The Short Porch is checking in on Dansby Swanson’s bat

It’s been rough back-to-back homestands for the Chicago Cubs. They went just 2-4 over the six-game set against the Athletics and Giants, which admittedly is better than the sweep they suffered during their homestand against the Brewers and Astros, but better than being swept at home is a pretty low bar.

The offense that seemed unstoppable in April has collapsed. There are some bright spots as you’ll see below, but amongst hitters with at least 100 plate appearances since May 1, well, it’s pretty bleak as you can see below:

There is plenty of blame to go around and the short porch will be diving into all of the struggles (and the silver linings!) in the coming days, but perhaps no one has struggled as much this season as shortstop Dansby Swanson.

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Dansby’s offensive woes since May 1 are alarming, but honestly the full season of work isn’t much better. This season the Cubs shortstop is slashing .180/.285/.322 with a 12.5 percent walk rate and a 23.3 percent strikeout rate. While the walk and strikeout rates are within the range of career norms, the slash line is far from his normal .248/.317/.410 with a 8.8 percent walk rate and a 24.4 percent strikeout rate. Those numbers would be bad enough, but as you can see from the table above, they’ve fallen off a cliff since May 1, with Dansby sporting a 27 wRC+ in his most recent 118 plate appearances. You can see that collapse clearly in the below chart that tracks the last three seasons of Dansby’s rolling wOBA by his hard hit rate:

There are a couple of notes of optimism in the bleak stats. First, as you can see above, Dansby’s wOBA tracks pretty consistently with his hard hit rate. The recent slump isn’t an outlier, in fact, it’s in line with similar slumps that the Cubs saw Dansby work his way through in 2025. Additionally, Swanson’s season-long .207 BABIP is an extreme outlier in his career. Dansby’s career BABIP is .304, even if you assume he’s going to decline a bit as he gets older, that decline is likely to look a lot more gradual than a 97 point BABIP drop. That screams bad luck. Since May 1, that BABIP mark has been even more punishing with Dansby hitting just .192 on balls in play.

But here’s where we get into the concern section of today’s short porch. There are some metrics that are less than ideal in Dansby’s batted ball profile. In addition to the hard hit rate that is 6 percent off his 2025 mark, his barrel rate is at a nadir since 2018 of 7.5 percent. As a reminder, barrel rate is a combination of the exit velocity and launch angle of a batted ball and barrels have an expected batting average of .500 with an expected slug of 1.500. For comparison, Dansby’s career barrel rate is 9.2 percent, but in his seasons with the Cubs he’s posted a 10.9 percent, 9.2 percent and 11.7 percent barrel rate respectively by season. It seems pretty obvious the combination of a lower hard hit rate and working to find the ideal swing path are impacting Swanson’s results.

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Luckily for Dansby, and all the other struggling Cubs hitters, they are heading into the offensive paradise known as Coors Field. 32 is a little young for a player with the contact skills of a Dansby Swanson to begin to decline so precipitously. This looks like a string of bad luck, although fans can be forgiven for their frustrations as half the Cubs lineup slumps at once.