NEWSLETTER
I’m a huge fan of Christopher Morel, who could certainly be a mainstay in the Cubs lineup for many years to come. But it serves no one to lob him with praise when he’s succeeding and ignore the performance entirely when he’s struggling. And right now, he is struggling. Badly. I think it’s worth exploring.
In his first ten games (44 PAs) with the Cubs this season, Morel slashed .381/.409/.952, with seven of his 16 hits leaving the yard and three more going for doubles. His walk rate was small (4.5%) and his strikeout rate was elevated (36.4%), but it hardly mattered with production like that.
In his nine games since (31 PAs), Morel has just four hits, two of them homers, and is slashing .138/.194/.345 (42 wRC+). If you wanted to be really cruel, you could cut it off at his last seven games, and you’d wind up with a .091/.130/.091 (-42 wRC+) slash line. But we’ll go with the former for a little more balance against those first ten games.
The production, alone, might be ignorable in such a small sample. But that’s not what has me concerned. Instead, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, it’s the strikeouts. And as you’ll recall, that was already the concern last season, during his time in the minors this year, and even during his homer-happy stretch with Chicago a couple weeks ago.
In that most recent nine-game stretch, Morel has struck out 13 times in 29 at-bats (41.9 K%). And his underlying plate discipline, which stabilizes more quickly, has gotten much worse.
O-Swing Rate:
First 10: 37.8%
Last 9: 45.0%
– League Avg: 31.5%
Whiff Rate:
First 10: 19.9%
Last 9: 25.7%
– League Avg: 11%
To put those numbers into words: Relative to the league average, Morel was ALREADY swinging at more pitches out of the zone (bad for making contact and bad for contact quality when you do connect) and whiffing way more than the league average on all swings. And now both of those key indicators have gotten worse as the season has gone on.
If you want to look at it in more of an absolute sense: Since he debuted this season, Morel’s out-of-zone swing rate (18th worst), zone contact rate (2nd worst), overall contact rate (dead last), whiff rate (dead last), and called strike + whiff rate (dead last) are all among the very worst in baseball. The swing decisions and the contact rate are a clear problem.
And that problem is being exacerbated by the fact that pitchers are increasingly going out of the zone as the season (and his struggles) press on. The change has not been subtle:
The league finds your struggles quickly, and exploits them quickly.
In a vacuum, you might be happy to see his zone-swing rate increase from Period 1 to Period 2, but his overall swing rate is up across the board (57.4%), which is way above the league average (46.9%). In other words, he’s trying to swing his way out of it. And that’s just not going to work. In fact, it’s probably hurting.
Generally speaking, we like to think about strikeout issues in two different forms: pitch/zone recognition and contact ability. Some guys struggle with one more than the other…
… But right now, Morel is struggling with both.
He’s failing to identify which pitches he should offer at, so he’s offering at more pitches, including balls out of the zone. AND ALSO he’s making less contact when he does offer. It’s the worst of both worlds and it’ll require some serious work if he wants to stay a productive overall hitter in the big leagues.
Morel’s quality of contact is generally good enough that you can live with him having an elevated strikeout rate. That’ll probably always be part of his game. But he’s going to have to improve at the margins of all of these issues to keep that strikeout rate consistent at a playable level.
I think he can do it — he’s not even turning 24 for another month, and he still has very little upper-level experience — but we can’t just ignore the problem, either. The league certainly noticed, and now it’s time for Morel to adjust.
