The Cubs Need the Dansby Swanson Resurgence to Be Real. Is It?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Since the All-Star break, the team's formerly All-Star-caliber shortstop has looked a bit more like his All-Star self. Can the good times last? And if so, is this team alive and kicking, after all?

Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

For nearly a year, Dansby Swanson's bat looked dead. From Aug. 1, 2023 through the recess for the All-Star break last month, Swanson batted .212/.286/.368. In 570 plate appearances, he struck out 26 percent of the time, walked 8.8 percent of the time, and hit 18 home runs. It was a very long stretch of futility for a player who turned 30 right in the middle of that stretch, over the offseason. There were no guarantees he would ever be especially useful at the plate again.

That could still turn out to be true. We're only 69 plate appearances into the second half of this season, and there's all kinds of noise in the data. However, it sure looks like Swanson got healthy, inspired, or otherwise fueled up over the four-day break last month. He's a whole different hitter since the start of baseball's unofficial second half.

He's hitting .317/.391/.400 over this span. His walk rate is up to 11.6%, and his strikeout rate is down to 20.3%. He hasn't yet homered, but hits are everywhere for Swanson over the last three weeks. In the first half, he hit far too many ground balls, and also too many high pop flies.

The trouble spots in the graphic above are the big gray bars just south of 0 degrees of launch angle, which mean he was hitting a lot medium-speed, routine ground balls; and the pale salmon bar just above 30 degrees, which means he was hitting a lot of fly balls that were almost threatening, but not quite.

Here's the same chart for the admittedly tiny sample he's accumulated since the break.

Those easy grounders are almost nonexistent, lately. His high liners and low fly balls are better-struck. And see that cluster of deep blue, way below the equator in terms of launch angle? It's not how you'd want to try making a living, but those slowly hit balls straight into the ground are often viciously difficult to convert into outs. Swanson has four infield hits on such balls already in the second half, and sometimes, the difference between a strikeout and even this ostensibly unpromising contact can be night and day.

Indeed, Swanson has made far more contact since the break, and part of that is being willing to adapt his swing and his approach, rather than try to blast away on every swing.

Mostly, though, the promise lies in the fact that Swanson seems to have figured out how to time up his upper and lower halves better. Consider two 0-1 sliders, 11 months apart, both thrown to Swanson at Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati. Last September, he pulled off the ball, got it off the end of his bat, and flied out lazily. This is typical of a lot of his contact over the final two months of that season, and throughout the first half of 2024.

Now, here's how he looked at the tail end of this July. Same pitch, different swing, very different result. 

Swanson waits a bit longer to transfer his weight in his lower half, and is more balanced when he does so. Meanwhile, his hands stay closer to his body much longer, and then he fires. This is a swing that can adapt much better to various pitch types and locations. It doesn't lend the hitter as high a maximum possible exit velocity, but that's fine. Here, let's isolate the crucial moment, for easy comparison.

Each of these stills are when the ball is about 10 feet from home plate. The image on the left is a hitter who's worried about being on time, so he's cheating everywhere. The front hip is leaking open more, and he's on his front foot. The hands are way out there, trying to get extended--but really, just trying not to get jammed, should the pitch be a sinker inside. The one on the right is a hitter who's trusting his bat speed. He's actually going to contact the ball just as far out in front as the one on the left; he's just going to be far more under control as the barrel accelerates.

Swanson probably isn't totally fixed, just yet. This change to his timing and posture is positive, but it won't turn him into a superstar. However, it's the change he's been needing to make for months, and it could well mark the turning of a corner. Swanson still has the physical tools to be a .750 OPS guy. The challenge is being consistent enough, in both pitch selection and these finer points of the movements of hitting, to translate that ability into production. For a long time, Swanson was unable to meet that challenge, and the Cubs' offense is one (uninspiring) thing when he's thus mired. When he's doing what he's doing lately, though, that offense is an entirely different thing, and the Cubs are an entirely different team. The team desperately needs its star shortstop to keep those hands close and quick.

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[Bertz]

People hate hearing about xwOBA et al, especially since it was such a hot topic with Morel too, but those Statcast numbers have said Swanson's been largely fine all season.  And as a guy in the 9th year of his career you can safely chalk up half a season of underperformance in that area to small sample size nonsense (even if "luck" feels problematic).

The groundballs though have been a real issue, and are likely the difference between a luck neutral wRC+ in the 100-105 range versus something closer to 115.  That's been the especially heartening.