How Christopher Morel's patience could help propel the Cubs out of their rut
CINCINNATI – It could have been tempting for Cubs cleanup hitter Christopher Morel to try to swing his way out of a slump.
Early on in his career, when he wasn’t on an offensive tear, his propensity to chase pitches out of the zone would dig him further into a rut. But if he’s taken that approach, he probably wouldn’t have ended up in the groove he’s been in for the past week, which he capped with a go-ahead two-run homer in the Cubs’ 8-4 loss to the Reds on Thursday.
“Just staying positive,” Morel said through team interpreter Fredy Quevedo Jr. “Forgetting what happened in the past, not focusing on that, always keeping my head high and most importantly, just being surrounded by great teammates that always are there to cheer me up and give me words of consolation and supporting me in general.”
The Cubs overall are in a rut.
They came to Cincinnati riding their first two-game winning streak — if you can call that a streak – in a month. But they’d had to put together late-game comebacks to narrowly beat the cellar-dwelling White Sox to claim those two consecutive wins. And right before that, they’d lost two of three to the Reds at Wrigley Field.
It looks like their best bet to pull themselves out of the doldrums is going to be trusting that their pitching will stabilize – on Thursday, it was the bullpen, which had held strong through the comebacks against the White Sox, that faltered – and building on their recent offensive improvement.
“It feels like the middle of our middle of our order guys are where they need to be,” manager Craig Counsell said. “And we're getting [contributions from] not the same guy every day but the different guys, and that leads to consistent run-scoring. And that's what we're going to need.”
Morel’s raw hitting stats haven’t been anything to write home about. He entered Thursday with just a .203 batting average and .387 slugging percentage. But his expected statistics tell a different story.
Morel carried a .377 xWOBA (expected weighted on-base average) into Thursday, which put him in the top 8% in the majors. This was no normal slump.
“The expected stuff, that's probably what we should trust more than the other stuff,” Counsell said earlier this week.
The expected stats reflect the process more than the in-game results. And in theory, the luck should even out. Morel may have made a lot of hard contact right to leather, or into the wind. But that won’t be the case all season.
“It's hard to keep praising him on how great the approach has been and how good the quality of at-bat, because they really are,” Cubs hitting coach Dustin Kelly said about a week and a half ago, before Morel’s luck began to turn. “These guys still look up at the scoreboard and see the numbers that they don't like.”
Kelly said the coaching staff emphasized with Morel that, between the quality of his at-bats and the walks he’d drawn in big situations, he was consistently contributing in the middle of the lineup, even when he wasn’t recording hits.
“That kid loves playing baseball as much as anybody I've ever been around,” Kelly said. “Obviously there's frustrations, there’s competitiveness that he has that makes him really good. But he has an infectious ability to just stay incredibly positive.”
The past week, the results have begun to pay back Morel for his patience. Over seven games, Morel has gone 7-for-22 at the plate and hit three home runs. On Thursday, his two-run shot in the sixth inning gave the Cubs a 4-3 lead, albeit a short-lived advantage.