Dansby Swanson attends Vanderbilt. His highly acclaimed prowess within athletic endeavors deems him a southern gentleman of excellent repute.
Those two previous sentences could have been from a chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Or they could have been found in a Major League Baseball scouting report.
If your mock draft board has
1. Arizona, Dansby Swanson, Vanderbilt; then why not also put
2. Houston, Tom Buchanan, Yale.
3. Colorado, Jay Gatsby, Oxford.
All joking aside, it seems that Swanson, a 6-1, 190 pound 21-year-old shortstop, is locked into the Houston Astros at the #2 overall pick. He’s the best bat available in this draft, and he could still go #1 overall, should the Arizona Diamondbacks decide to opt for the best college (instead of high school) player available. Here’s where we have Dansby Swanson in our latest 2015 MLB mock draft.
We actually have two more Vanderbilt Commodores, including Swanson’s roommate, Carson Fulmer, in the first round of our mock. Fulmer made our top ten. Here are some Swanson highlights featured in the mock SportsCenter I did in Bristol last year. Watch the video below:
Said his college coach at Vandy: “Dansby Swanson is a rare talent…There isn’t much he can’t do well. He has a ‘care’ level for his personal game and the team, which naturally balances itself out.” According to his official profile on Vanderbilt’s website, he’s from Marietta, Georgia and his full given name his James Dansby Swanson, son of Nancy and Cooter Swanson.
Marietta is a suburb of Atlanta and the county seat in Cobb County, Georgia (where the early 1990s WWF wrestler Big Boss Man was from!)
So while the name Dansby Swanson sounds like the name of someone you’d find at an elite East Coast boarding school filled with 1%ers, his Dad, Cooter Swanson, sounds like the name of somebody you’d find at the Grand Ole Opry.
Dansby Swanson has a pretty awesome Twitter handle (@LieutenantDans7), so give him a follow there if you’re so inclined.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with Fox Sports Digital. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes to the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. He also appears regularly on numerous sports talk radio stations all across the country.
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