Dansby Swanson’s grand 11-RBI doubleheader highlights Cubs’ efforts to make hot hitting a team-wide thing

NEW YORK – Last week, Dansby Swanson got the blue whale off his back.

Now, he’s unleashing a whale of hurt on opposing pitchers.

The Cubs’ shortstop – whose lengthy slump was so deep that team brass was being asked about benching one of their highest paid players – had an absolutely massive day in Wednesday’s doubleheader sweep.

He homered twice in Game 1, driving in seven runs in a 10-3 win, and picked up three more hits and drove in four more runs in the Cubs’ 10-5 win in Game 2. All told, he’s got seven hits, five extra-base hits, three homers and 15 RBIs in the first three games of the four-game series with the Mets.

It’s part of a surge that has raised his batting average more than 25 percentage points in a week, from .175 to .202.

“I was never doubting what I was capable of doing as much as I was wondering when I was going to find that thing that was going to get me back to being myself,” Swanson said after the first game. “Sometimes that’s even more frustrating. I know I’m still capable, right? It’s just a matter of finding the consistent work that’s going to help that show up.”

While huge games have been the norm for center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong the last month – he came into Wednesday with a bonkers 1.447 OPS in June – other Cubs hitters thawing from their early summer cold spell is a more recent development.

After scoring more than three runs just nine times between May 9 and June 10 (29 games), they’ve done it in 10 of their last 12 games.

While it’s the no-brainer of all no-brainers to say that scoring more runs will be a good thing for the Cubs moving forward, the bigger point is that the whole lineup is starting to contribute, not just a “one-man wrecking crew” of Crow-Armstrong, who wasn’t going to be able to win a bunch of games by himself.

“We have to get large parts of our entire roster contributing. That’s how every team puts together good stretches of baseball,” manager Craig Counsell said Tuesday. “We can’t give the ball to LeBron James. In baseball, everybody’s got to share it. When teams talk about good stretches, they’re talking about a lot of players on their roster.”

Cue Swanson, who despite his offensive shortcomings hit 24 home runs last season, no small total. He’s into double digits after Wednesday as he and his teammates come to help Crow-Armstrong carry the load.

“We’ve shown that this group is truly special 1 through 9, anybody can hurt you from any spot,” Swanson said. “It was just a matter of time for things to turn. It’s not common for seven or eight hitters in a lineup to be trying to figure it out, and that’s what it seemed like was happening to us. Obviously, those things are starting to turn around.”

All the way from Norway

The first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader, rescheduled for the afternoon following Monday night’s rainout, could have been a somewhat sleepy affair.

But the atmosphere was livened up by a crowd of Norwegian soccer supporters in the latest example of foreign fans descending on American sporting events during the World Cup.

The red-clad crew donned viking helmets and unleashed their soccer chants on an otherwise echo-y Citi Field. That included numerous renditions of the “Viking Row,” which has gained attention on social media.

They even got Mr. and Mrs. Met to join in.

“I loved it,” said Swanson, no stranger to soccer traditions considering his wife, Mallory, plays for the U.S. women’s national team. “I thought it was so cool, them embracing being here and watching a baseball game.

“They were so in unison and so loud for maybe a couple hundred people. Could you imagine if this was 80,000 of them? That’d be incredible.”

Let’s take two

The Cubs grabbed a series win with Wednesday’s doubleheader sweep, their third series win in their last four tries.

After a rough early-summer stretch – the last-place Mets, who committed six errors in Game 2, can relate to rough patches – the Cubs have found their footing of late, winning eight of their last 11 games.

“This position-player group is incredibly strong and very confident,” second baseman Nico Hoerner said. “Obviously we haven’t played to our standards for parts of the season, but our outlook and our confidence and belief in ourselves internally hasn’t changed.”