Kyle Schwarber homered in four straight games and drove in five home runs during that surge, giving the Phillies a jolt as they turned things around after the club replaced Rob Thomson with Don Mattingly on an interim basis. Schwarber capped the run with two home runs in the series finale against the Colorado Rockies, a burst that helped underscore how quickly one bat can change the mood around a lineup.

“It’s been interesting so far,” Schwarber said, and the numbers explain why. He is still working on “cutting down the K rate, things like that,” after going down on strikes in eight consecutive at-bats in the series against the Miami Marlins. Through 184 plate appearances, his strikeout rate sits at 32.1%, up from 27.2% in 2025, while his batting average is.227 after he hit.240 last year. The swing has produced damage, but it has also carried the same volatility that has followed him for stretches before.

That is the backdrop for Schwarber’s recent power surge. The Phillies needed production after the managerial change, and he has provided it without pretending the rough edges are gone. “We know there’s always going to be ups and downs throughout the course of a year,” he said, adding that “there’s been a lot of good signs as well.”

The tension for Philadelphia is that the same hitter who can bury a game with one swing is also running a strikeout rate that leaves little margin for error. Schwarber did not try to dress that up. “It’s not like you can go home and be upset, right?” he said. “We’re winning baseball games and finding a way to be productive at the plate.” For now, that is enough to keep the Phillies moving, even if the longer answer still depends on whether the strikeouts come down and the average climbs with the power.

What happens next is straightforward: if Schwarber keeps hitting balls over the fence while trimming the swing-and-miss that has followed him through 184 plate appearances, the Phillies’ turnaround under Mattingly will look less like a burst and more like a real reset.