NEWSLETTER
As I was perusing Cubs prospects lists today, with Owen Caissie getting added to Baseball America’s top-100, I couldn’t help but notice how many of the Cubs’ top-30 are 23 years old or older. Ben Brown. Matt Mervis. Alexander Canario. Haydn McGeary. B.J. Murray Jr. Kohl Franklin. Brody McCullough. Even recent big league debut-starrer Jordan Wicks is about to turn 24.
That’s not outrageously old for a prospect or anything, and that constituency does not make up anything close to a majority of the Cubs’ best prospects. It was just a reminder to me that many players – even very well-regarded ones – are still working their way up toward the big leagues when they are 23/24.
Christopher Morel just turned 24 earlier this season. When he was turning 23, he wasn’t still working his way up to the big leagues, he was being thrust into them.
Whatever the typical progression for a quality prospect in the minor leagues, Morel definitely didn’t have it. An international free agent signing, Morel did not debut in the Dominican Summer League until he was 18, a year or two older than most positional IFA signings make their debut. Morel had suffered a serious accident the year of his signing, and spent the next year rehabbing, a 17-year-old alone in a foreign country. So he gets himself healthy after being told he might not play baseball again, and has to head back to the Dominican Republic for his professional debut, where his results were mixed.
Morel then came back to the States for his age-19 season, which was also a bit of a struggle between a couple short-season leagues, and just 54 games of experience. Still, the talent was there, and the Cubs promoted him to full-season Low-A for his age-20 season. That’s not SUPER old for the level, but it is, for example, a year older than Cristian Hernández is now at Low-A. So when Morel started to show some pop and steps forward physically, it was what you would expect for a 20-year-old prospect at Low-A. It kept him on the radar, and set him up for what would’ve been an interesting 2020 development year.
Ah, but then the pandemic hit, wiping out the minor league seasons. To say the timing was pretty darn bad for Morel would be an understatement. The Cubs did the best they could, bringing Morel to the alternate site to give him at least some semblance of experience, but it’s obviously not the same as playing 100 games at High-A. So Morel skipped High-A heading into 2021, his age-22 season, and he played reasonably well at Double-A. Good enough to remain on the radar, but not in such a way that we could’ve anticipated his 2022 breakout.
You know the story from there: Morel opened the 2022 season, about to turn 23, absolutely crushing the ball at Double-A. The Cubs, in the midst of a rebuilding year and with a need for a bat, decided to just bring Morel straight up from Double-A. In another year, with another set of circumstances, Morel would have instead spent most of 2022 at Triple-A, if not still at Double-A. He had some initial success in the bigs, wore down a bit in the second half, and when the Cubs filled out the roster a bit more in the offseason, he was sent to Triple-A to open the 2023 season.
He was all-universe at Triple-A Iowa immediately, the Cubs made room for him again, and he has generally followed a similar trajectory this season as last: super hot to start, fading as the season goes on.
Because of that last part – particularly being that it’s two years in a row – you might be developing a sense of “this is who he is,” and maybe you don’t see a long-term, high-level, impact future for Christopher Morel in the big leagues.
But the reason I opened all of this with a discussion of Cubs prospects and Morel’s development trajectory is to underscore that he’s kinda much more like a prospect who has been tasked with developing at the big league level, rather than a guy who got a normal run in the minor leagues and then is having trouble fully stabilizing in the big leagues. Sometimes, even a guy who has 196 games of big league experience is still best thought of as a prospect.
Here’s how Morel’s first base coach Mike Napoli put it to The Athletic: “He’s made some strides, but he’s got some ways to go, too. There’s a lot to this game, the ins and outs of knowing what to do, where the ball goes, your approach at certain times in the game. There are so many different things that he has to live and see to know during the game. But he’s doing it in the big leagues. A lot of us had the opportunity to make those mistakes in the minor leagues, so when you get to the big leagues, you don’t make those mistakes. It’s trying to balance that kind of stuff out and make sure he realizes that if he does something, good or bad, you learn from that. You’ll be able to use that.”
Even if you set aside the accident when he was younger and the pandemic, both of which dramatically curtailed the total volume of minor league games Morel could have played along the way, there’s also the fact that he has played so few minor league games above Low-A: just 168 total. That’s barely one full seasons’ worth of opportunity to work in the high minors before you’re expected to adjust and develop and produce against big league pitchers.
Long story short: we can stay very optimistic about Christopher Morel’s long-term future as a productive big leaguer. He has things to work on this offseason, without question. The contact rate still needs to improve. The defense at SOME spot other than second base needs to get to a playable level. But he can keep developing.
Also, even if you would like to see some stability, I don’t think we can ignore the simple fact that so far in his big league career, Christopher Morel has hit: .241/.311/.459/112 wRC+ over 759 plate appearances.
