Eight RBIs. From the ninth spot. I need a moment.
Dansby Swanson went 3-for-4 with three home runs including a grand slam and drove in eight runs batting ninth on Wednesday afternoon as the Cubs beat the Padres 23-3 at Wrigley Field. Twenty-three to three. The last time the Cubs scored that many runs at home was 1977. None of those people are still in baseball. Most of them are on Medicare. And Swanson, the guy your manager slots ninth specifically so he doesn’t have to think too hard about him, went out and put up the second-most RBIs from the nine-hole in MLB history since 1920. That stat sounds made up. It is not made up.
Here’s what makes this even better. Through June 16, Swanson was hitting .175. Not a slump. A disaster. The kind of batting average that gets a player benched in a pennant race, except Craig Counsell kept running him out there, because Counsell is either very patient or very stubborn and at this point nobody can tell the difference. Swanson kept swinging. The hits didn’t come. Then they did, and apparently they all decided to show up at the same time, in bulk, like back-ordered furniture.
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In the last 10 games, Swanson has 26 RBIs. Twenty-six. That’s a Cubs club record, the franchise mark for RBIs in a 10-game stretch that had stood since Joe DiMaggio set it in 1939. Joe DiMaggio. The guy with the hitting streak named after him. Swanson just matched that, and he’s been doing it from the bottom of the goddamn order. He also homered in his previous game, giving him five home runs over two consecutive games, tied for an MLB record. The ninth hitter. The ninth hitter did this.
But focusing only on Swanson misses the larger point, which is that the Cubs are a team-wide problem for everyone they face right now. In this one game, five different players hit eight combined home runs. Swanson hit three. Conforto hit two. Seiya Suzuki hit his 100th career home run. Pete Crow-Armstrong hit his 19th. Michael Busch got one too, because why not, everyone else was doing it. That’s not a hot night. That’s a lineup with no safe outs, no place to catch your breath, no exploitable weak spot. The Padres’ starter Walker Buehler gave up nine runs in four innings and presumably drove home in complete silence.
Remember that the Cubs had a genuine rotation disaster on their hands not long ago. What they’ve built anyway is a 49-38 team that’s 9-1 in its last 10, running up scores that would embarrass a Little League mercy rule. They don’t have a singular superstar to build around. They have depth, patience, and a shortstop who was arguably one of the worst hitters in baseball two weeks ago and is now setting franchise records. It’s a little like one of baseball’s stranger statistical moments this year in the sense that the game keeps finding ways to surprise you when you’re looking at the wrong person.
Swanson, for his part, had thoughts on RBIs as a statistic. “The one thing I was taught early on playing this game, RBIs is like the one stat that continuously adds up. No matter if you’re going good or bad, they can continue to stack up each and every day.” That is a fairly modest thing to say after driving in eight runs from the ninth spot in the order. Counsell offered something slightly more cosmic: “We never have baseball figured out, and this tells you that.”
He’s right. Nobody has baseball figured out. Certainly not the Padres. And whatever the Cubs have going, they’ve been keeping it quiet, which is either humility or strategy. The rest of the league should probably start paying attention, before Dansby Swanson bats ninth and takes them apart too.
