Dansby Swanson and the Importance of Being Early When You're Fast

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Cubs' leader and highest-paid player hit the ball hard more often in 2024 than in 2023—but he got much less value from those hard-hit balls. Why? Check the contact point.

Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images

In his second season with the Cubs, Dansby Swanson had very similar strikeout and walk rates to the ones he posted in his first campaign with them. He hit the ball hard more often (42.7%, up from 39.7%), and had a virtually identical average exit velocity. Based on raw batted-ball data, he should have been close to the same hitter he was in 2023. He wasn't. After hitting .244/.328/.416 in the first year of his seven-year deal, his production dipped to .242/.312/.390 last season.

Last week, I wrote about the difficulty of playing through injuries, as Swanson did for much of 2024. While he managed superficially similar contact quality, his swing didn't look quite the same, because he was compromised by the sports hernia for which he underwent surgery after the season. Now, thanks to the new data on batter's box positioning and contact points made public on Baseball Savant Sunday night, we can see what undermined his performance in more granular detail.

Here's what Swanson's setup, stride and contact point looked like on pitches that resulted in hard-hit balls in play in 2023. 

Right away, the aggressiveness of Swanson's stride is apparent. He gains about 20 inches of ground on the ball with this attack, meeting the pitch (on average) 2 inches in front of home plate and 32.5 inches from his body. Hard contact tends to happen out front for most hitters, and that's always been true for Swanson. When he's right, he gets his power by beating the ball to its spot. His results on hard-hit balls that year were quite good—as you'd expect.

He uses all fields, but when Swanson is on time (which is to say, in a way, early; the fast swings that tend to generate hard contact usually mean getting to the ball before the ball gets to you). he pulls his well-hit balls pretty often.

Now, compare that graphic of his stance and movements from 2023 to this one, showing the same data for 2024.

He set up deeper in the box last year, to give himself a little more time to get the bat up to speed and on plane. As we discussed last week, his stride was shorter; you can see that clearly in this visual. Pay special attention, though, to that contact point. It's much deeper, averaging 2.7 inches behind the front edge of home plate and 29.5 inches from Swanson's body. There are plenty of hitters who (even on hard contact) meet the ball deeper than Swanson did last year, but for him, this was a symptom of a physical limitation. It showed in the spray of his hard-hit balls, and the production he realized on them.

Compared to the previous season, Swanson was markedly less productive on his hard-hit balls: a lower batting average, and six fewer homers in almost exactly the same sample size. The culprit (besides, perhaps, unfriendly Wrigley Field winds): too many of those hard-hit balls went to right field. Sometimes, even when he was swinging fast, he seemed to get there too late, too deep in the hitting zone, and the pitcher beat him.

Hitting is about both fast, controlled, explosive movements, and good timing. It's about being fast enough, but even being fast enough isn't good enough if one gets started too late. Swanson, playing through a fairly major injury, was not on time even on some of his best swings last year, and it ate into his production. This season, to assess his health and project his ability to rediscover consistent positive outcomes on his best contact, keep an eye on his contact point. Swanson is a guy who needs to catch the ball out front, at least a little bit, to do his best work. Last year, he couldn't do it, and although he's now healthy again, he's also 31 years old. There are no guarantees that he'll immediately reclaim his former form purely because he's gotten that sports hernia taken care of.

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