How Unlucky Has Christopher Morel Been? Going to the Tape, Pt. 1

[Matthew Trueblood]

It's early June, and the Chicago Cubs' everyday cleanup hitter is hitting .195/.307/.371. Under normal circumstances, this would be a daily topic of anguished, even livid conversation. This seems to be a different case, though, because of who the player is and how he's come by this stat line. Let's dig deeper on it.

Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

Almost everywhere you turn in the midst of conversations of everything going wrong for the Cubs right now, you hear the name Christopher Morel. His defense at third base has been genuinely problematic this year, and the decision to install him as the regular at that position looks pretty bad, but he's made some improvements since Opening Day, so the agreed-upon course for the moment there is patience. As Morel's offensive struggles pertain to the team's overall difficulty in consistently scoring runs, though, the conversation is even more complex.

Seasoned baseball viewers have seen a more disciplined, controlled Morel in the batter's box this year. Without a doubt, he's taking better, smarter at-bats. He jumps at the ball much less often than was the case a year ago, and he did so less then than one year earlier. Statheads will note not only his elite raw swing speed, according to new bat-tracking data available via Statcast, but the numbers that show he's been very unlucky this season--in essence, that more of his batted balls should have gone for hits than have actually done so, based on their exit velocity and launch angle.

Yet, some fans also cast a more skeptical eye on Morel, and on those who would hype his burgeoning skills despite his ugly overall numbers. They point out, firstly, that he remains one of the streakiest hitters you'll ever see. Even while looking more competitive than he did during a hideous slump last summer, Morel has already gone through a funk in which he not only didn't produce hits or get on base, but rarely even put the ball in play. He goes dormant for longer periods than you would like to see a cleanup hitter do, and for those disinclined to accept broad-brush numbers in making a granular assessment, the expected batted-ball data fails the sniff test.

Let's meet in the middle, and engage with Morel's very strange season to date on the simplest terms possible. He's tied for 15th in MLB this year, with 15 outs on batted balls that had an expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) of .500 or higher when they left his bat. What if we just watched them all, to try and digest what they're telling us and hone our projections of Morel's future production?

We'll start at the very beginning. Here's one from the very first weekend of the season, in Texas.

Mm. Ok. Before we talk about that one at all, here's another, from the Cubs' opening series at home, against the Rockies.

Ok, these aren''t that impressive so far, are they? Each is hit at more than 95 miles per hour, but they're just grounders to third base. The expected outcomes model is catching something real, in that they're well-struck and (this is a subtle but important factor) are what we might classify as "high" ground balls. They come more or less straight off Morel's bat, before gravity goes to work on them, rather than being hit downward and bouncing within 30 or 40 feet of the plate. I did research on this going back almost half a decade, and it's a real consideration. Higher grounders, as you'd guess, have a better chance to get through or force defensive mistakes than do choppers.

Still, neither of these had any chance to be more than a single, and it doesn't even feel that unjust that they went for outs instead. Let's take a look at the next time he was cheated, in San Diego a week later.

Line drive this time, but similar story. Morel hit that hard, but he didn't blister it or lift it much. It could have been a single. Despite the expected batted-ball data, it doesn't feel like it should have been one, exactly, and it wasn't splitting any gaps.

The next day, he hit one considerably better, with some air beneath it.

This, at last, is the kind of batted ball we're really thinking of when we say Morel has been unlucky, right? It jumped off his bat at 108 miles per hour, with some loft on it. It went to the biggest part of the park, in a setting (April in San Diego) that isn't terribly conducive to getting extra carry on the ball, but there's not much more you can ask of a hitter than to hit the ball that way. Maybe we'll come back to this one for further discussion later, but hitting the ball that hard and on a high line is surely a sign of a good (or at least gifted) hitter. 

Later in that road trip, as Morel settled into what would be a long and ugly slump, he nearly had a slump-preempter.

Again, the expected metrics are being a little bit friendly, right? The probability of this ball (hit only 94 miles per hour) being any kind of hit is tiny. The thing is, if it's a hit at all, it's gonna be a home run. And look, it almost was one! Hitting long, high fly balls to the pull field is the single more valuable thing a hitter can do, before we bake in the costs (usually, a lot of extra strikeouts) of an approach centered around hitting them. Morel did that here. He wasn't rewarded.

Gosh, that West Coast trip was long. The day after the above, in Arizona:

To me, this is one of the most tricky and telling batted balls we'll study in this sequence. Morel got way out on (and a bit around) a ball off the plate inside, and he kept it fair, hit it squarely, elevated it at 106 miles per hour. If the ball is 20 feet to either the left or the right, it's a sure double, and if it's even 10 feet in either of those directions, it's a very tough play for the left fielder.

At the same time, look at that swing. Was there any version of it where he could have hit that ball either 20 feet to the left or to the right? To me, it looks like he either could have yanked it foul or hit a much less potent strike to another part of the field. This was a good pitch, and Morel put a freakishly good swing on it, but that might not quite mean that he deserved any more than he got out of that swing.

The thing about Morel slumps is, he gets going so badly that he doesn't even have bad luck. That lineout in Arizona came on Apr. 15. Over the next fortnight, he went 7-43 with 13 strikeouts and zero home runs. He only managed two doubles, and his OPS was barely over .500. He didn't have another hard-luck out, by our measurements, until Apr. 29.

See, and that's not the kind of hard luck we've been hunting either. Morel got jammed badly. He still showed good bat speed and muscled a looping, hopeful liner toward right-center, and balls hit that softly but with that kind of loft very often drop into the grass beyond the reach of the infielder. When you think of bad luck, though, this isn't what it looks like.

For today, we'll pause this revue here. Tomorrow, we'll tour the other eight instances in which Morel got jobbed, according to the expected numbers. At this halfway point, though, it's worth making a few observations:

1. Some guys seem to hit screaming line-drive outs that look much more like the bad luck we picture when we say the words. Seiya Suzuki is a good example. Morel runs into misfortune at a different angle, figuratively and literally.
2. Almost all of these came on inside pitches. That's something to watch, especially given the way Morel's swing works. He loves to get his arms extended. Maybe we need to give a bit more credit to pitchers when they successfully jam the very jammable Morel, and maybe Morel needs to cut down his swing rate on those offerings on the inner edge--and beyond it.

Morel is a pivotal part of the Cubs' medium-term organizational plan, one way or another. This is an important topic to understand as best we can, so it's worth another round of conversation and breakdowns tomorrow.

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[We Got The Whole 9]

I feel like a large % of the Cubs 'Bad luck' comes in the middle of the field. Is this accurate?

[We Got The Whole 9]

And on cue, Seiya rockets a warning track out to straightaway center.