Back in December of 2022, the Chicago Cubs signed free agent shortstop Dansby Swanson to a seven-year, $177 million contract. If you recall back to that winter, Swanson was the fourth of the four big free agent shortstops (Carlos Correa, Trea Turner, Xander Bogaerts) to sign his deal and got the smallest guarantee of the bunch. And although the Cubs have made the playoffs just one time since signing Swanson to that near-franchise-record deal, it does generally feel like it’s been a success. But has it?

Now that we’re three years (and $65M deep) into this deal, now feels like a good time to reflect on Dansby Swanson’s time with the Cubs. And fortunately, thanks to ZiPS, we have a very fair, very accurate way to evaluate his performance and the deal he signed relative to the Cubs’ expectations.

Back in December of 2022, Ben Clemens (FanGraphs) used ZiPS to project Dansby Swanson’s next six seasons and assign an expected free agent value. The contract ZiPS spit out? An almost eerily accurate seven-year, $176.2M contract, which was just $800K short of his actual deal. Great work, ZiPS. Because of those similarities, we can take those season-by-season projections as a VERY close approximation of what the Cubs were hoping to get out of Swanson. So here they are, year by year, next to Swanon’s actual production.

Full Story (via Michael Cerami):

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