Cubs to Call Up Top Prospect Owen Caissie, Place Miguel Amaya Back on Injured List After Ankle Injury

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Dan Hamilton-Imagn Images

There are two stories, here. The temptation is to focus primarily on one of them, because it's more urgent and also more fun. Owen Caissie is coming to the big leagues, a fortnight after the Chicago Cubs elected not to include him in a deadline deal to upgrade their starting pitching. They'll add a fairly thunderous left-handed bat to their lineup, albeit one whose viability in the majors has not yet been tested. With Kyle Tucker and Pete Crow-Armstrong each in prolonged power slumps and Seiya Suzuki becoming increasingly inconsistent, there are at-bats to be had—because there's a profound need for this addition.

Caissie coming to the majors, then, is like the news telling you that the Thwaites Ice Shelf has collapsed, and Miami has just 24 hours to evacuate—right when Taylor Swift is about to host a listening party for her new album in South Beach. (Please, don't freak out. Neither of these things are true. Don't get cocky about Thwaites; that's gonna happen and it's gonna be bad. But it's another day's crisis. Swift's album, presumably, will be every day's solution for the foreseeable future.) It's urgent, and it's also sexy. You want to know everything, and you want to obsess over the ramifications, even though there's also a real element of risk... you know what, I'm getting carried away. You get the point. We will, I promise, talk about the glacier-turned-tidal wave heading straight for Taylor Swift that is Owen Caissie.

First, though, I want to make sure we talk a bit about Miguel Amaya. He's a lot more like a species of coral that went extinct, which will be reported on NPR and get a tiny little blurbicle on the World News page (but not the front page) of the New York Times's website. It's very sad, and it profoundly matters, but the temptation is not to talk about it—to let the urgent outstrip the important and to reach for positivity in a world of gloom and doom. Let's resist that particular temptation.

Baseball needs a third signal. When Amaya hit that slow chopper toward shortstop and headed for first base at a dead sprint, he surely hoped to be 'safe', and to be sure, the umpire would have been wrong to call him 'out'. Amaya hustled hard for that infield single, and not for his own glory. The game was on the line. It was the first time Amaya had gotten to take the field with his big-league teammates in almost three months, and the foundering Cubs needed a win, and they were only up 2-0 and there was a rally on, if he could just leg out that hit. He did.

But in the moment when Amaya's left foot hit first base, and in the moment just afterward when the call was made, he was anything but 'safe'. It's an odd form of relief (and not yet a very settled one; we'll see whether something more severe emerges upon closer examination after swelling subsides) that X-rays were negative and that the early diagnosis was an ankle sprain. In real time, it looked worse. Amaya stepped on the base, and an invisible land mine exploded. He was lifted off the ground by some spasm of pain and fear and the body's reflexive self-protection so strong that he vaulted into the air and nearly flipped as he fell, landing basically on his shoulder.

Weapons of war are no subjects for jokes, so understand that I mean it when I say that watching him was very much like seeing someone's body respond to the massive force of an explosion. It looked involuntary; it looked like the air underneath him was bouncing him off the sky like a mini-hoop basketball above its bed. It looked like his career would end in a heap behind first base at Rogers Centre. 'Safe' was a cruel joke of a word to characterize the play, even if it was technically accurate.

Amaya has been through the professional wringer. He signed with the team more than a decade ago, in July 2015, but he couldn't hit even in Rookie ball his first two seasons. He finally got untracked in 2018, and played fairly full, successful seasons that year and in 2019. He was knocking on the door of the majors, at least enough to merit being added to the 40-man roster and shielded from the Rule 5 Draft.

Then, COVID hit. Amaya did get to go to the alternate training site, but he didn't see game action that year. In 2021, he needed Tommy John surgery on his right arm. In 2022, he suffered a Lisfranc fracture in his left foot—the same lower leg he injured Wednesday. In 2023, the towering incompetence of Tucker Barnhart's Cubs tenure forced the team to call Amaya up and let him ride the bench quite a bit. From 2020-23, during his years of being eligible to be optioned to the minors, Amaya got all of 144 games and 538 plate appearances under his belt.

That's all part of this story, because it highlights how cruel the game can be. Amaya survived those career shocks, and he survived having an OPS around .500 at midseason last year, because he's tough, adaptable, and talented. He entered this season hoping to prove that last year's second half was a step forward he could sustain, and he was doing a tremendous job—until he strained his oblique in May. Now, one game into his return after a long and maddening absence, he's had the game taken away from him again. Maybe it really is "only" an ankle sprain, but if his reaction was any gauge, it could still be the kind that ends his season. This has become, improbably and tragically, another lost season in the unlucky career of Amaya. His teammates and his coaches love him. His absence will be felt, and if this injury affects his ability to lay claim to a major chunk of the playing time at catcher next year, it could be that he never gets another chance as good as the one that danced before him for much of the last year, but never stayed comfortably within reach for long.

Alright, now, let's talk about Caissie. Reports emerged late Wednesday night that he would come up to (presumably) replace Amaya. Craig Counsell only had to spend one day worrying about playing with a three-catcher positional roster. Now, though, he has to answer even harder questions: How can Caissie find important playing time, to continue to develop and begin to adjust to big-league stuff, while the team also chases a playoff berth? Where does he fit?

