Article: And They Said Dansby Swanson Couldn't Hit

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Nobody said Dansby Swanson couldn’t hit. But juxtaposing him with the other three shortstops in this year’s free agent class, it’s easy to see how one could arrive at the perception of him that pervaded over the winter.

Compared to the trio of Trea Turner, Xander Bogaerts, and Carlos Correa, Swanson was less desirable and less marketable. But at his peak, he’s probably part of the second tier of Major League shortstops (we can litigate tiers later). Elite defensively. Probably already punched above his weight offensively. Can still be a 20/20 guy. 

That’s where I landed with Swanson. You could do far, far worse at the six. But as an offensive centerpiece? Probably not what you want. Well, we’re through four games and it suddenly looks like we were all off-base in being underwhelmed by Swanson being the choice among the four winter shortstops. 

It’s a hilarious sentiment. Just as one shouldn’t react negatively to outcomes over the course of…probably April, one also certainly should not jump to happy conclusions, either–even if those happy conclusions feature 10 hits across the first 17 at-bats and being one of the only drivers of run production across the team’s first five days of the regular season. 

It probably wouldn’t be super worth discussing, unless the numbers in question were weird. And they are. So this isn’t so much raving about Swanson as it is seizing the opportunity to look at the output thus far. 

We covered the 10 hits across 17 at-bats (18 plate appearances). Within that, Swanson has an average exit velocity of 95.7 miles per hour. That’s five MPH higher than any season he’s had to date. He’s making hard contact a hair above 58 percent of the time. That’s 12 percentage points higher than his rate last year, which represented his best offensive season up to that point. 

If there’s a trend that is legitimately notable, it’s that Swanson has been hyper-aggressive against fastballs to this point. He’s swinging at hard stuff at a 58.4 percent clip, which would be his highest swing rate against that pitch type in any of his Major League seasons. Typically, it’s the offspeed stuff that induces his highest swing rate in each year since 2017. He’s laid off that stuff quite a bit to this point in favor of fastballs. 

 

Two other trends are worth tracking, too: 

1. Swanson has been hitting to the pull side or middle a shade over 83 percent of the time. For a guy who’s gone the other way about a quarter of the time throughout his career, it’s interesting that he’s starting out this hot and carrying the vast majority of that contact to the hitter’s side of the field. We’ve got a long way to go before it’s of any statistical significance, but the elimination of the shift makes it something worth pointing out for future monitoring. 
2. Swanson has a fly-ball rate of exactly zero percent. He hasn’t put a ball in the air to this point. Again, the sample is so small. This one is just funny to me. It’s been hard contact on the ground or via line drive, and it’s obviously working. 

 

Dansby Swanson is 7 for 9 to start his Cubs career 😮‍💨 pic.twitter.com/Kiwlp1m1DU

— Cubs Zone ™️ (@CubsZone) April 2, 2023

Perhaps the biggest irony of all of this is that Swanson got off to a completely abhorrent start in 2022. He hit .216, posted a .135 isolated power (ISO), and struck out almost 37 percent of the time. Once the calendar turned over to May, it was (obviously) a different story. Nonetheless, for someone who emphasizes the mental game as much as Swanson does, I imagine there’s a certain level of freedom that comes along with a start such as this. 

Ultimately, the numbers here don’t mean anything. They’re entertaining, but not indicative of performance or any level of output we can expect moving forward. However, with the other factors at play this season (shift, etc.), it’s absolutely going to be worth exploring Swanson’s production as the season wears on–not only because he represented the Cubs’ largest contractual investment this offseason, but because he’s had such variance at the plate in his career to date. 

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