Dansby Swanson’s mind was on overdrive.
His first month of hitting was frustrating. So he tried different drills. He chased different feelings in the batter’s box. Now, after days of tinkering, it was a blur.
“One of my biggest strengths is my brain. I’m pretty smart,” Swanson said in a recent conversation with the Sun-Times. “But it also can be my biggest weakness at the same time. So usually, I have to be reminded of how to not overthink.”
Early before a game in Pittsburgh last week, he met with Logan Brumley, the son of the late Mike Brumley, Swanson’s longtime personal hitting coach. And the fog cleared.
Swanson used a math analogy to explain the feeling: “You’ve always done long multiplication a certain way, and you’ve struggled with it, and you’re like, ‘Gosh, it takes me forever, this is really hard for me.’ And then someone says, ‘Well, have you ever thought about trying to do it this way instead?’ And that way makes sense to you, and then all of a sudden you’re starting to do the problems easier.
“It’s kind of the same way. It’s like, now I can actually go do my homework and trust what I’m doing, as opposed to just making it up as I go.”
In a baseball landscape filled with independent hitting instructors, rather than fight the trend, the Cubs try to partner with them.
Logan had been his father’s right-hand man every offseason as he worked with Swanson. And Mike, who died in a car crash last June, even had Cubs ties, as a former player but also the assistant hitting coach in 2014.
Logan boiled down the adjustments Swanson was targeting to one focus: his setup. Traditionally, Swanson has had more success in an athletic stance with his torso tilted forward.
“Just started from there,” Swanson said. “And it sounds simple, but sometimes when you get in the box, you’re trying to be relaxed, you’re not really in a good place to hit from.”
In the week since, Swanson, who has tended to be a streaky hitter throughout his career, has had fun with the repetitive questions about the root of his offensive breakout. He even joked Monday that daily swigs of Nicky Lopez’s Red Bulls had done the trick.
Starting in Pittsburgh, Swanson went on an eight-game hitting streak that ended Wednesday against the Giants. He launched three home runs in that span.
Swanson has been complimentary of the Cubs’ coaching staff, praising the hitting group just this week for keeping him locked in.
The moment of clarity he keeps returning to, though, was seeing Logan Brumley — someone who has been there through ups and downs in different phases of Swanson’s career.
“Logan is very much just like his dad in terms of, he is who he is, and he believes in what he believes,” Swanson said. “And people that are like that are just very inspiring.”
A little quirky
Swanson was skeptical when he first met Mike Brumley.
It was 2019, and Swanson, with the Braves, was on a rehab assignment in Rome, Georgia, with third baseman Austin Riley.
The Braves’ minor-league hitting coordinator from 2018 to 2022, Brumley spent time in major-league camp during spring training, especially before activity on the minor-league side picked up. But this was Swanson’s first real dose of him.
“Just doing some odd stuff,” Swanson said. “If you ever knew Brum, some of the drills he comes up with, they’re all a little quirky and different.”
Then there was Brumley himself — also quirky and different.
Brumley didn’t temper his conviction, even when saying things a player might not want to hear — like that Swanson was letting his brain get in the way.
“Just spoke the truth, and it always came out weird,” Swanson said. “And so I was kind of thrown off.”
The next spring, Swanson found himself working closely with Brumley, spending -extra time in the cages.
Brumley explained how being front-side dominant, using your quads to power your swing, created less margin for error. He wanted Swanson to understand how to use his hamstrings, glutes and back to rotate properly.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ ” Swanson said. “It started to make sense. And the way the ball was coming off the bat was different.”
As the adjustments solidified, so did Swanson’s appreciation for Brumley’s communication style and approach to the job.
“He had such a simple way of taking some complex issue and singling it down to one thing,” Swanson said. “And every time you’d leave the cage, you’d be like, ‘Man, I feel like this could be my year.’ Or even during the season when we worked together, it was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m getting four hits tonight.’ ”
Swanson began to see just how far Brumley’s influence stretched behind the senses, in the way he passed on observations or -advice that a player might never know originated with him.
Swanson was among the players who started hiring Brumley in the offseason. It was then that he embraced the quirky drills.
With a band wrapped around his right hand and elbow, it clicked.
“He was so good at coming up with these drills that allowed you to do the move that he wanted without you having to think about it,” Swanson said.
Logan would join them, recording swings on an iPad while Mike flipped balls to -Swanson.
“They were a really good, dynamic duo,” Swanson said. “Logan explains things differently than Brum, but they’d both get to the same point.”
Between the two of them, the message was bound to get through.
Love my people
Swanson woke up on June 16, 2024, to a text message from Riley, asking if he’d talked to Logan.
Then he saw the texts from Logan.
“He was basically like, ‘We got in an accident, and my pops didn’t make it,’ ” Swanson said.
The crash in Mississippi the night before involved three cars and two semitrailer trucks on Interstate 20.
“Fortunately, I haven’t really lost many people, but I’ve never really handled it well,” Swanson said. “It’s just not my personality. I love my people.
“A lot of tears. Yeah, it was rough. Still is.”
Swanson played that day. He didn’t have a hit, but that wasn’t unusual at the time. He was batting .212. A slow start coupled with a knee issue and nagging sports hernia made for some poor offensive performances. The feeling that he wasn’t “holding up [his] end of the bargain” had been weighing on him.
“He didn’t let on to people what he was going through,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer told the Sun-Times. “And, obviously, he was going through a lot.”
Swanson talked to Hoyer about Brumley. Hoyer knew Brumley from the 2014 season and had enjoyed reconnecting with him when he’d come to town to work with Swanson.
“I feel like that was [Swanson’s] baseball rock,” Hoyer said. “I mean, he went from Atlanta, which was all he knew in the big leagues, to here. The one constant was working with Brum.”
If there was a Mount Rushmore dedicated to people who have changed Swanson’s life and career, Swanson said Brumley would be on it.
“To lose that, and in a season that you were kind of struggling, it was a lot,” Hoyer said, noting the constant communication between Swanson and Brumley. “The fact that he had a really good second half was amazing.”
Swanson, on an offensive hot streak and back to playing up to his normal high standard defensively, had the sixth-highest August and September WAR (2.5) in the majors last season, according to FanGraphs.
Swanson, Riley and the rest of the close-knit group that worked with Mike Brumley tried to make sure Logan took the time he needed. But he’d still send Swanson scouting reports. And, working around Swanson’s -October sports hernia surgery schedule, Logan went out to Atlanta a couple times last offseason to work with him.
“Knowing him, and just how Brum was, too, that helped him, still talking to us,” Swanson said.
While Swanson took plenty of hitting lessons from Mike Brumley, none of those stood out when asked his biggest takeaway from their time together.
Instead, it was a quality that Swanson also sees in Logan.
“He was who God made him to be at all times, in every room that he went in,” Swanson said. “He never wavered from it. And that was really, really powerful.”