Isaac Paredes Needs To Get Back To What Made Him Successful With The Rays

[matto1233]

Isaac Paredes has a less-than-stellar partial season with the Cubs in 2024. To succeed again, he needs to go back to what he did with the Rays: pull fly balls.

Image courtesy of © Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images

The thought process behind the move was clear when the Chicago Cubs acquired Isaac Paredes from the Tampa Bay Rays on July 28. Viewing from afar, the Cubs were swapping out an underperforming third baseman with a very high ceiling in Christopher Morel for an overperforming one who has probably already realized his ceiling in Paredes. Paredes is a free agent as soon as 2028, while Morel is as soon as 2029, so the Cubs gave up one year of team control and two relief prospects in Ty Johnson and Hunter Bigge for the swap. 

The Cubs likely felt that Paredes guaranteed the team more production from the hot corner for the next few seasons. That wasn’t a crazy thought, either. The Cubs’ new third baseman boasts a 123 wRC+ since 2022, according to FanGraphs, which is 40th in all of baseball, right around names like Christian Yelich, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Randy Arozarena. Morel, on the other hand, was costing the Cubs defensively at third base and couldn’t seem to translate the ability to hit the ball hard into consistent offensive results. As a team trying to win now, the Cubs couldn’t afford to wait around for him to figure it out. 

Paredes did outperform Morel for the remainder of 2024, at least. That says more about how bad Morel was in Tampa Bay than anything else. Paredes posted a wRC+ of 86 with the Cubs, while Morel posted a putrid 59 wRC+ down in Florida. Comparisons to Morel won’t make Cubs fans feel secure in who their third baseman is for 2025; however, Paredes didn’t get the raw results in his two months with the Cubs to warrant security. What do the numbers beneath the hood say?

A brief refresher on how Paredes succeeds: he hits the ball in the air. A lot. He also pulls the ball. A lot. This enables him to hit a whole lot of home runs that just barely sneak over the left-field fence, but hey, a home run is a home run, right? This gives him well above-average home run totals. His 17.4 percent career strikeout rate and 11 percent career walk rate combine to give him a well above-average .333 on-base percentage for his career. He’s patient, puts the bat on the ball, and does so in a way that maximizes his power, resulting in a good offensive player. 

The issue with this kind of offensive profile is that the line between the numbers he was posting with Tampa Bay and those he posted with the Cubs is razor-thin. Consider that his average exit velocity last year was 85mph, per Baseball Savant. That was 244th among 252 qualified players and put him around names like Nicky Lopez, Nico Hoerner, and Brayan Rocchio. Those guys have their uses as players, sure, but slugging third basemen, they are not. 

Let’s look at Paredes’ batted ball data before and after the trade. All stats courtesy of FanGraphs:

Time	LD%	GB%	FB%
Before Trade	20.5%	29.0%	50.5%
After Trade	30.1%	33.6%	36.3%

He increased his line drive rate by roughly 50 percent! As a matter of fact, that 30.1 percent line drive rate was second only to Aaron Judge during this timeframe. That’s good, right? Recall how poorly he rates in average exit velocity. Baseball Savant said his average exit velocity on those line drives was 89.5mph, 167th of 186 players who hit at least 25 line drives during this time frame. This led to a .585 wOBA on line drives, which sounds good, but was only 137th of those 189 players. He had 28 hits on those line drives, and just six were extra-base hits, all of which were doubles. He doesn’t hit the ball hard enough to do much more damage than a single on a line drive.

With that said, more line drives should never really be seen as a bad thing. Even if they are just singles, more singles are good! The issue here is that it cut into what made him good. Not only did he hit fewer fly balls, he also didn’t hit them to the pull side nearly as often, and his output on fly balls, and thus his home run total, suffered as a result. Here are his fly balls by batted ball direction and his wRC+ on fly balls before and after the trade:

Time	Pull%	Cent%	Oppo%	wRC+
Before Trade	45.3%	31.3%	23.3%	96
After Trade	37.7%	34.0%	28.3%	-7

Combine this lessened pull rate with softer contact on his fly balls, as well as fewer fly balls in general, and you have a player who was only able to hit three home runs in 212 plate appearances with the Cubs after clubbing 16 in 429 plate appearances with the Rays.

Where does this leave Paredes for 2025? He’ll almost certainly be the Opening Day third baseman. He has enough of a track record that the Cubs won’t give up on him after 212 subpar plate appearances, and besides, they have plenty of other issues to address, like catcher and the bullpen. I hope that more line drives weren’t an initiative inspired by the Cubs. I assume he got in his head a bit, knowing that Wrigley Field has a very deep left-field corner, and tried to hit more line drives to compensate. But Paredes is who he is at this point. He has discovered a way to maximize what is mostly subpar batted ball quality, and he does so impressively. He needs to get back to that to be a long-term option for the Cubs at the hot corner. 

View full article

[Old Time Cub Fan]

I was against the trade from the start. Time will tell how they both will perform. I'm still betting on Morel. I also liked Bigge and think he will be a quality reliever. A team having trouble putting its bullpen together shouldn't be giving up relievers. 

[We Got The Whole 9]

It feels as if he heard the skepticism around him and tried to prove that he could succeed with a different approach.

[CubinNY]

I think he had a nagging injury and wasn't right for much of the season.

[Tryptamine]

5 hours ago, Old Time Cub Fan said:

I was against the trade from the start. Time will tell how they both will perform. I'm still betting on Morel. I also liked Bigge and think he will be a quality reliever. A team having trouble putting its bullpen together shouldn't be giving up relievers. 

I lament the loss of Bigge but I don't really care about trading Morel. He's just short of 1500 career PAs now and he's put up a whopping 2.3 fWAR. Over that same 3 year stretch Paredes has put up 10.1 fWAR. I still pull the trigger every time, but given the bullpen's needs, giving up a guy who might have been your best pen arm in 2025 kind of hurts.

[We Got The Whole 9]

20 hours ago, Tryptamine said:

I lament the loss of Bigge but I don't really care about trading Morel. He's just short of 1500 career PAs now and he's put up a whopping 2.3 fWAR. Over that same 3 year stretch Paredes has put up 10.1 fWAR. I still pull the trigger every time, but given the bullpen's needs, giving up a guy who might have been your best pen arm in 2025 kind of hurts.

We don't know what Bigge is gonna do but they effectively replaced him with Neely who is younger and had just as much current milb success.