MESA, Ariz. — Standing at his locker, Dansby Swanson stared at me like I was an idiot, and yes, I’m very familiar with that look.
My question was simple: What are his expectations for the Cubs this season?
His answer, complete with withering eye contact, was succinct: “To win.”
From your lips to Pat Hughes’ ears, Dansby. That’s all Cubs fans want too. No one wants to hear about prospect rankings or the competitive balance tax. Everyone wants to hear “Go Cubs Go” at the end of a game.
“I don’t know that my expectations ever really change in that regard,” he said. “I think that we as a collective here in this room believe that we have more than enough of what it takes to win at a high level. And we’re excited to obviously go out and strap it up.”
Of course, the Cubs won last year. They won exactly 83 times. At times, it felt like the energy had returned to Wrigley Field after a few seasons in the doldrums. But then, the Cubs collapsed late. They missed the playoffs. David Ross is now a former Cubs manager.
Team president Jed Hoyer didn’t hire Craig Counsell, who is now baseball’s highest-paid manager, because he wanted to talk Notre Dame football. Counsell is the kind of manager you hire to take your team to another level.
But Hoyer didn’t follow that move by going on a spending spree. He signed Japanese free-agent starting pitcher Shōta Imanaga, added a couple of relievers, and after a protracted wait, he brought back outfielder Cody Bellinger on what could be another one-year deal.
These were the kinds of moves made to win the NL Central but probably not the World Series. Like Swanson, Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts wants to win, but not like, say, the Dodgers or Braves do.
Much like how the Cubs’ player development behemoth never came to fruition under Theo Epstein, the organization has never become a financial powerhouse. There are wheelbarrows full of cash, as promised, but the deliveries are few and far between.
“There are teams that can have the 30th percentile outcome of their projections and still make the playoffs and we’re not one of those teams,” Hoyer told me in a recent conversation. “We need to perform probably at or a little bit better than our projections in order to have a really successful season. The Atlanta Braves and the Dodgers, they have built a cushion where things can happen and they can they can undershoot their projections and win. We can’t do that. So we need to eke everything out of this group.”
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With that in mind, I asked Swanson, the team’s big-money free-agent addition of recent vintage, if he thinks the Cubs can compete with that upper echelon of the NL this season and, folks, he gave me that look again.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “Why else would we be here?”
I responded that for some teams, they’re here simply because they get paid. Players on bad teams might talk about shocking the world (not including the guys in the clubhouse, who always believed) and living and dying on the field, but in the end, “baseball player” is a vocation.
“Well,” Swanson said, “that’s not here.”
Dansby Swanson said he’s entering the season with the same expectation he always has — to win. (Matt Kartozian / USA Today)
I’ve never talked to a player in spring training who wasn’t in awe of the early bonhomie in the clubhouse or didn’t think he was surrounded by gamers, and that’s the case with Swanson as well.
“We really do have such a great team and a great organization with talent and with guys that have a chance to definitely take a leap forward this season,” he said.
In fact, one of the only worries he expressed to me was that the focus on Bellinger returning might take some shine off some of the younger guys.
“I hope that the Belli thing doesn’t overshadow them in that regard,” he said.
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Last year, the Cubs were in the mix to win the division and good enough to make the playoffs — the Diamondbacks and Marlins snagged wild-card spots with 84 wins and Arizona rode a wave to the World Series — but they were short on pitching and fell apart down the stretch. At no point were they really scary, but they were 76-64 on Sept. 6 after sweeping the Giants before losing 10 of 13. In a two-week span, the Cubs went from 1 1/2 games back of the Brewers in the NL Central and holding a wild card spot to eight games out and in fourth place in the wild-card race.
The Cubs didn’t have the pitching depth and they couldn’t hit enough to make up for it. Did Hoyer make enough moves to fix those issues? Not on paper. He’s hoping the answers will come from within and that he’ll have enough money to make a deadline deal on a rental if the Cubs are good enough to keep investing in.
They will begin the season with a largely homegrown rotation, led by Justin Steele, the Opening Day starter in Texas. Javier Assad and Jordan Wicks join Kyle Hendricks, the last link to the 2016 team. On one hand, maybe this is finally the “Year of Cubs Pitching.” On the other hand, Jameson Taillon is starting the season on the injured list and the Cubs, who are just under the CBA tax line, didn’t pounce on Jordan Montgomery, who signed with the Diamondbacks as spring training ended.
When I asked him about the pitching, Hoyer harkened back to 2016 when the five starters all made between 29 and 32 starts. It’s been eight years but it feels like a lifetime. He thinks they’ve adapted to the new age of pitching, where quantity is key.
“Now, the game is so different in the sense it just feels like you have to have so many arms to get through the battle, both bullpen-wise and starting pitching-wise,” Hoyer said. “And so, looking at it in terms of opening day rotation or opening day bullpen … it doesn’t matter. All that matters is having all these guys with the option to go up and down and having the depth so when Caleb Killian gets hurt, we have an answer for that. I just look at it as much of an amorphous group instead of how I used to look at like one, two, three, four, five.”
If the Cubs can get that pitching help from their system, they can meet Swanson’s simple goal.
Then again, how Swanson plays is a big part of that too. His 2023 season was undone by a late-season collapse. He rarely got a rest down the stretch and it showed. In 49 games from Aug. 7 through the end of the season, Swanson put up a slash line of .204/.287/.333. Combine that with Nico Hoerner’s lack of pop and the Cubs had a problem. There are questions still at both corner infield spots, but at least right fielder Seiya Suzuki is coming off a torrid spring. Suzuki hasn’t really lived up to his promise since coming over from Japan, but maybe this is the year.
Seiya sees baseball. Seiya crushes baseball.@suzuki_seiya_sb pic.twitter.com/7N7nz7nFRm
— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) March 25, 2024
As for Swanson, he said he didn’t feel pressure to play up to his $177 million contract last year and he’s not worried about outside expectations of the team, either.
“Because it doesn’t matter,” he said. “And I say that in a very respectful manner. No one has higher expectations than each player and each team internally, right? No one has higher standards. We all want things at the highest level. And so the more you can kind of keep the emphasis and focus on the group within, then that’s usually when better things happen.”
If it were only that easy. Pressure isn’t just internal in Chicago. Cubs fans expect to be entertained, but they also deserve a season that doesn’t end when October begins.
(Top photo of Cody Bellinger: Allan Henry / USA Today)