It’s been an exhausting week for the Swansons, both physically and emotionally.
On Saturday, U.S. women’s national team standout Mallory Swanson was carted off the field during a friendly against Ireland, a tuneup before this summer’s World Cup, with a torn patellar tendon in her left knee. She underwent successful surgery on Tuesday.
“It sucks,” Dansby Swanson said Wednesday. “Seeing the person you love the most be heartbroken and in pain was not fun. Wouldn’t wish that upon anybody. We’ll get through it.”
Swanson was out of the lineup for the Cubs’ 5-2 loss to the Mariners on Wednesday, after pulling himself out of the game the night before with cramping and fatigue.
He has been by his wife’s side through the process, and by Tuesday night, the lack of sleep, food and fluids had caught up to him. He left the Cubs’ 14-9 comeback win before the sixth inning, after already recording four hits.
“Realistically, I feel like my body was just done,” Swanson said Tuesday night. “I felt like doing anything any more probably would have put me in harm’s way. So, just felt like the night was over for me.”
It takes a lot for Swanson to get to that point. He only missed one game in his last three seasons.
“He’s going through a lot in his life in general right now,” manager David Ross said. “So the conversation we had was very easy and clean. And you think you might get some pushback, but we were in lockstep in the stuff that we were talking about and where we need to be.”
With Swanson out for the series finale, Nico Hoerner started at shortstop, and Nick Madrigal moved to second base.
New heights
As the Mariners added to their lead with a pair of solo home runs off Cubs reliever Julian Merryweather in the eighth inning, Jarred Kelenic set a Wrigley Field record. His homer to center field was a 482-footer, making it the longest regular-season homer at Wrigley in the Statcast era (since 2015).
In the postseason, Willson Contreras topped that distance with a 491-foot blast in Game 4 of the 2017 NLCS.
