How Unlucky Has Christopher Morel Been? Going to the Tape, Pt. 2

[Matthew Trueblood]

After mashing his 11th home run Tuesday night, Christopher Morel is on pace to approach 30 for the Cubs this season. His overall numbers remain insufficient to his role as their cleanup hitter, though, so let's finish digging into the idea that he's been grossly unlucky.

Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

Yesterday, I wrote at length about Christopher Morel, and the fact that he shows up as one of the most unlucky hitters in baseball this year. Specifically, I broke down seven of the outs on which the models that drive those labels say he suffered the worst misfortune, looking for patterns and meaning. Today, let's finish that walkthrough and draw some broader conclusions (though not carve any in stone).

Let's pick up right where we left off. We last found Morel at the end of April in New York. Here he is back in Chicago in early May, with the Brewers in town.

If you read last night's piece, you've already seen a pattern develop, and this continues it. Morel chased a pitch way off the plate inside. Many hitters would whiff on it. Few of those who make contact on it would keep it fair, and fewer still would keep it fair while making solid contact. This could easily have been a double down into the left-field corner. Again, we see Morel being an extraordinarily talented hitter. Again, though, it feels like the bad luck factor should take a backseat to the question of whether he should be swinging at that pitch at all, and that when we do weigh the impact of the bad luck, we should ask ourselves whether any other outcome was really possible, given the pitch location and the nature of Morel's swing.

Ok, next, from the following series against the Padres.

This one really is brutal. That's 99 on the inner edge, and Morel gets the barrel to it while staying through the ball well enough to take it to right-center field. It's an impressive swing. It's also another case where you have to ask: Was any other outcome actually possible?

In the comment section of Part 1 of this two-part series, site member @We Got The Whole 9astutely observed that most of the Cubs' alleged bad luck seems to come when they hit to the middle of the diamond, and asked whether that's true, in more than an anecdotal sense. Naturally, it is. 

This is, in no small part, because expected outcome models for batted balls don't take spray angle into account. That sounds like a massive failure of the models, but there are some sound reasons to exclude that input. For one thing, it's often hard for a hitter to manipulate the direction of the ball, more than influencing it through their tendency to either pull the ball or hit it the other way. For another, once you start accounting for direction, you have to account for the positions of fielders before the ball is hit, at which point you're not only measuring the hitter's ability to hit.

Still, it's a major factor. Balls hit equally hard and on the same launch angle might be 50 feet over the wall if hit to straightaway right or left field, at some parks, but die on the track if hit to center field. Morel crushed this ball, and on one of those high-school fields with uniform fence distances all the way around, he'd have had an easy homer. That's not big-league ball. The fact that Robert Suarez was able to hit his spot with a fastball just shy of 100 MPH on the inside corner made it almost impossible for Morel to pull the ball, at least with the authority with which he hit this ball back up the middle. Some credit there has to go to Suarez, and we have to acknowledge that while Morel did well, he didn't exactly get unlucky. He got beaten, despite a great swing. Against pitchers as good and in ballparks as big as the big leagues have, that's going to happen.

On to the next one.

Here's where things get crazy. This ball left Morel's bat at just 81.2 miles per hour, with a launch angle of 29 degrees. That's not exactly blistered, and it ended up looking like a lazy fly ball. Why was it tagged as a ball with a good chance of being a hit? Because most balls hit that hard, on that trajectory, fly 20 or more feet fewer than that one did. With the wind blowing out to left, this one settled into the glove roughly 304 feet from home plate; the average for balls hit like that this year is 283. Often, outfielders have to run a bit farther to get to balls hit like this one was, and (as was the case here) they sometimes have to do so after initially seeing a hitter with power take a healthy swing.

This was good hitting by Morel. It was a mistake breaking ball up in the zone, in a situation when lifting the ball and making contact were imperative. He didn't get off his hardest swing on it, and that meant an out, but there was good process here, and it's fair to say that he did get some bad luck. With a generally less favorable wind at his back, he might have ended up with a game-changing double instead of a sacrifice fly.

Finally! We've found one. This is just plain bad luck. Baseball is a game of millimeters, played on nearly three acres of land. Morel hit this 105 miles per hour, at a 34-degree launch angle, and he ever-so-slightly pulled it. Obviously, to get the payoff on a day when the wind was swirling and sideways, he needed to lean on it a hair more or get it a hair more toward left field, but this was a pitch out over the plate, and he put a superb swing on it. I'm happy to call this one pure, unadulterated bad luck.

This clip is a perfect distillation of the reasons why so many teams now emphasize pulling fly balls to an extreme degree. There's just so much frustration to be found for anyone shy of elite, monstrous humans when they try to find their power in the opposite-field gap, especially in the modern game. Morel did everything right here. On a fastball away, he aggressively drove through the ball, slicing a 108.5-MPH drive at a launch angle of 17 degrees. Yet, he never seemed to have much chance of getting a hit, once it left his bat. This is another easy catch for the outfielder, even though it shows up as a should-be hit. File this one away. We'll discuss it further in a bit.

