sure, the night blinks first.