Dansby Swanson is Fighting a Losing Battle Against Changing Opposition

[RandallPnkFloyd]

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images

Despite a home run on Wednesday night, Dansby Swanson has been one of the more consistently broken components of a collectively broken Chicago Cubs lineup. His line of .176/.280/.318 features career worsts across each of the three categories while his wRC+ of just 71 is indicative of a player performing well below average at the plate. Despite the value he's still able to provide with his plate approach (and with his work with the glove and on the basepaths), he's been objectively bad as a hitter in 2026. 

Swanson has long been considered a player who needs to sit on four-seam fastballs to find success. The 2025 campaign notwithstanding, his run value — indicating his runs added or prevented within a specific situation or specific pitch — has landed on the positive end of the spectrum in each year of his career. In most of those cases, that pitch has served as his highest mark in that category. 

Things started to shift last year, when Swanson posted a run value of -10 against four-seam heat. While he was still able to generate hard contact (62.1 percent of the time) and find some positive outcomes (.409 slugging percentage) against it, he also whiffed more than 30 percent of the time, a career-worst rate by a wide margin. His chase rate jumped up to 27.1 percent (his highest since 2018), indicating a potential over-reliance on four-seamers, at least in the sense that it didn't necessarily matter where it landed in the zone, he was going for it. Nevertheless, the fastball still represented an area of success when you consider the volume he was getting against the outcomes. The run value came as more of a byproduct of his aggression rather than a regression against the pitch itself.

Unfortunately for Swanson, opposing pitchers are keen to his history. 

For the third consecutive season, Swanson has seen a decrease in four-seamers his way, with the rate he's seeing the pitch sitting at 24.0 percent in 2026. Worse yet in his case, that rate has continued to decline as the season has progressed: 

Not only is Swanson seeing far fewer four-seam fastballs, it's happening while he's getting pounded with sinkers. The rate of four-seamers he's seeing has dropped by about seven percent while the sinker rate has jumped by about the same. This presents a couple of different issues for Swanson. 

The first is his actual outcomes against the sinker. He's putting the ball on the ground 44.1 percent of the time, feeding directly into what the pitch is designed to do. Of course, that's when he actually makes contact. He's had a tremendously difficult time adapting to this world of increased sinkers, with a swing-and-miss rate that sat at 12.5 percent in May now resting at an obscene 52.9 percent in June. It's no mystery what's happening here: 

The swing timing data only shows fastballs, with May and June illustrated above. Swanson's distribution in May looks largely like it should, but when you shift attention to the orange portion of the above (indicating June), it gets rather messy. The veteran shortstop is swinging over the baseball 24 percent of the time in June. That's an alarmingly high rate that is 11 percent higher than the next closest hitter against that pitch type. When you consider that data along with the visual above, it's clear that this is an exclusive byproduct of the increase in sinkers. 

A central issue within all of this is that we haven't seen the appropriate adjustment from Swanson. There hasn't been anything in his approach to help mitigate this. Nearly all of his mechanics that we can track (tilt, attack angle, etc.) remain nearly identical to what we've seen in the past few seasons. That there hasn't been a discernible change as the year has wore on and this has become more evident represents a paramount concern actively working against hope for Swanson to work his way out of this. 

There was this perception of Swanson that he, a hitter who needed the hard stuff to survive, was getting hit heavily with breaking and off-speed pitches as a means for opposing pitchers to minimize his impact at the plate. Instead, the call is coming from inside the house. It's the heaters proving to be his enemy this year. Coming at him in this new form appears to be something he's not yet ready to combat.

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