Trying (And Failing) to Make Sense of Dansby Swanson’s Second-Half Resurgence

[Davy Andrews]

The BABIP gods frowned upon Dansby Swanson earlier this year. What, exactly, has he been doing differently of late?

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

I’ll be honest with you. At a certain point, I stopped checking in on Dansby Swanson. The first half of the season was just so disheartening. Some of that was Swanson’s fault, and some of that was simply because baseball is a lot like life, and sometimes life is stupid. In 2022 and 2023, he’d combined to put up a 111 wRC+, which meant that for the first time in his career, Swanson was coming off two straight seasons of above-average production at the plate. According to Statcast, his 30 Fielding Run Value were the most among all shortstops over that period. That combination of good offense and excellent defense gave him 11.5 fWAR, second only to Francisco Lindor’s 11.9. In other words, over those last two years, Swanson was the second-best shortstop in baseball. Then the spring of 2024 happened.

In March and April, Swanson ran a wRC+ of 90, while whiffing a third of the time. Then things got worse. He spent the entire month of May in a slump (wrapped around a 12-day absence due to a sprained knee). He ran a wRC+ of just 39 and batted .144; it was the third-worst month of his entire career. Swanson finally looked like himself in June, running a 111 wRC+ and slugging four homers — as many as he’d hit in March, April, and May combined. But rather than going into the break with any kind of momentum or hope, he started July with the coldest stretch of his entire career. Starting on June 30, he ran a six-game hitless streak with just one walk. (Just to satisfy any morbid curiosity you might have, a stretch like that works out to a slash line of .000/.045/.000 and a wRC+ of -87. Yes, that says negative 87. Over those six games, Swanson was 187% worse than the average hitter, so that’s fun.) Swanson didn’t do much better after the break, ending the month of July with a wRC+ of 63.

I think that’s around the time I tuned out. Swanson wasn’t feeling great about things, either. When Meghan Montemurro of the Chicago Tribune asked Swanson about his production before the break, he started his answer with, “Production would be a very kind word for you to use.” Looking back, however, it’s clear that I missed some important signs. That’s not to say that Swanson didn’t have some real issues. He definitely did.

Still, Swanson actually ran an excellent 45.4% hard-hit rate over the first half, a mark he’s only ever sustained over a full season once. Likewise, his 90.6-mph exit velocity was higher than he’d ever run over a full season. However, his 50.5% groundball rate was the highest of his career. Hard contact is extremely important, but it can only help so much if you’re just beating the ball into the ground.

Swanson’s 24% chase rate was also right in line with his career totals, but his swing rate on pitches in the zone dropped to 70.6%, his lowest since 2019. Furthermore, perhaps because he was so passive, pitchers started attacking the strike zone as they never had against him. Before the season, he had a career zone rate of 49.6%. In the first half, it was 52.9%. He saw more breaking stuff, and, somewhat surprisingly, more of that breaking stuff ended up inside the zone. Pitchers were challenging Swanson, and he responded by taking called strikes and grounding out.

In 2023, Swanson’s SEAGER score, which rewards hitters for selective aggression – swinging at hittable pitches and laying off balls – ranked in the 95th percentile. Even though his chase rate is excellent as ever, this season, Swanson’s passivity has caused his SEAGER score to fall into the 60th percentile. Swanson doesn’t make a ton of contact or put up top-end exit velocity numbers. Every batter has their limitations, and those are his. They leave a somewhat narrow path to success, and plate discipline is the key to walking that path. Swanson has to avoid chasing, and he has to jump all over hittable pitches. During the first half of the season, he failed to do the latter.

Okay, so those last three paragraphs represented some very tangible things that Swanson was doing worse during the first half. However, something else was going on, and it was extremely predictable. What’s the first thing a smart person looks at when a batter’s production suddenly falls off a clip? Their BABIP. Swanson ran a .271 batting average on balls in play during the first half, nearly 40 points below his career average and more than 15 points below the worst season of his entire career. I’m all about digging through the numbers for an explanation, but it’s pretty clear that Swanson was just plain getting unlucky. He ran a .323 expected wOBA and a .277 actual wOBA in the first half. That 46-point gap was the second-largest among all qualified players. Baseball is going to baseball, and there is very little that you can do about that, even when you’re a back-to-back All-Star and Gold Glove winner. That’s one nice thing about the baseball gods: they’re equal-opportunity smiters.

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[Bertz]

Yeah it's like 90% luck.  There was this weird thing in the first half where because Morel was so comically unlucky, it took up all the air in the room and it was hard to have the conversation about Swanson without it coming off as excuse making.  And forget about Miguel Amaya getting in on that convo.

And honestly I think the other part might be simple strength of schedule.  There was a stretch in late April to early June where the Cubs played a brutal gauntlet of pitchers.  Even teams that don't have the best pitching (the Reds for instance) the Cubs seemed to always draw the top of their order.  By Pitch Info, in the first half of the year, the Cubs faced an average fastball of 95.01 MPH.  The Braves were second at 94.68.  That 0.33 difference is the same as the difference between the #2 Braves and the Orioles at #19.  Velocity is not a perfect proxy for pitcher quality, but when you're more than a full standard deviation beyond your next closest peer it's a problem.  Here in the 2nd half, Cubs are 27th.

Swanson has improved across the board in the second half, but when looking at peripherals rather than production, it's all small incremental improvements.  He cut his groundball rate, but not dramatically.  His K's have gone down a lot, but the contact/discipline numbers have moved improved far less.  I think those peripheral improvements are the ebbs and flows of quality of competition, while the topline production is largely BABIP.