A Whole New Kind of Dansby Swanson Has Joined Cubs Lineup Since All-Star Break

[Matthew Trueblood]

The quintessential throwback shortstop of his time is throwing his game back to a style he's never actually played before.

Image courtesy of © David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

The constant in Dansby Swanson's game--the meat in the sandwich, around which toppings and bread styles can change without the essence materially doing so--is his defense. His offensive contributions have always been variable, prone to long slumps and impressively long streaks. However, the shape of that production has been fairly consistent. Swanson is a power-over-OBP guy.

He hits for average, maybe, sometimes, as a product of hitting the ball hard when he's seeing it well, but he runs a high strikeout rate and a low-to-average walk rate. His strength at the plate lies in his ability to rack up extra bases more often than many shortstops. In his final three seasons with Atlanta, when he came into his own at the plate, he had a .265/.324/.451 slash line. He averaged 21 home runs and almost 50 extra-base hits per year, even though one of those seasons was the pandemic-shortened 2020.

That power--the foundation of his offensive game, at his peak--has been missing for a long time, now. It was a crisis that threatened his viability as an everyday player. He batted .212/.282/.350 in the first half of 2024, after going .212/.297/.346 over his final 200 plate appearances in 2023. The batting averages there drag down both of the other numbers, but viewed another way, the fact that his isolated power fell from .186 over a three-season stretch in Atlanta to .137 over a full season's worth of games from August of last year through the break this year indicates a lower quality of contact. He wasn't hitting for average for the same reason he wasn't hitting for power: too many rolled-over ground balls, too many whiffs, not enough juice behind the ball when he hit it.

Those are three different problems, but they're also related. They're about what you're looking for, as well as how your body moves. Fixing them is difficult, because when you're experiencing all of them, you're very much in multi-system failure. Like a knot that has been pulled tighter and compounded by tangling and time, it's hard to get the situation unwound even far enough to identify and tackle the underlying issue.

For the moment, it seems like Swanson has given up on trying to be his whole, natural self at the plate. That sounds bad, but it might be exactly what the moment demanded of him. Since the All-Star break, Swanson is batting .268/.339/.366, a combination of modest-but-solid batting average and below-average power you just never see from him. He's commanding the strike zone much better, with his strikeout rate down from 27.0% before the break to 20.5% and his walk rate up from 8.3% to 10.2%, but his batted-ball data all says that those changes are a matter of giving up power to put the ball in play. That jibes, too, with what I broke down on Swanson almost three weeks ago.

As that article pointed out, Swanson is getting on base with some dribblers and some bloopers recently. Even his double in Sunday's finale in Miami was a space-finder, rather than a wall-banger. He's become an effective hitter, for a little over a month now, purely piling up singles and walks.

The key to making that a dynamic offensive profile, though, is speed. It takes a little bit of it to reach on those choppers to the left side, and a little bit of it to get to second on those maybe-doubles that require some courage and hustle. It also takes a good deal of it (and another helping of nerve) to steal bases. Swanson isn't slow, per se, but he's not especially fast, and he has absolutely never made that a substantial part of his game in the big leagues. He did steal a career-high 18 bases in his walk year with Atlanta (almost everyone lucky enough to reach what can be readily identified as a walk year will set their career high in steals in that season; it's just good business), but he was caught seven times in the process, washing out most of that value.

Remove that year from the equation, and Swanson has never stolen more than 10 bases in the big leagues--at least, he hadn't, before now. At the All-Star break, Swanson (whom many believe has been hampered this season by a nagging knee injury that might require further intervention this offseason) was just 5-for-8 in steal attempts on the year. He took bags in back-to-back games in the team's mid-June trip to San Francisco, but otherwise, he hadn't even attempted a steal since May 1.

After swiping third after hitting a double Sunday afternoon, Swanson now has nine steals in as many tries over the last five weeks. He's up to 14 on the year. In the first half, Swanson attempted steals in 6.2% of his opportunities. Since the break, that rate has more than doubled, to 14.3%. He is, in one way of looking at it, pretty much what Nico Hoerner has been for the last few years--not quite what Hoerner has been when he's been going well, but what he's been overall. There's a solid batting average and good plate discipline here. There is, suddenly, a huge speed element. Power is still absent, and that should concern us. The fact that Swanson has come out of the break running so well and so eagerly is encouraging, since it would seem to tell us that his knee is feeling better after five days off--but the fact that his power didn't come back might mean that it's gone in a more lasting way than we previously guessed.

For now, what matters is that Swanson is finding ways to make big and valuable contributions to the team, even in the absence of what has typically been his signature offensive skill. Maybe he can come out on the other side of these struggles as a better and more well-rounded hitter than ever, but in all likelihood, what we're really looking at is just a great competitor getting creative in the pursuit of utility. That leaves a whole universe of possible futures on the table.

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