Is Dansby Swanson Fixed? And How Did He Get So Broken?

[RandallPnkFloyd]

The Cubs' richest recent player investment has had a tough season, but he's coming out of his funk a bit during June. Could it be that he was at less than 100 percent during his toughest times?

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

When the Chicago Cubs signed Dansby Swanson in the 2022-23 offseason, they did so knowing that he didn’t possess the offensive upside of his free agent counterparts. However negligent pursuing defense and unquantifiable character traits over clearly (and, probably, vastly) superior hitters might’ve been, it’s not likely they expected this poor a performance from him with the stick this early in the contract.

That's because Swanson hasn’t been this bad for this long before--at least not since he stabilized as an offensive performer, somewhere in 2019. That year was when he established himself after a rapid ascent to the big leagues. He posted wRC+ figures of 63 & 79 in 2017 and 2018, respectively, with the 91 in 2019 representing his establishment. He’s produced above-average wRC+ figures since, with the exception of a 99 blip in 2021. So when we think about stretches where he’s been as bad as he has for virtually all of 2024, it becomes very difficult to find a comparison.

It's that very “breakout” season, though, that provides us with something we can compare to. Even after establishing himself as an elite defender who hits enough, Swanson has had month-to-month stretches of volatility, but August and September of 2019 give us a precedent for this sort of prolonged slump. Perhaps there’s some sort of information we can glean, to find answers as to how Swanson can crawl out of what is threatening to become a season-long funk.

The last stretch this brutal for Swanson really started in July of that 2019 campaign. He ran an 84 wRC+ that month, before going for figures of 36 and 52 in the final two months. His final figure for the second half was just 55. Looking at the second half as a whole, he struck out at a 29.7 percent clip while hitting just .204 and posting a .315 on-base percentage. His ISO was only .049. That’s all even with a very respectable .312 BABIP.

Let’s dig a bit deeper. In August and September of that season, he made only one piece of hard contact on a non-fastball. Other than that, offspeed and breaking pitches ruled him. He whiffed at roughly 42% of breaking pitches and exactly half of his swings at offspeed stuff. His overall swing rates were within his normal band for that season, but he plunged to a contact rate of barely 70%. It was just a lot of whiff, when he wasn’t making higher-than-usual groundball contact.

Swanson hasn’t been quite that bad in 2024. Sure, a wRC+ of 81 isn’t what you want from perhaps your highest-profile player. But it’s been even worse within. In May, he was at just a 40 wRC+ and fanned at a 28% rate. His ISO was just .086. His overall first-half numbers feature a slash with a .208 average, a .286 OBP and a .134 ISO. Again, not quite as bad, but his longest stretch of well-below-average production since late 2019.

Of course, there’s a giant caveat within that 2019 stretch that I have neglected to share: He was working through a heel injury. He missed time, and then continued to have it nag him through the end of the year. Up to that point, he was having a genuine breakout season, which brings us to a relevant question: how much of Dansby Swanson’s current performance can we attribute to the knee injury for which he spent time on the IL last month? It was characterized as a right knee sprain coming off a slide into second base.

This is my entirely backdoor way of trying to find a little bit of optimism with regard to 2024 Dansby Swanson. As outsiders, we have no way of knowing the extent to which the knee was bothering him. But thus far in June, he has looked… better.

Through a shade over 50 plate appearances, his wRC+ is at 103 for this month. His strikeout rate has been cut from 28.1% in May to just 19.0% in June, while his walks are back up a touch, to 10.3%. His ISO is up at .196, the highest of any month to this point. He’s still hitting the ball on the ground far too much (60.0 GB%), but whiffs are down and balls in play are up. That’s a start.

It’s easy to lose the uptick in performance within the broader context of Swanson’s own struggles and those of the team at large. But it’s at least becoming fairly clear that the weeks surrounding his IL stint were absolutely impacted by the knee injury, given the parallels to the heel in 2019. He has a long way to go to reestablish some value as a member of this Cubs’ lineup, but the reality is, so do the eight guys around him on any given night.

What we have for now, at least, is at least some semblance of optimism.

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[CubinNY]

Nope, he's Dansby Swanson. This is who he is as a player. 

[Bertz]

Dansby Swanson monthly wOBA and xwOBA

It's mostly just batted ball luck.  He had a rough stretch in early May leading into his trip to the IL but there's less progression here and more just getting what he's due.  Morel and Amaya have some of this coming their way too.

The groundball rate is too high, I think that's the one thing that's actually been problematic.  Interestingly it was also really high last April when he was crushing it.  I wondered at the time if it might be a somewhat intentional choice due to the April weather.  This has lingered into the summer though so it's clearly not on purpose this year.

[Billy62]

You want to make yourself go crazy? Try to figure out why a player goes into or comes out of a batting slump? Or why a pitcher suddenly loses his grasp on pitching location, only to suddenly find it again. We have to look no further than Kyle Hendricks to see that play out. What if Yan Gomes gets picked up by somebody else and starts driving the ball all over the field and driving in runs? Even worse, what if he beats us late in the game in the future? If you have been a Cubs fan long enough you have witnessed some of these things play out. Then you come up with the only obvious explanation, "God hates the Cubs." The game is 20% mechanical and 80% mental. Sure a guy can be watching film and see that he might be dipping his shoulder to early or pulling his head off the ball as of late. And sometimes these are accurate discoveries. They correct them and they start hitting again. But more often than not, its something else. "I hit better when I have fried chicken for dinner." "My pant legs don't come down far enough." Maybe its a new bat, new cap, new gloves. All of this defies rational explanation, but the player believes in it and it restores his confidence in the box. So you have to live with your decisions based on the present. We had to move Gomes because he was not hitting for us. Maybe in the future he will hit for somebody else. Then again maybe not. The game is not that exact. This is why you lose hair and feel twinges in your chest. God help us. 🙂

Edited June 21, 2024 by Billy62
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