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Nobody said Dansby Swanson couldn’t hit. But juxtaposing him with the other three shortstops in this year’s free agent class, it’s easy to see how one could arrive at the perception of him that pervaded over the winter. Compared to the trio of Trea Turner, Xander Bogaerts, and Carlos Correa, Swanson was less desirable and less marketable. But at his peak, he’s probably part of the second tier of Major League shortstops (we can litigate tiers later). Elite defensively. Probably already punched above his weight offensively. Can still be a 20/20 guy. That’s where I landed with Swanson. You could do far, far worse at the six. But as an offensive centerpiece? Probably not what you want. Well, we’re through four games and it suddenly looks like we were all off-base in being underwhelmed by Swanson being the choice among the four winter shortstops. It’s a hilarious sentiment. Just as one shouldn’t react negatively to outcomes over the course of…probably April, one also certainly should not jump to happy conclusions, either–even if those happy conclusions feature 10 hits across the first 17 at-bats and being one of the only drivers of run production across the team’s first five days of the regular season. It probably wouldn’t be super worth discussing, unless the numbers in question were weird. And they are. So this isn’t so much raving about Swanson as it is seizing the opportunity to look at the output thus far. We covered the 10 hits across 17 at-bats (18 plate appearances). Within that, Swanson has an average exit velocity of 95.7 miles per hour. That’s five MPH higher than any season he’s had to date. He’s making hard contact a hair above 58 percent of the time. That’s 12 percentage points higher than his rate last year, which represented his best offensive season up to that point. If there’s a trend that is legitimately notable, it’s that Swanson has been hyper-aggressive against fastballs to this point. He’s swinging at hard stuff at a 58.4 percent clip, which would be his highest swing rate against that pitch type in any of his Major League seasons. Typically, it’s the offspeed stuff that induces his highest swing rate in each year since 2017. He’s laid off that stuff quite a bit to this point in favor of fastballs. Two other trends are worth tracking, too: Swanson has been hitting to the pull side or middle a shade over 83 percent of the time. For a guy who’s gone the other way about a quarter of the time throughout his career, it’s interesting that he’s starting out this hot and carrying the vast majority of that contact to the hitter’s side of the field. We’ve got a long way to go before it’s of any statistical significance, but the elimination of the shift makes it something worth pointing out for future monitoring. Swanson has a fly-ball rate of exactly zero percent. He hasn’t put a ball in the air to this point. Again, the sample is so small. This one is just funny to me. It’s been hard contact on the ground or via line drive, and it’s obviously working. Perhaps the biggest irony of all of this is that Swanson got off to a completely abhorrent start in 2022. He hit .216, posted a .135 isolated power (ISO), and struck out almost 37 percent of the time. Once the calendar turned over to May, it was (obviously) a different story. Nonetheless, for someone who emphasizes the mental game as much as Swanson does, I imagine there’s a certain level of freedom that comes along with a start such as this. Ultimately, the numbers here don’t mean anything. They’re entertaining, but not indicative of performance or any level of output we can expect moving forward. However, with the other factors at play this season (shift, etc.), it’s absolutely going to be worth exploring Swanson’s production as the season wears on–not only because he represented the Cubs’ largest contractual investment this offseason, but because he’s had such variance at the plate in his career to date. View full article

Opening Day was a delight, because it showed you exactly what you can expect wins to look like for this iteration of the Cubs: manufacturing runs, capitalizing on a few breaks via aggressiveness on the bases, solid pitching, and outstanding defense. Since then, they’ve laid down just as clear a blueprint for their losses. I’m not a purist, but I can at least enjoy the idea that the type of baseball which the Cubs will need to employ often is close to baseball at its purest. The wins are going to look like that. Clean. Efficient. A dash of aggression. That’s fun baseball when it works. Since Thursday, though, what we’ve largely seen is the other end of the spectrum. It’s less fun. Not because of the outcome. Losses aren’t particularly enjoyable when you have a rooting interest, regardless of their style or character. But this is what the losses are going to look like in 2023. It’s of a more agonizing flavor. If anything, it serves as a looming reminder that this version of the Cubs doesn’t have the chops to compensate when they need it. Through this trio of losses, we’ve run the gamut as to the type of defeat we can expect to see from a club like this one. Saturday’s game was, perhaps, the clearest example. The Cubs managed to get one run across, via an Ian Happ homer that essentially climbed its way into the basket. From there, mild mismanagement of the bullpen from David Ross watched Javier Assad squander the lead provided by said run. Assad was charged with all three Milwaukee runs after struggling to hold onto his command in his second inning of work. While Sunday figures to be the rarest type of loss from a score standpoint, it still represented something that we haven’t seen the last of. Cubs pitchers walked six hitters, five of which came from relievers. Four of those free passes resulted in runs. Ironically, that was the difference in the 9-5 final score. Which brings us to Monday. The Cubs jumped out to a 3-0 lead. Drew Smyly quickly erased it by surrendering three of his own, most of which came on a handful of singles in the first inning. While they were able to regain the lead by a 6-4 count in the top of the fifth, Smyly surrendered another three in the bottom half. Nine hits, a pair of walks, and one game-sealing homer across 4.2 innings of work. The Cubs created traffic thereafter, but they couldn’t manifest the situational hitting needed to take the lead back from a lowly Cincinnati team. It's three losses. In the grand scheme of a baseball season there will be many, many more. But while three losses in early April can’t tell you anything about the long-term future of a team, the nature of each does tell you something about these particular Cubs. The Saturday loss shows you how slim the margin for error is. David Ross rolls Assad out for a second inning. With a 1-0 lead, the manager was unable to act quickly