Dansby Swanson helped the Cubs edge the Pirates 7-6 at home on Sunday, scoring three of Chicago’s seven runs and driving the game with a seventh-inning home run.
The shortstop said the play that keeps echoing in his head came Wednesday in Tampa Bay, when he made a face-plant slide into home plate. “Let me tell you, I, I've rethought everything after that Tampa slide,” Swanson said after Sunday’s game. “You're just kind of always ready for anything that can happen. And if [the outfielder] catches it normal and I just stay there, I stay there. But that's not what it was in store for today.”
That is the part of Swanson’s game that has mattered most to Chicago lately: the running, the awareness and the willingness to keep moving with his eyes up. He said the approach is built on something simple. “I think just being taught to run with your eyes up, run with your eyes on the ball,” Swanson said. “I know it sounds like super elementary, but the more that you can run and be aware with what's happening, like your instincts can tell you to go quicker than someone can tell you to go.”
The Cubs needed every bit of it because Sunday’s win came by one run. Swanson’s scoring touch and his homer in the seventh gave Chicago the margin it needed to hold off Pittsburgh, turning a close game into another reminder of how much value he brings when he is creating pressure on the bases as well as at the plate.
Swanson had even joked during Spring Training that baserunning should be instinctive, not dictated from the third-base box. “I always said, ‘if you need the base coaches to tell you what to do, you stink at base running,’” he said then, and Sunday fit that view neatly. In a game decided by a single run, his reads and his legs were part of the difference.