To answer that, it's time to get a bit more familiar with Caissie. Most of those reading this already have a passing familiarity with him, but the scouting report is roughly thus:

• A big, left-handed Canadian outfielder, capable of playing either corner but not (except in emergencies) center field.
• Tons of raw power. It's not at the top end of the scale, but Caissie swings fast and can hit the ball hard, including over 450 feet when he attacks a pitch and catches it out front. In the minors, he's even hit for a solid average, because simply hitting the ball hard on a consistent basis allows one to find hits fairly often against the inferior defenders and worse positioning that prevail in the minors.
• His big weakness, besides a dearth of defensive value, is strikeout vulnerability. Caissie has fanned in 28.2% of his trips to the plate at Triple A. That's trended sharply down recently, but then again, Caissie has amassed over 930 plate appearances at that level since the start of last season. You'd expect him to be figuring out the league and demonstrating that he needs a new challenge, by now, and while he's done that (he's batting .292/.393/.573 for the Iowa Cubs this year), he hasn't answered the major questions about whether his shaky bat-to-ball skills will allow him to get to his power in games against better hurlers and defenses, in bigger parks and with bigger strike zones to cover.

It's vaguely possible the Cubs are calling up Caissie just because they're in Toronto, and it should be easier to get him through customs and into Canada for the one game left on this road trip. Amaya's loss leaves a hole shaped more like Moisés Ballesteros than like Caissie, and when the team has needed stopgaps before, they've turned to Ballesteros. For now, though, assume Caissie really is coming up to join the team for the rest of this season. 

In that case, you have to figure he'll play, and play fairly often. Prospects of his caliber don't get called up for bench duty and observation; nor should they. In all likelihood, Caissie will work his way slowly into the mix, by spelling some of the team's struggling sluggers. He can't take over for Pete Crow-Armstrong in center field, but his presence as a power source might make it easier for Counsell to rest Crow-Armstrong in favor of Willi Castro. Meanwhile, there's no reason Caissie can't play for two or three days at a time in favor of Ian Happ (.192/.295/.378 in his last 200 plate appearances), Tucker (four extra-base hits, just one of them a homer, since July 1) and Seiya Suzuki (.226/.331/.403 since July 1, and with just a .300 OBP for the season against righties), giving each of them a chance to catch their breath and/or make needed changes.

Starting with Tuesday's game, the Cubs are in the midst of a stretch during which they'll play 23 games in 23 days. They have a doubleheader Monday and just one day off between now and Sept. 4. Castro is a valuable resource for resting Crow-Armstrong, Matt Shaw, Dansby Swanson and Nico Hoerner, but Caissie introduces the possibility of substantially replacing Tucker, Suzuki or Happ on any given day.

What kind of production can we fairly expect from him the rest of the way? Well, projection systems offer room for cautious optimism. The ZiPS model, published at FanGraphs and curated by Dan Szymborski, projects him to hit .242/.320/.383, which sounds underwhelming but would be a material upgrade over what Happ, Suzuki or Tucker (factoring in the platoon advantage, in Suzuki's case) have given the team lately. PECOTA, powered by Baseball Prospectus, forecasts an even more encouraging .257/.321/.421. This is not an instant star, but it would be enough to bolster a struggling lineup during an overcrowded segment of their schedule.

We can try to answer the question of what to expect differently, too. There are 12 batters with at least 300 plate appearances either in the majors or at Triple A who fit a series of criteria I applied to metrics tracked in Robert Orr's app, showing hitters' approach, their ability to drive the ball in the air to the pull field, and the quality of their contact more broadly. These are all hitters who avoid chasing too much; make at least a tolerable amount of contact when they swing within the zone; and hit the ball very hard, including hitting it in the air enough to create lots of expected value, but who also whiff a lot and don't pull the ball in the air at as high a rate as one would like. Four of the 12 have played mostly in the minors this year:

• Hao-Yu Lee
• Gabriel Rincones
• Luis Campusano
• Caissie

The other eight are big-leaguers:

• Bryan Reynolds
• Josh Bell
• Fernando Tatis Jr.
• George Springer
• Mike Trout
• James Wood
• Matt Olson
• Juan Soto

For the most part, these are highly productive sluggers, and it would be great if Caissie could match their output. That's unlikely, of course. It's a lot harder to make this list when facing major-league hurlers than when facing minor-league ones. It's a good snapshot, though, of what kind of player he's been and what fans might hope to see him develop into, even down the stretch this year.

One more way to shape expectations, a bit less rosily, is to look at the scouting grades on Caissie's tools on FanGraphs. That site has always been a bit lower on him than the rest of the prospect industry, worrying (very fairly) that his swing-and-miss will get in the way of establishing himself as a regular at the highest level. Three other players are in the same range in terms of present hit tool grade as Caissie, and (like Caissie) also have above-average present game power. They are:

• Heriberto Hernandez
• Orelvis Martinez
• Samuel Basallo

That's a pretty exciting group, too. Martinez is having a nightmarish setback of a season, but Basallo (two years younger than the very young Caissie, who just turned 23 last month and is already a seasoned Triple-A veteran, and also a catcher) is one of the top prospects in baseball. Hernandez, meanwhile, might offer the best lens through which to view what's possible from Caissie the rest of the way. He maintained a double-digit walk rate all the way up the ladder in the minors, and has seen that dip below 9% in the bigs. However, he's batting .299/.354/.507 for the Marlins, with seven home runs in limited action. 

Losing Amaya means not only the setback of a beloved player no longer being part of the team the rest of the way, but no margin for error when it comes to catcher injuries. Since the team already cut Jon Berti to make room for Amaya's return, they're a bit of a strange puzzle when it comes to the bench. Caissie, though, is a nice consolation for the injury. If Counsell is willing to mix him in, even if it offends one or more of the veteran sluggers, Caissie can help this team reach the postseason, and be more dangerous there. It's just a matter of finding time for him to learn, and of accepting the huge risk involved in giving him that time.

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[Rob]

I wasn't expecting this article to give me a panic attack. Thanks, climate change anxiety!

[Matthew Trueblood]

2 hours ago, Rob said:

I wasn't expecting this article to give me a panic attack. Thanks, climate change anxiety!

Sorry! When I write late at night, I write *weird*.