Dansby Swanson, the baseball player, didn’t play soccer growing up in Georgia.
His other sport of choice in high school was basketball.
‘‘I was a shooting guard,’’ he said the other day. ‘‘I was a good player. I played basketball just like I do baseball. Just, like, I did the right things, made the right reads and rebounded well because I boxed out. I was, like, ‘Do the right things.’ ’’
This conversation took place before Swanson began raining home runs like Steph Curry dialing long distance from behind the arc. The Cubs’ shortstop hit three of the team’s eight home runs in their 23-3 demolition of the Padres in the Wrigley Sauna on Wednesday afternoon.
Swanson has hit a mind-boggling nine home runs in his last 13 games, with the Cubs winning 11 of them. Sammy Sosa (12) and Hack Wilson (10) are the only Cubs to hit more in a similar span. He also has driven in 26 runs in his last 10 games, a number exceeded only by Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio in a similar amount of games.
The eight home runs the Cubs hit Wednesday matched the club record they set just a year ago, on the Fourth of July against the Cardinals, who will be visiting again on the Fourth this weekend. Only the Blue Jays (10 in 1987), Yankees (nine twice, both last season) and Reds (nine in 1999) have hit more home runs in a game that lasted nine innings, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
If Swanson’s nine long balls in the last fortnight could be converted into soccer goals, he would be three clear of soccer superstars Kylian Mbappe of France and Lionel Messi of Argentina in the race for the Golden Boot, the prize awarded to the World Cup’s top scorer.
You do recall, dear reader, that we commenced this little exercise by noting that Swanson never played soccer. That should not be confused with how much attention he is paying to the World Cup, the global extravaganza currently serving as the primary preoccupation of a few billion or so inhabitants of our planet.
Their invasion of our shores has been one of the most joyous delights of the summer — Scotland’s Tartan Army, Norway’s Viking rowers, the bursting-with-pride passion of little Cape Verde, the rollicking Aussies, on and on we can go. One TikToker described it in a song that has gone viral as ‘‘the best sleepover ever . . . started out as strangers, ended up as friends.’’
There’s also this little detail: When she was Mallory Pugh and had not yet taken her husband’s name, Mallory Swanson played on the U.S. women’s national team that won the 2019 Women’s World Cup.
‘‘I mean, we haven’t, like, sat down and watched games,’’ Dansby said the other day. ‘‘We watched one game together, but it’s just kind of, like, on. We’re keeping up with what’s happening, but it’s not like we’re riveted.’’
The Swansons have a good reason for lacking laser focus: You try watching a soccer match when you have a 19-month-old competing for your attention. If time — and Josie James Swanson — allowed, the Swansons were no doubt watching the U.S. men play Bosnia and Herzegovina on Wednesday night for a chance to advance to the round of 16.
Though he makes his living with bat and glove, Swanson understands soccer’s appeal.
‘‘It’s the world’s sport,’’ he said. ‘‘I mean, it’s the cheapest and most accessible sport to play. You can play it with anything and anywhere, which is so cool. I’ve started to understand that now.
‘‘I mean, that’s what makes it so ecumenical. The poorest kid in the world and the richest, it doesn’t matter who you are, where you are — like, you can play.’’
This is how Paraguay coach Gustavo Alfaro put it before his country’s stunning penalty-kick upset over Germany earlier this week:
‘‘Football, we all own it, primarily the poorest, because the cheapest toy to play with was a ball, which was sometimes hard to afford, but 22 people could play with just one toy. So the power of football is immense.’’
In the time he has been in Chicago, we have been privileged to watch Swanson play with an artistry achieved by only a few. Games that we could be inspired to call beautiful. Wednesday was one of them.
And now, together with Dansby and the rest of the world, we can celebrate the beautiful game.
