The Cubs are not planning to bench Dansby Swanson, even after a stretch that left his bat looking far removed from the player they signed. He answered back Wednesday with a two-run homer, but the bigger decision was that his place in the everyday lineup did not change.
That mattered because Swanson entered Wednesday with a.175 batting average, the worst mark in the sport among qualified hitters. The slump has been severe enough to raise the obvious question about whether the Cubs should give him a break, especially with a $28 million salary and the expectation that he supplies more than defense alone. Instead, the club is betting that staying on the field is part of the fix.
Jed Hoyer made that clear on Tuesday when he said Swanson has struggled and has gotten some days off. He also said the offense has been a challenge and that the Cubs should score more runs than they have. The message was not that Swanson is beyond help. It was that the team still believes it can work him back into rhythm without taking him out of the mix.
Craig Counsell pushed the same idea on Wednesday. He said the Cubs should keep investing in Swanson getting back to the offensive player they know he is, and that the best way to do that is to keep him out on the field. That is the central choice here: a player with the worst batting average among qualified hitters is still being treated as too important to hide, because the Cubs do not view his value through offense alone.
There is a reason the club is willing to hold that line. The Cubs remain the best defensive team in baseball according to multiple metrics, and Hoyer pointed to that edge when he said they won a game in San Francisco because they played great defense. In a season where run prevention has become part of the club’s identity, Swanson fits the shape of the team even while his bat has lagged behind. He has been a.235 hitter with a.705 OPS in four seasons in a Cubs uniform, and last year he hit 24 home runs, proof that the current stretch is a slump rather than a rewrite.
The friction is what makes this worth watching. Swanson had gone his previous 24 games without a home run before Wednesday, yet the Cubs still chose not to treat that drought as a reason to pull him from the lineup. He has also drawn a 12.7 percent walk rate coming into Wednesday, which helps explain why the club sees more than empty at-bats when it looks at his profile. But the question does not disappear just because he homered once. If the bat stays cold, the Cubs will have to decide how long they are willing to keep absorbing the tradeoff between production at the plate and stability in the field.
For now, the answer is simple: they are staying with Swanson and hoping repetition turns into recovery. Wednesday’s homer gave them a short-term lift. The next test is whether the Cubs keep him anchored in the everyday lineup long enough for that shot to mean something more than a brief pause in a slump.
