Here at Audacy Sports, we've written not once, not twice, but three times about just how hot Kyle Schwarber has been of late, and for good reason. After all, he has been hitting home runs at a rate that was only matched by two players in baseball history, and both of them — Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa — were doing so under circumstances that didn't seem all too innocent.
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And every single person is talking about Shohei Ohtani, the two-way star who has taken the MLB universe by storm and is casually a pitcher leading the league in home runs. It just doesn't make sense.
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But in the past 15 games, which is roughly the time span since Rob Manfred and the league introduced their crackdown against pitchers using foreign substances, the best hitter in baseball hasn't been Shohei Ohtani, nor has it been Kyle Schwarber. I kid you not... so long as you're using OPS as your metric for measuring total offensive production.
If that's the case, then you'll see that it's Texas Rangers slugger Joey Gallo who is raking better than anyone else in baseball. As of the writing of this article, here are those three players' slash lines over their last 15 games played:
— Gallo: .357/.500/1.000 | 1.500 OPS
— Ohtani: .310/.408/1.048 | 1.456 OPS
— Schwarber: .333/.419/1.019 | 1.438 OPS
That's insane! Maybe there's a correlation between this wild stretch and the crackdown, or perhaps it's just the case of a hitter getting hot. And the craziest part of all this is that the hottest part of that streak is still happening. In his last five games — and you might not believe these numbers at first glance — Gallo is slashing .563/.667/1.875 with seven home runs. And I'm not talking about my Joey Gallo card in MLB The Show on rookie mode. I'm talking about the Major League Joey Gallo, the first Ranger since Mike Napoli in 2012 to homer in five straight games.
And what a time for Gallo to be doing so, with the trade deadline coming up and the chance for him to join a contender in the middle of an unconsciously hot streak. We'll see if it continues and which teams push all their chips to the middle of the table for a chance at MLB's hottest slugger. We took a crack at it back in mid-May, though times have changed a little bit since then.
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