BLOCKBUSTER: Cubs Land Isaac Paredes, Send Christopher Morel to Rays in Huge Trade

[Matthew Trueblood]

In a move that signals the franchise's seriousness about a change of tenor and direction, the Cubs have made the biggest splash of the trade deadline season.

This is a huge one, and while it comes a bit out of left field, it couldn't make more sense, or have more bread crumbs forming a trail right up to it. The implications are massive, for this year and far beyond. Christopher Morel will be the centerpiece of a move that brings in his own replacement at the hot corner. In Isaac Paredes, they bring back a player whom they dealt away years ago and who has thrived the last two seasons in Tampa.

Much more to come, but the gist here is: the Cubs are done doing the same old, same old. This is a huge pivot toward a new kind of team, and Paredes will be one of the keys to their attempt to become a contender again right away in 2025.

UPDATE 1: The Full Deal
In addition to Morel, the Cubs will send Hunter Bigge and prospect Ty Johnson to Tampa Bay in exchange for Paredes. Morel, of course, has four more years of team control after 2024, and Bigge just made his debut earlier this summer. Johnson was a 15th-round pick last summer for the Cubs, but is off to a strong start in his pro career and had a bit of helium heading into this deadline.

 

Bigge is strictly a reliever, of course, and thus, he's fairly fungible, but he very much belongs to a class of pitcher with which the Rays can do some interesting things. It's not a shock to see any of Morel, Bigge, or Johnson moved right now, but each does have some value, so the takeaway here is that the Cubs value Paredes quite highly.

And well they should. I wrote in support of this acquisition a full eight months ago, on the eve of the Winter Meetings, and this is precisely the kind of deal that made sense. The Cubs consolidate some of their farm depth (and let go the fading dream of Morel figuring it all out for them) while adding a player with stellar numbers over the last two seasons in Tampa. Even amid an ugly recent slump, Paredes entered today batting ..249/.353/.467 since the start of last season, with 47 home runs, 43 doubles and a triple. He's the quintessential hitter of the modern era, pulling the ball in the air with sufficient authority at sufficient frequency to make up for a lack of superb raw power. He is, in many ways, the anti-Christopher Morel.

Paredes controls the strike zone brilliantly, including making ample contact. He plays a solid (if unspectacular) third base. And he's under team control through 2027, in his own right. He would have gotten too expensive for the Rays, starting this winter, so they cashed him in for three players with real promise, headlined by Morel. For the Cubs, though, this is a significant immediate upgrade and a long-term fix for a lineup that lacked power.

UPDATE 2: Tax Implications and a Quick Word on Paredes's Spray Chart
Notably, Paredes qualified for arbitration as a Super Two player this past winter, and his salary for 2024 is $3.4 million. The Cubs will, of course, absorb just about a third of that, but doing so still puts them within a whisker of the competitive-balance tax threshold, since Morel is still pre-arbitration. It's a virtual lock that the team will trade one or more players making a similar amount of money in the next 50 hours or so, but in the event that they didn't, this could nudge them into taxpayer status. Again, the organization isn't going to let that happen, by so little and with the team looking unlikely to make the postseason. This just underscores that they haven't decided (it would be a bizarre decision, indeed) to become buyers; they're just making a long-term investment in Paredes instead of in Morel.

On that point, we should take a moment to discuss the hand-wringing already going strong on Twitter about how Paredes comes by his homers, and whether or not it will work at Wrigley Field. Because he hits a lot of his shots close to the left-field line, where Wrigley is the deepest park in the league, Statcast will tell you he'd have lost a dozen or so home runs if he played all his games on the North Side. That is freaking out some of Statcast's more slavish devotees, for a couple of reasons, but it shouldn't make you worry the same way.

Firstly, Statcast's expected versus actual home runs are a fun little toy, but not a serious analytical tool. They not only don't account for wind or elevation or temperature, but don't even incorporate exit velocity or launch angle, as you might very naturally assume they do. When you see those graphics about how many parks a fly ball would have been a home run in, you are seeing the computer take the observed distance of the fly ball in situ, the spray angle of the ball when it reaches the wall, and the height of the wall in each park in question, and spit out the number of times the distance exceeds the one required.

That comes with all kinds of problems. There are plenty of days when the wind is blowing in at Wrigley, of course, but plenty, too, when it's blowing out or from right to left, and on those days, a fly ball down the line will carry the 355 feet to that corner every bit as easily as it carries the 330 feet required to leave Tropicana Field. Then, there's the elevation difference, and wide variations in temperature. None of that is accounted for in the facile numbers people are allowing to to scare them about Paredes. It's all important information, and teams have much better models than the public. The Cubs would not have acquired Paredes if they thought all his homers might fall into outfielders' gloves on the warning track in the well.

Nor is that all of Paredes's game. His strikeout and walk numbers deserve more credit than they get, and unlike Morel, he's a playable third baseman. None of this is to say that he comes without risk; all players carry significant performance risks. The Cubs also need to prove they're better at player development and coaching than they have looked the last couple of years, to ensure they get the most from this unique profile. On the other hand, they've gotten quite a bit from a mirrored version of it, in Cody Bellinger, over the last year and a half. I would caution against panicking over a dataset meant to entertain, rather than to rigorously inform.

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[painhertz]

Eh...blockbuster?  Not really.  Morel is pretty one dimensional and that one dimension hasn't shown up much.  Cubs have a 3rd baseman now.