enough when his reliever didn’t have command. Or, rather, have the foresight to have an arm up and moving if command was an issue to begin with. No one warming. No contingency. Weirdly, a loss in which the Cubs surrendered nine runs also said a lot. The pitching staff, be it the rotation or the bullpen, doesn’t have a lot of strikeout stuff. It’s why the Cubs spent so much time beefing up their defensive infrastructure. When you issue free passes and allow teams to put it in play, which is the entire basis of this pitching staff, weird things are going to happen. You’ll be flared to death–sometimes, to the tune of nine runs. Monday was likely the least common outcome we’ll see. It’s hard to visualize too many losses when the Cubs score six runs, given the solid quality of their starting staff and the defensive component. But they also can’t be chasing teams late in games. Opposing managers can play matchups with their bullpen. The bottom half of the Cubs’ lineup is meek. There isn’t a lot coming off the bench that is going to rattle an opposing reliever, either. Which we also saw Monday. This isn’t about pointing out that the Cubs have lost three of four, or even feeling some type of way about it. The Cubs are going to win a lot of games. The roster is going to change over the course of the season. My overarching point, which will be belabored over the course of 2023, is that the roster construction of this team means that the pull-your-hair-out type of losses will be more the norm than, say, a blowout. Nobody’s going to classify this team as bad. Even after a 1-3 start. But these Cubs were built to be average. As such, they were unintentionally built to frustrate. Through four games, we’ve already seen most of the manners in which they plan to do so. View full article

Hello. I’m Randy Holt, and I’ll be joining the crew here at Northside Baseball. Let’s get to know each other. It’s been a minute since I referred to a Chicago Cubs website as a writing basecamp. Long enough, anyway, that recalling the last time–when I was a freshman in college–made me feel very sad about my age. In any case, I’ve been around. I’ve spent time at RotoGraphs, FanSided, Beyond the Box Score, and a handful of places in between. And while I now primarily reside at Pitcher List, I jumped at the opportunity to focus on my first love of Major League Baseball once again: Our Cubs. My Cubs story is not a super complicated one. My mom’s side of the family are Cubs fans. My dad’s side lean White Sox. Mom won. And while I spent pretty much my entire life into high school moving around to or adjacent to military bases (which did complicate things a couple times for an impressionable youth who went to a disproportionate number of games in Philadelphia), it always came back to the Cubs. And realistically, that’s where I still find myself. I won’t lie: Living in the southwest and spending a lot of time recently in San Diego, it’s hard to resist the pull of what they’ve got going on there. But, amid whatever in the world the organization has done to undermine our collective loyalty since 2016, I’m still here. So there’s that. Inside and out of the Cubs, if you are unfamiliar with my writing (as you likely are), there’s a few things I tend to hone in on. Defense. Give me a slick turn on the middle infield or a pick at first base all day over a 450-foot homer. My favorite baseball archetype is the elite defender who can’t hit. And I unironically love the fact that most defensive metrics in existence are widely criticized and deemed unreliable. Swing aesthetics. I wrote a whole piece a couple years ago at BtBS attempting to quantify a swing that was visually appealing for the eyeballs. The bottom line was that lefties just do it better. And I’m excited to watch Cody Bellinger’s beautiful hack in 2023. “Vibes.” Every spring, everybody always talks about the vibe(s) in camp. The Cubs, apparently, had very good vibes in Mesa. Starting on Opening Day, I plan to track vibes throughout the season as part of my aim to quantify them. The Cubs will be the litmus test. I still don’t know how it’s going to work, but I’ll have a metric for vibes by year’s end. The mental side. When I was teaching, I had a bit with my students when they were worried about accruing student loan debt. I told them that my plan was to continuously go back to school for the rest of my life and then one day, I would die. Problem solved. More importantly, on one of those trips back, I acquired a master’s from the University of Florida that specialized in athlete development. Dansby Swanson’s focus on the psychological side of baseball is of utmost interest to me, and it’s a conversation I intend to continue to spread. Because it ain’t happening enough in the world of baseball. Jake Lamb. I live in Phoenix. He was an All Star. I still believe the breakout is coming. No further questions. Which brings me to the 2023 Chicago Cubs and why I’m excited that this year, in particular, is the one in which I can set up shop here at North Side Baseball. I love a process. Development, in any field, and all of its facets fascinate me. For better or for worse, the Cubs are at a very delicate stage of that process. Granted, it’s the second time we’ve seen this sort of process play out in barely over a decade, and this one hasn’t quite brought the level of anticipation that the first one did. Nonetheless, we’re at the turn. I don’t have a particularly high opinion of the 2023 Chicago Cubs. I think they’re going to have a decent staff, a fun defense, and will ultimately struggle to score runs. Given the top-heavy National League, .500 is probably the best we can hope for. But where the Cubs go from here in the process is going to be wildly interesting. There are so many intriguing arms in the system. There are several interesting bats. They won’t all make it, and the organization won’t have room for all of them even if they did. Watching this take shape is going to be a blast. Having the opportunity to look at the many components of a rebuild process at this stage is something that I take great joy in. The joy in 2023 will manifest itself in the middle infield defense, in Hayden Wesneski’s slider, and in the continued development of those intriguing guys in the system. Maybe 2023 joy is Matt Mervis’ first homer later in the year. Or someone like Cam Sanders breaking onto the scene. Perhaps joy comes in the form of a Cody Bellinger return to prominence. There will be joy, though, and that’s the important thing. And so here we are at Opening Day 2023. No matter how cynical you’ve grown about the Cubs–or the sport at large–there’s still something mystical about it. There’s an energy there that you can’t quite describe. I almost disassociate while consuming Opening Day baseball. Just taking it in. The analysis can start on Day 2. View full article