Chicago Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson has gone from one of the game’s coldest hitters to one of its hottest, and the turnaround has come with a clear name attached: assistant coach John Mallee.
A few weeks ago, Cubs fans were calling for Swanson to be benched. Craig Counsell even gave him a couple of days off for a mental reset, and the numbers at that point were brutal. Entering June 17, Swanson was sitting on a .175/.281/.306 slash line, and his 68 wRC+ in 268 plate appearances ranked eighth-worst among 156 qualified hitters.
Then everything flipped.
In the 13 games since, Swanson has been the third-best hitter in MLB and has started stacking records with each passing night. He had one home run in 44 games from April 25 through June 16.
Since then, he’s piled up nine home runs and 29 RBI, including three multi-home run games. That explosion hit another level Wednesday in the Cubs’ 23-3 win over the San Diego Padres, when Swanson blasted three homers and drove in eight runs.
The surge has been especially wild when you zoom in on the last week. Since the series against the New York Mets, Swanson has eight home runs and 26 runs driven in, pushing him into elite company in Cubs history.
5 HR over 2-Game span
Cubs history
Cap Anson August 5-6, 1884
Billy Williams Sept 8-10, 1968
Dave Kingman July 27-28, 1979
Dansby Swanson June 30-July 1, 2026
- Christopher Kamka (@ckamka) July 1, 2026
That kind of production looks even more dramatic when you remember how deep the slump had gone. Over the 44-game stretch from late April through mid-June, Swanson hit just .154/.234/.217 - literally the worst hitter in baseball.
So what sparked the change? Swanson got the mental break in early June when the Cubs were hosting the San Francisco Giants at Wrigley Field, and he has also pointed to Mallee as a key part of the turnaround.
Mallee is in his second run with the Cubs organization. He came back in 2023 as the Triple-A hitting coach, then moved up to the big-league staff before the 2024 season. Cubs fans will know the name well, too: Mallee was the team’s hitting coach from 2015-17, which included the 2016 World Series championship club.
There was plenty of noise around the Cubs’ ugly team-wide slump, and it would have been easy to put a coach on the spot for it. But Swanson has publicly credited Mallee, and at least once, a fan got a look at the work being done behind the scenes.
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