A recent visit to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles sparked an unexpected baseball thought experiment. Surrounded by iconic movie vehicles including the legendary DeLorean from Back to the Future it was hard not to imagine traveling through time. Maybe to witness a historic World Series, maybe to rewrite a painful Phillies collapse, or maybe just to answer one impossible baseball question:
What would happen if Kyle Schwarber played his home games at the Baker Bowl?
The old Baker Bowl, home of the Phillies from 1887 through 1938, was infamous for its absurdly short right field dimensions. The foul pole sat just 280 feet away from home plate, with the power alley only around 300 feet deep. For a modern left-handed slugger like Schwarber whose swing is practically engineered to launch towering pull-side fly balls it sounds less like a ballpark and more like a cheat code.
Naturally, the first idea was to borrow the museum’s DeLorean and settle the debate firsthand. Unfortunately, museums apparently frown upon unauthorized “historical baseball research,” especially when it involves attempting to drive off in movie props. After a failed escape attempt involving a vintage pickup truck from Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, and an awkward encounter at Schwarber’s front door, the time-travel mission was officially abandoned.
That left only one option: baseball math.
Today’s Citizens Bank Park already favors left-handed power hitters, but compared to the Baker Bowl, it looks spacious. The current right field wall stands 330 feet down the line and stretches to 369 feet in the alley. The Baker Bowl, by comparison, shaved roughly 50 to 70 feet off those measurements.
Using Baseball Savant data, every Schwarber fly ball to right field at Citizens Bank Park between 2022 and now that traveled between 280 and 369 feet was examined. The goal was simple: estimate how many of those outs, doubles, or warning-track shots would have cleared the Baker Bowl wall.
Without an exact scale model of the old stadium, the process became a glorified guessing game. The rough method involved comparing the warning track distance in Citizens Bank Park to where the Baker Bowl wall likely would have stood. Scientific? Not remotely. Entertaining? Absolutely.
And even with all the imperfections in the calculations, one conclusion became impossible to ignore:
Kyle Schwarber likely would have hit around 28 additional home runs as a Phillie if he played at the Baker Bowl.
That estimate could fluctuate slightly depending on wall angles or the towering height of the Baker Bowl’s right field barrier, but the overall point remains crystal clear. A pull-heavy slugger with Schwarber’s raw power placed inside one of baseball’s most famously hitter-friendly parks would have produced video-game numbers.
It’s the kind of baseball fantasy that makes fans wish time travel actually existed. Imagine Schwarber peppering the old metal wall with moonshots night after night while opposing pitchers slowly lost their sanity. The Baker Bowl already had a reputation for chaos during the live-ball era adding Schwarber to the equation might have pushed it into legend.
Unfortunately, reality still exists, the DeLorean remains locked away, and there are probably still legal questions surrounding the stolen movie truck. But at least the numbers offer a glimpse into an alternate baseball universe where Kyle Schwarber and the Baker Bowl became the most destructive home-run pairing the Phillies never had.
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