As Three Other Top Cubs Prospects Join Them, a Check-In on Moises Ballesteros and Owen Caissie in Iowa

[Matthew Trueblood]

On Sunday night, news broke that three of the Cubs' top five or six position-player prospects were being promoted from Double-A Tennessee to Triple-A Iowa, Two other top bats in the system will be waiting there to welcome them.

Image courtesy of © Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports

Lately, the Cubs are in the bad habit of having their best offensive prospects stall out in the upper levels of their farm system. It's not a problem exclusive to them; it's part of how being a top prospect works. Still, they need to start getting those players over the hump, not only onto the big-league roster, but into the everyday lineup as solid or better regulars.

At the moment, the players who seem to stand the best chance of doing that are (in any order you choose) Kevin Alcántara, Moises Ballesteros, Owen Caissie, Matt Shaw, and James Triantos. Sunday evening, Tommy Birch of the Des Moines Register reported that Alcántara, Shaw, and Triantos are getting a bump from Double-A to the Cubs' top farm club, where they'll join Ballesteros and Caissie in the lineup. All five of these players have, at some time this year, appeared on one or more top-100 prospects list for the league, and now they're all as close as they can get to the majors.

Though teams have batted-ball and plenty of other data on players at all levels of their farm systems, the promotion of these three means we'll get our first look at publicly available Statcast info for them. Ballesteros and Caissie, though, have already played a considerable amount of ball in front of those cameras. What have we learned about them in that process?

Owen Caissie
Given aggressive level assignments ever since he was acquired in the Yu Darvish trade, Caissie has spent the whole season at Iowa, even though he didn't turn 22 until Jul. 8. He's a tall, lanky left-handed slugger, and on his way up the ladder, power has been his calling card. He put up some terrifying top-end exit velocities in Tennessee, and got the feel of pulling the ball in the air well enough to slug .515 in the pitcher-friendly Southern League last year.

However, Caissie also struck out at a cartoonish rate at each of his previous stops in the minors, He fanned in 31.2% of his plate appearances at Tennessee last year. That's a very boom-or-bust profile, and although he did get to a modicum of power and draw plenty of walks, the odds weren't necessarily in his favor. Joey Gallo struck out at a similar rate in his age-20 season in the upper minors, but Gallo slugged .100 better than Caissie did. He needed to unlock even more pop in order to be a viable big-league prospect while punching out so often.

Instead, early this year, Caissie began concertedly trying to make more contact, at the expense of his light-tower power. For the season, he has a 27.6% strikeout rate, which still isn't good, given the relative weakness of Triple-A pitching and the relative smallness of Triple-A strike zones. However, he's walking 12.7% of the time, and hitting enough line drives to run another in what has been a career of very high BABIPs. Overall, his batting line is .278/.375/.452. He's thriving there, just as he did in Double-A.

You could choose to view this as evidence that Caissie is ready to do damage in the majors right now, but it's not that simple. His average exit velocity is 89.4 miles per hour. Isolate the balls in the most productive launch-angle range, and it's 91.8. His 90th-percentile exit velocity is 107 miles per hour, and 42% of his batted balls top 95 miles per hour. All of that would rate as thoroughly unremarkable, and even discouraging, for a hitter who strikes out as much as Caissie does in the big leagues--and that's before accounting for the change in the quality of pitching between Triple-A and MLB.

Caissie could sort through all of this and come out the other side with high-end power skills, but the trend arrows aren't even pointing in the right direction at the moment. Caissie's six hardest-hit balls of this season all came before the midpoint of May. He hasn't shown the ability to reach even 110 MPH off the bat since Jun. 21, and again, unless he learns to make much more contact, he's going to need to hit the ball at least that hard with some regularity. He's not pulling the ball with authority in the air with any substantial consistency right now, which is especially worrisome.

Moises Ballesteros
Because he's spent more than half his season to date in Tennessee, Ballesteros has a more limited sample of Statcast-covered Triple-A data from which to draw any conclusions. We'll be more brief, and more circumspect. In 139 plate appearances with Iowa, he's batting .279/.331/.457, with five home runs. He doesn't walk nearly as much as Caissie does, but he also has a strikeout rate around 21%.

So far, Ballesteros has shown no ability to handle advanced left-handed pitching, but against righthanders, the stocky lefty slugger is raking. His 90th-percentile exit velocity is lower than Caissie's, and their average EVs are nearly identical, but that's what we should expect. Caissie is the slugger. Ballesteros has superior bat-to-ball skills, including hitting more line drives. Caissie's weighted sweet-spot exit velocity is a paltry 83.1 MPH; Ballesteros's is a robust 91.2.

Adding three right-hitting top prospects to these two lefties figures to make the inconsistent Iowa lineup much more formidable down the stretch. In a perfect world, maybe they would all matriculate from there to dominating at Wrigley Field in the near future. In this deeply broken one, it's more likely that two of them become trade bait, two are derailed by injuries or the difficulty of the game, and only one becomes a meaningful long-term Cubs contributor. So far, Ballesteros looks more likely than Caissie to be one of the success stories, even if it be as a valuable trade chip, but it'll be interesting to see how the long-levered Canadian adjusts down the stretch. Meanwhile, Shaw, Triantos, and Alcántara will allow us some new insights into their own futures.

View full article