Christopher Morel's Bat Speed Keeps Going to Waste

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Chicago Cubs have a slugger with one of the fastest bats in baseball, and he's leading the team, on pace for nearly 30 home runs. Overall, though, that bat speed is going to waste, because it's a swing without barrel control and he rarely meets the ball squarely.

Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports

When MLB released Statcast bat-tracking data for public consumption earlier this season, the headlines for Cubs partisans wrote themselves. Christopher Morel swings extraordinarily fast! It was one of those insights from advanced baseball data that are so obvious to even a casual observer that they border on redundant, but which so pleasingly confirm our priors that they also stir our excitement and passion for the game. Maybe we could all be scouts after all. Yes, Christopher Morel's bat speed is awesome.

Alas, 347 plate appearances into his first full and undisrupted big-league season, Morel is hitting an unproductive, unimpressive .195/.304/.370. Everyone knew that having one of the five or 10 fastest swings in baseball didn't automatically make a player an elite hitter, but seeing Morel struggle this way--despite a strikeout rate on the right side of average and a walk rate in excess of 11%--is unsettling. When Giancarlo Stanton or Jo Adell fails to dominate offensively in spite of the raw materials for top-of-the-scale power, it makes sense. They strike out over 30% of the time. Morel, though, keeps swinging very fast, making contact, and making outs anyway.

The problem is exactly what you'd probably guess: in addition to being insufficiently selective within the zone (even if he does do fairly well at not chasing outside the zone), Morel is swinging too wildly. Every hitter has to calibrate their own balance between swinging hard and fast enough to put some juice into the ball, and controlling their bat path well enough to bring the big parts of the bat and the ball together. Morel is out of balance.

He swings very hard, and without much of a spread in his swing speed. He attacks the ball in a way few other hitters are capable of--or at least that few others are willing to.

That doesn't translate, though, when it comes to raw exit velocity. As you'd expect, swing speed is closely correlated with exit velocity, but Morel belongs to the class of hitters who create less velocity off the bat than the velocity of their bat would imply.

The problem is inefficient collisions between bat and ball, because while Morel has made some adjustments and increased the rate at which he makes contact this year, he's also mishitting it more often. His average exit velocity is higher than in 2022 or 2023, but he's hitting fewer line drives, and more of his hard-hit balls are grounders. Statcast keeps a statistic to count how often a batter's swing and the incoming pitch meet cleanly enough to generate 80% or more of the possible exit velocity, based on the speed of each. Morel rates poorly.

Hitters like Morel can be lethal when they get hot. Whether it be because they see the ball especially well for a while or because they get a series of fat pitches over a particular stretch, they can run into a number of balls and generate some big power numbers. When things go wrong, though, they can go very, very wrong. Morel's been in a slump since mid-May, with a line of .171/.301/.308, and it's largely because he's not squaring up the ball.

Again, this is something hitters with fast swings struggle with. You'll square it up better and more consistently if you're willing to moderate your swing speed to meet the ball squarely, and if you're not, you accept a certain risk of imperfect contact and/or whiffs. Morel, though, ends up hitting the ball efficiently only in locations where the ball just isn't going to take off very often. Squaring the ball up when it's down and inside, out of the zone, is a recipe for hitting it hard right off your shoe top, as Morel is infamously prone to doing.

Compare Morel to Heliot Ramos, who also has a very fast swing and is also below-average at squaring it up, overall. Ramos is striking out more than Morel, but he's hitting a robust .298/.373/.524. How? He's squaring the ball up when it's over the heart of the plate, where squared-up balls tend to be fair, tend to be hit in the air, and tend to turn into big hits.

It's easy to get discouraged about Morel's overall batting line. It's also easy to get excited about his improved contact rate and obvious power potential. He has the most important raw material for producing pop. The truth, though, is right in the middle, in the worst possible way. He's made up of extremes, and while there are still ample reasons for hope, the truth of this moment is that he's an incomplete hitter, lost on the winding road from where he was the last two years to the destination he and the team envision.

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[Transmogrified Tiger]

I really hate that this gives credence to what I was hoping was me being a game thread reactionary

 

[We Got The Whole 9]

I'm not sure he has the right staff around him either to get to the best version of himself. But this article does a really nice job of summarizing why we've seen big gains in his development in a couple departments but what fatal flaws he may still have that will limit his overall output with the bat. And if he doesn't hit at elite levels he's simply another negative player.