I was trying to think about why I have such a negative perception of Dansby or why it feels disappointing to watch him. Last August 6th, his batting line was .264/.347/.456/.804. He was consistently getting big hits, hitting HRs, having good ABs, playing great defense. We all loved him.
However, for the last 49 games of 2023, his batting line was .204/.287/.333/.620 during a stretch where the Cubs blew a great chance of making the playoffs. It wasn't all bad, there were a few big hits in there and ok stretches of games and his defense was still stellar, but overall it was a long frustrating slump. Now in the first 30 games of this season, his OPS is .667. Putting those performances back to back, its roughly 1/2 a season worth of games with ~.650ish OPS.
I'm not posting this to say Dansby sucks. He's always been an extremely streaky hitter and assuming his skills didn't randomly plummet one day in August last year, he will get hot again and will seem a lot more valuable. Heck despite a rough start with the bat, he's still been worth 0.7 fWAR, which is 3rd on the team behind Tauchman and Imanaga. But because he's been pretty bad with the bat for so long, it really does feel like he's terrible and frustrating to watch.