Yesterday’s hopeful update on Nico Hoerner’s recovery from after-season surgery had me wondering if there was an update on midde-infield-mate Dansby Swanson during the Convention (a lot of stuff comes and goes very quickly during that time, so we don’t always see it at the moment it drops).
Sure enough, there was a little update, and it’s all good stuff on Swanson’s recovery from surgery this past fall.
For one thing, Swanson revealed that he’d been dealing with the sports hernia issue for something like a year and a half, but the nature of the injury is such that you don’t necessarily know what is going on. So that’s why there was such a long delay in getting it surgically addressed.
“I’ve been dealing with this for a pretty long time,” Swanson told The Athletic. “Over a year, probably like a season-and-a-half worth. I wasn’t quite sure what it was in the beginning. That’s why I didn’t do surgery (right away). I did a bunch of rehab things. But it got to the point where it felt like this was going to be necessary. And it’s going to be something that can kind of get me back to where I want to be.”
Although I’m neither a doctor nor a professional athlete, I do think I can add a little personal context to this one, having had the same procedure done at more or less the exact same time Swanson did. These hernias are kinda weird – their impact can come and go, they can be really subtle, and you absolutely can be completely fine for long stretches even with a hernia present. I completely get why Swanson was rehabbing and trying different things for a long time before even considering a surgery.
Eventually, though, that’s where you’re likely to land, because these hernias don’t get better on their own – they just get progressively a little worse over time. So you deal with it as best you can until you have a clear window to get the procedure done, and it sounds like that’s exactly what Swanson did. He generally played well in the second half, so I don’t think anyone can say he made the wrong call (getting the surgery in-season could’ve cost him upwards of two months or more).
Looking forward now that he’s had the issue surgically addressed, the question is how much was it impacting his performance the past year and a half? Should he expect a boost going forward? Well, maybe, depending on just how bad he was feeling at times. But there’s also the natural aging curve, and a lot of noise in trying to predict something like that. Frankly, if he just plays close to the average of what he’s been in his first two years with the Cubs (about a league-average overall bat, elite shortstop defense, and 4.5-ish WAR), it’d be pretty hard to be upset with that. And that is what he did WHILE dealing with this issue.
“No one’s going to give excuses for this, that and the other,” Swanson told The Tribune. “It was obviously my choice to play and to play through things, and we all do, right, throughout the year. Like, you see guys all the time at the end of the year, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize you were dealing with that.’ And so no one makes excuses about it. But obviously when you’re not healthy, it affects things. And it’s our job to obviously figure out how to still be a productive player in different ways.”
Going forward, though, it sounds like Swanson feels healthy again, and maybe even more like himself than he felt all of last season. He expects to be full-go for a normal Spring Training.