In the chaos of a midsize hotel ballroom adjacent to the massive space where Friday’s opening ceremony of Cubs Convention was about to take place, new shortstop Dansby Swanson, the jewel of the Cubs’ offseason, looked only the slightest bit overwhelmed.
Anywhere he turned, Swanson, 28, was bound to see iconic Cubs faces, many of them representing the organization’s distant past. Billy Williams here, Ryne Sandberg there. Old battery mates Fergie Jenkins and Randy Hundley. Lee Smith, Mark Grace, Shawon Dunston, Rick Sutcliffe. On and on. How many of them did Swanson recognize? How many of them were among Grandpa Herb’s favorites?
Charles Hebert Swanson died at 88 on December 11, back home in Kennesaw, Georgia. Grandpa Herb loved the Braves above all other teams, but No. 2 in his heart was the Cubs, whom he watched for many years on WGN. If only he could have seen his grandson run out of the home dugout just once at Wrigley Field. As suddenly as Swanson arrived in Chicago for his first Cubs Convention — the first one of these since 2020, just before the pandemic shut down baseball — he’ll leave Saturday morning in a beeline for Kennesaw, where a long-awaited celebration of Herb’s life will last into the night.
If Swanson didn’t break any records for mingling Friday with new teammates, ex-Cubs, team announcers, TV reporters and notepad-carrying scribes, it was plenty understandable. The guy has a lot going on.
“But I’m very happy to be here,” he said. “This is Chicago. This is the Cubs. This is going to be awesome.”
It’s going to be different. Last time Swanson shipped off for spring training, he was a reigning World Series champion for his hometown Braves and, by the way, hadn’t even been an All-Star yet. Now, he’s not merely an All-Star but also a seven-year, $177 million man — and the biggest boost to the Cubs’ on-field credibility since they tore what was left of it down at the 2021 trade deadline.
How quaint to think back to the last Cubs Convention before this one, with Willson Contreras, Jason Heyward, Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, Javy Baez, Kyle Schwarber, Yu Darvish and Albert Almora Jr. among those milling around, shaking hands and exchanging warm smiles and hearty back slaps.
It was still warm and fuzzy in 2020. The Cubs still had a core of homegrown players, the best of whom still embodied both lovable familiarity and indelible World Series glory. Wrigley was still going to be packed, the place to be. There was hope the team would still rank among baseball’s elite.
It’s different for the Cubs now, too, isn’t it? Kyle Hendricks is still here, somehow, and before long he’ll be among the ex-Cubs who pop in every January to relive some wonderful times. But the warm-and-fuzzy is largely gone, replaced by the wafting sense of a desperate need to become good and win again, to pack the ballpark all the time again, to get fans watching on TV again. If the Cubs don’t play better this season, if they look like pretenders and not rising contenders, there will be nothing but growing anger toward the Ricketts family, nothing but doubts about president Jed Hoyer and general manager Carter Hawkins, nothing but dismissive scorn for the Marquee Network.
The Cubs are going on seven years removed from the World Series, with a teardown and rebuild punctuating the finality of the best mini-era of baseball on the North Side in a century. Sentimentality aside, Cubs Convention was less about the ballplayers who belong to the past and more about the mercenaries who will fight for the future.
New center fielder Cody Bellinger is one of them. The National League MVP with the Dodgers in 2019 and a World Series champ in 2020, Bellinger has been in a personal backslide since, his swing utterly abandoning him in an ugly 2022 season.
But here he was, walking into a hotel ballroom and drawing lots of admiring stares. From the airport gate to the hotel lobby to the door to a ballroom on the second floor, Bellinger — on a one-year, $17.5 million deal — was called out to by fans excited to see and welcome him to Chicago.
“I think I’m every bit as excited as they are and more,” he said. “I really am, you know? Wrigley Field is an incredible place, and to play center field there — for however long — is going to be unbelievable.”
With the Dodgers, the most talented team in the league, he was surrounded by an embarrassment of riches. With the Cubs, he has to make an instant difference or else how is any of this going to work?
“I think we’re very impressive,” Bellinger said. “I think the guys we have in the locker room are right up there, and we’re going to have fun and we’re going to play really good baseball.”
But how does he know?
“Because we have to,” he said. “That’s why we’re here.”
That’s the conventional thinking.
