'We Don't Do Losing': It Took Three Years, But Dansby Swanson Made Cubs His Team—and His Teams Win

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images

The words should have sounded trite, or at least overconfident. When most players talk about winning as much as Dansby Swanson did upon his introduction as a Chicago Cub in January 2023, it comes off as blather. They mean it, of course, but they usually mean it in a slightly self-serving way, or they have a generalized mindset that winning is good but a lack of real, specific concepts that allow them to anchor winning at the center of what they do. So much is beyond the control of any one player on a baseball diamond that boasting about the intent to win feels like so much overheated bravado.

With Swanson, though, there was undeniably a little more depth to it. Firstly, his words carried more weight than the same ones would have if uttered by most other players. He'd won one national championship and come up one win short of another with Vanderbilt. He'd won a ring with the team from just outside Atlanta, and during his big-league tenure with them, they were 486-378 when he played. That's a 91-win pace, and it includes the postseason, where they were 22-15 with him. As much as any one player can be a proven winner, in baseball, Swanson is one.

Secondly, Swanson wasn't short on specifics.

“If I go 4-for-4 and we lose, I’m not a happy camper. You can ask my wife. Like, we don’t do losing. That’s not something we like," he said at his first press conference. “The important goal is winning. That’s the only stat that matters. Bringing that sort of philosophy is really, really important. It’s important to get all the guys to buy into, which they will. That’s just who we are at our core. And who I believe that we will be moving forward.”

He's a self-described trash talker, and he brought swagger to the Cubs clubhouse right away—not a flashy, insecure kind, but a real expectation of victory and an understanding that it would be achieved only by being willing to look it right in the eye. 

“And then when you start to win, it really starts to build confidence in the organization; it starts to build confidence within your teammates," he said. "Winning baseball is really just about playing the game to win. I know it sounds super cliché, but there are so many times and examples where you can tell like, ‘Oh, this guy is doing this for himself.’ Or, ‘He was wanting to do this to get the RBI instead of moving the runner or whatever.’"

That does sound cliché, but Swanson has brought that attitude to work every day since the one on which he said it all. By no means has that translated into the success he imagined or expected, at all times. The team limped through two disappointing seasons to start his Cubs career, and he was sometimes the problem, rather than the solution—not because he faltered as a leader or became selfish on the field, but because he probably played at some times when the better part of valor would have been the discretion to spend a bit more time recuperating from a nagging injury. It's worth noting that those two rough seasons were each technically winning ones, since the Cubs' previous two hadn't been and since it speaks a bit to the high standard Swanson helped set and the bar below which he refused to let them sag, but 83 wins per year wasn't what he meant when he walked in the door talking about winning.

What the team experienced Wednesday is more like it. They clinched their first real playoff berth since 2017, on a day when Swanson extended his hitting streak to seven games and drew his eighth walk of September. He's been the leader of the team almost since he walked through the door, but over the last month or so, he's also been the engine of their surge to seal a playoff spot and virtually lock up home-field advantage for the Wild Card Series.

That starts with his defense, of course, not because he's been his best self at shortstop this year—he's probably permanently lost a step, there—but because he's the captain and the central defender of a unit on which so much of the Cubs' success hinges. He's gotten better as the season has progressed, shaking off a shaky start to remain a solidly above-average fielder.

At the plate, though, he's also made some huge contributions of late. Now up to 22 home runs and 17 stolen bases on the year, Swanson is filling up the stat sheet—but as he said so passionately a few years ago, that's not the right way to measure his importance to the team. Lately, he's taken smart, team-oriented at-bats, and it's led to lots of added value in terms of winning the game for the team, even when it hasn't meant getting hits, per se. Here's a three-year look at his rolling 15-game averages for weighted on-base average (a holistic measurement of offensive output) and win probability added (which assigns value to all outcomes based on situation within a game). These numbers usually move together, for any given hitter, and have generally done so for Swanson since he came to Chicago—but that's changed lately.

Sometimes, Swanson shows an ability to take over games with great plate appearances or high-leverage breathroughs, even when he's not actually hitting exceptionally. He did it for a stretch late last summer, and he's doing it again over the last three weeks or so. 

Lately, Swanson is struggling to get to much power—which is peculiar, because he'd just been doing that very thing well last month, when he started to warm up after his midseason slump. However, he's been able to convert more walks lately, and his approach is yielding more singles scattered across the field.

It's been fascinating to watch Swanson's approach evolve this year. He clearly got frustrated, after a first half in which he showed good plate discipline but wasn't always being rewarded, and went a bit swing-crazy for a spell. On the whole, though, he's managed the strike zone well. He's been increasingly focused on pulling and lifting the ball as the season has gone on, too.

If you watch his at-bats and see a bit past the granularity the numbers can capture, though, there's an important nuance to grasp: swinging for air balls to left field hasn't meant swinging for the fences. Swanson has hit more homers this year, to be sure, and they're certainly going to left, but he's also stroking more line-drive doubles to the gap and down the left-field line. That jibes with the approach we've seen Matt Shaw and Nico Hoerner adopt in the second half, too. That trio is batting .281/.342/.446 since the All-Star break, which indicates that it's a good approach for the group.

That's the other thing, too: there really seems to be a group approach, spearheaded by Swanson. His at-bats look intelligent. He's taking pitches he chased in the past, but he's also attacking certain ones to generate sacrifice flies or to move a runner from second to third when there's nobody out. He's finished his walks lately, after struggling to do so in the first half. He's also communicating constantly with his teammates; the flow of information shared between Cubs hitters seems more robust lately.

At times, this year, the Cubs have been (almost) too consistent for their own good. They haven't lost four games in a row all year, but they only won five in a row once, and that was within the first 10 games of their season. They couldn't chain together enough good things to go on a streak this summer, which (in a stark contrast) is how they lost touch with the Brewers and their series of long winning streaks. Now, though, they might be getting into that very habit. They've won four in a row and seven out of eight. This is the hottest they've been since May. Swanson is in winner mode, and so is his squad. Whether they can make the magic last (and come back again, after whenever it next ebbs) will be the defining question of the season.

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[Development DL]

One of the best articulations of how “ soft factors “ can blend with hard data to paint a supportive picture , of an interesting hypothesis. 
 

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