For Dansby Swanson, Strikeouts Are Piling Up. What's Going On?

An anecdote: I swung a torpedo bat for the first time on Monday. For some reason, one of my JV players acquired one at the earliest possible moment. I found that it was easier to find the barrel, but the weight distribution was quite a bit different. And when I didn't find the barrel, I found more pain in my hands than with a traditional barrel. In short, it's something that clearly requires significant adjustment and isn't going to be an appropriate tool for everyone. 

Not that that's new information. For those 72 hours during which the baseball world was abuzz with discourse regarding the new bat shape, the prevailing opinion likened it to a club fitting in golf. Nor do we suspect that Dansby Swanson came out to start the year swinging it for the first time in his career. Ultimately, there's some indication that it's serving him well, although it also doesn't seem that he's using it all the time. Meanwhile, there's a segment of Swanson's game that is going terribly wrong and rendering those benefits rather hollow—which his bat had better not be, that would be illegal and not very effective. 

The last time I wrote on Swanson, his slash included a .211 average and a .281 on-base percentage, but the underlying data was encouraging. Each of those trends has gone in starkly opposite directions. 

In the 10 days since I wrote that piece, Swanson's average has plummeted further, to just .177, while he's scratching out a meager .223 OBP. His ISO, which sat at .263 back then, currently checks in at .167. The strikeout rate has ballooned from 18.5% at that point to 28.8% now. It's that last fact that has us most concerned for Swanson moving forward. The 18.5% figure came in at the 67th percentile. It's now in the 17th. 

The Cubs have played seven games since that last Swanson examination. Across that stretch (31 plate appearances), Swanson has 4 hits. He's struck out 15 times. For those not well-versed in mathematics, Swanson has struck out nearly half the time in his last seven games. It sucks.

So what, exactly, is going wrong? Many of Swanson's contact trends remain the same (including an actual increase on Contact% inside the strike zone) and his Hard-Hit% (52.9) is in the 87th percentile. His BABIP has come up somewhat (.206), and he's driving the ball in the air. Many of his outcomes are indicative of a player that should be far better on the stat sheet. 

There's just one massive problem: when he expands his zone, it's a bloodbath.

Chase is a natural component to the approach for most hitters. Few can minimize chase in favor of in-zone swings and, thus, more production (hello, Kyle Tucker). Swanson has a 24.9 Chase% for his career. This year, it's at 26.1%. That's... not really a notable increase. What is notable, however, is what is happening when he does chase. 

Swanson's contact rate on pitches outside of the strike zone checks in at an appalling 34.0 percent. That's down from 50.4 percent last year and 52.4 percent for his career. And it somehow gets more concerning. Swanson is not only chasing fastballs at a higher frequency, he's missing them: 

Opposing pitchers are missing the zone at a 42.5 percent rate with fastballs. Swanson is swinging at such pitches 30.6 percent of the time. That's a big ol' jump from last season, when he chased fastballs just 19.9 percent of the time. The overall O-Contact% is, quite obviously, concerning, but to be missing fastballs to that extent really sets off alarm bells. He seems to have gotten better at identifying offspeed stuff—or at least, he's sitting more eagerly on the fastball—because he's swinging less often on offspeed pitches and more often on fastballs, regardless of location. If he's sitting on the fastball and seeing it well, maybe this will just require him to temper his aggressiveness when pitchers take him out of the zone with it—but you'd hope to see more contact on it, given his apparent approach.

There are other factors contributing to the slump in which Swanson finds himself currently mired. Wrigley tamping down right-handed hitters against his rise in flyballs is an easy one. But the inability to generate any kind of contact outside of the zone represents perhaps the largest and most concerning component of his April. 

Is he just out of sorts? Is the torpedo throwing off balance and showing us both sides of the spectrum? It's unfortunate, because the actual batted-ball outcomes are quite good. But if Swanson isn't generating contact, he's generating nothing. If he's locking in on a particular pitch type in order to do more damage when he gets it, he'll have to make better swing decisions even upon identifying that pitch. Otherwise, a partial retreat to a more balanced attack is in order.