After that streak of bad-luck outs on balls inside, now we're seeing some where he went and got a pitch solidly on the outer part, but the defense was ready for him. The shift is banned, but it's still a shaded-infield league, and this line drive (while well-hit enough to be a clean single much of the time) wasn't crunched hard enough to get past a second baseman positioned almost behind the bag even before the pitch was thrown. As with some of the early non-hits we saw, the upside of this one was a single, and it doesn't feel like cruelty from the fates that he was retired, but it certainly could have been a knock.

Ok, let's recall the most painful of these examples.

From the side angle this might have been legitimate home run robbery by Blake Perkins. If so, it saves what would have been a go-ahead, two-run shot for Christopher Morel. pic.twitter.com/dFZXFiozaX

— Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) May 30, 2024

Ugh. It's hard to imagine a clearer demonstration of how hard being a great hitter in MLB is than this. The team, fans, and analysts have all rightly commended Morel for being more under control this year, especially in deep counts and with runners on base, which was the situation here. He still gets off a great swing against a fine pitch on the outer edge, and crushes it 405 feet to dead center field. But, there's that admonition against hitting it a long way in the air to center instead of to left, again. This time, it's because you have to clear the wall by more than you used to (in most places and with most center fielders), because the defense will take back your homers if you let them. But could Morel really have hit this any better, without being the lunging, strikeout-prone, pitchable hitter he was for too many long stretches the last two years? It's hard to imagine how.

Last video:

We've come full circle. This is much how his first couple bad breaks of the year looked. He hits it sharply, and again, this is a "high" ground ball, which has some expected utility. Still, it's a ground ball to the pull side. Defenses are ready for those, and it's hard to chalk them up as bad luck when they get gobbled up--especially when hit right at a defender, more or less.

It's time to synthesize some of what we've seen here. I think I'd sum it up thusly: Don't set too much store by expected batted-ball stats, period. Don't expect Morel to get better just because he's due to do so, because I don't think he is. That said, do expect Morel to improve, if he continues to evolve and learns to lay off or adjust his swing a bit more on the ball in and off the plate. He has a unique swing. He gets the barrel way out in front, the same way great sluggers like Nolan Arenado do, but Arenado has learned to consistently elevate and pull the ball. He's similar to Willy Adames, whom he loves and respects, but like Adames, he can end up with deep funks and ugly OBPs when he doesn't have his approach perfectly tuned. 

Given the current bat path he uses, Morel will continue to hit into bad "luck" on a lot of pitches inside. We can see some of the reasons, but not all of them, absent more data on batted-ball spin and attack angle (which might well become public in the next year or two). He has to cover the whole plate, because his whiff rate will always be too high for him to simply cut it in half and work back from deep counts without running up his strikeout rate.

Morel will do better, though, if he either tweaks that swing path or gets more selective on pitches that run off the plate inside. Changing his visual cues or mindset might also help him get around and pull the ball more sharply when it's on the outer third, too, and that's a vital component of whatever changes he'll continue to undertake. A few more of his well-struck fly balls have to go to left and left-center, rather than to center and right-center.

We've seen evidence of him doing all of that over the last week or two, which has helped him come out of his latest slump and approach the production the team needs from him. That has to continue, but the signs point in exciting directions. Morel might not have gotten as unlucky as some stats say, but he's also not a finished product--and a breakout might be around the corner, if more because of an evolving process than because of a simple course correction in outcomes.

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[Bertz]

I'm sympathetic to the spray angle argument, it's more or less the opposite of Cody Bellinger's whole deal.  That said I'm not sure it holds up here? 

Chris Morel is pulling the ball 50.9% of the time this year.  That's down from last year's 55%, but still well above the league number of 40.1%.  He is 6th out of 155 qualified hitters this year.  And it's not a flyball/groundball disconnect.  I'm a novice at Statcast search, but below is I believe Morel's pulled flyballs + liners as a portion of all flyballs + liners

2022 - 35 /105 = 33.3%
2023 - 60 / 129 = 46.5%
2024 - 34 / 75 = 45.3%

This is not a reverse-Bellinger happening.  I know some of these examples are balls hit to center, but Chris should probably still have some extra doubles to his name.

The other instances where you look at a wOBA/xwoba disconnect and don't cry luck are when a guy is slow/fat (nope) or when a guy has built up a track record of underperformance (nope).  I know the fanbase is in a real self flagellating mood right now but I just don't see anything that says Morel hasn't been ludicrously unlucky to this point.

[We Got The Whole 9]

Bet this one rattled through his head a couple times last night. Fedde misses his location by a mile and this should have been sent to the street.

 

https://www.mlb.com/video/erick-fedde-swinging-strike-to-christopher-morel?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share

 

Where do the Cubs rank in hard hit FB% to the pull-side? They had 2 more long flyouts to center last night. It feels like they just don't have guys who can yank em. They tend to hit gap-to-gap and that ends in a lot of hard-luck flyouts.