The Rays and Cubs exchange third basemen

The Rays continued their apparent firesale Sunday afternoon, effectively swapping third basemen in a four-player deal with the Cubs — yes, those Cubs, six games under .500 and dead last in the NL Central. Isaac Paredes, a first-time All-Star at the age of 25 and one of the best hitters on the market, heads to the Windy City, while Christopher Morel, a 25-year-old bat-first lightning rod, is bound for St. Pete. 

But, as can be the case at the Trade Deadline, it’s not as black-and-white as the Cubs buying and the Rays selling. 

Let’s start with Paredes. After a breakout campaign in 2023 (.840 OPS with 31 HR and 98 RBI), Paredes is in the midst of another strong season (127 OPS+), though his production has dipped of late. He’s hitting just .198 with a .678 OPS and six home runs since the beginning of June. Nonetheless, he’s remained at least quasi-productive thanks to his elite walk rate (91st percentile) and a career-low strikeout rate, too (82nd percentile). 

Paredes has always been a bit of a unicorn, in that he succeeds without hitting the ball hard (his 26.1% HardHit% is in the fifth percentile); of his three full big league seasons, he’s running career-lows in Barrel% (5.4%) and Average Exit Velocity (85 mph). And yet, he’s still a respected power hitter — and a pull-happy one, at that. He’s hit 69 home runs in his career, and we’re still waiting for him to hit one straightaway or to the opposite field. 

Perhaps as much as anyone in baseball, Paredes seeks to play to his strengths — or, more accurately, his strength. He has a 238 wRC+ on balls to the pull side; on balls hit anywhere else, he extracts virtually no value, with a wRC+ of just 54. Of his fly balls, a whopping 51% of them go to the pull side. 

But how friendly will the ‘friendly confines’ be? Using Statcast’s xHR metric, if Paredes played every game this season at Wrigley Field, he’d have 11 HR. That’s the fifth-fewest xHR for Paredes at any ballpark, ahead of only Camden Yards (6), Marlins Park (9), Comerica Park (10), and Busch Stadium (10). It’s not as obvious a fit as, say, MinuteMaid Park, where Paredes would have 24 HR. Needless to say, the wind won’t be his friend. 

In Morel, the Rays acquire a player who, just last year, looked to be cementing himself as the Cubs’ third baseman of the future. But a year after hitting 26 HR with an .821 OPS, Morel has seen his production nosedive. Despite his 18 HR, his SLG has dropped drastically (.508 to .374) and his OPS+ is down to 90, rendering him 10% worse than league average. 

Morel developed a reputation as a free-swinger, and rightfully so, but he’s made subtle improvements in his command of the strike zone. He’s swinging less (2.7% below his career mark), and chasing less, too (-1.9%). As a result, he’s making more contact, spurring a walk rate in the 84th percentile and a strikeout rate in the 31st percentile. The latter isn’t the prettiest number, but it’s noteworthy because his previous-career high was in the 10th percentile. 

Unlike Paredes, Morel hits the ball hard, posting a career 45% HardHit% and 13.7 Barrel%. Yet his batted ball type is trending in the wrong direction — he’s hitting more ground balls and less balls in the air. Maybe he could take a lesson from Paredes, who has eschewed both ground balls and the opposite field to attain his All-Star status. 

If the Rays are going to unlock Morel — and he has five years of team control — they’ll have to tap back into his power-well which, oddly, has dried up. He’s on pace to hit roughly the same HR as he did last season, but he’s hit just seven doubles, rendering him pretty much all-or-nothing when it comes to extra-base hits. 

Ground balls are a problem here. When he hits the ball in the air, as the table below shows, Morel is elite, regardless of the batted ball location. 

wOBA on Fly Balls (career)	MOREL	PAREDES
Pull	1.076	.973
Straight	.553	.072
Oppo	.420	.136

In particular, Morel finds most success on fly balls to his pull side — of qualified right-handed hitters, his pull side wOBA on fly balls rates 14th in baseball, three spots ahead of Paredes. And yet, after hitting the ball to the pull side at a 51.6% clip last season, Morel is down 3.5% from that mark in 2024.

Of the balls that Morel does pull, an increasing percentage are on the ground. He’s already hit more ground balls to the pull side this year (73) than he did all of last year (63), and, not surprisingly, he has a mere .138 wOBA on those 73 ground balls. So not only is Morel hitting it to the pull side – his strength — less, he’s also hitting ground balls — the sort of contact he wants to avoid — to the pull side at a significantly higher clip. The pull side power is certainly still there: He’s slugging 1.958 on pulled fly balls. Morel just has to maximize that sort of contact, and considering the Rays’ success with Paredes, we’d expect Tampa Bay to hone in on that rather quickly. 

Maybe they can do that by, well, modeling Morel after Paredes. It’s almost like the inverse of the Moneyball meme where Billy Beane’s character (Brad Pitt) instructs the room of disgruntled Athletics scouts to create Jason Giambi in the aggregate. Maybe the Rays don’t need an aggregate — and Morel, perhaps, could even become better than Paredes. 

Paredes, we know, hits a whopping 51% of his fly balls to the pull side. Morel does this 36% of the time but, at least in 2024, he actually generates more success out of his pulled fly balls than Paredes. 

SLG on Fly Balls (2024)	MOREL	PAREDES
All	1.209	.912
Pull	1.958	1.674
Straight	1.000	.069
Oppo	.471	.250

Paredes is a one-trick pony, and Morel isn’t — that’s good, valuable production off fly balls to all fields. But, Paredes is maximizing his capabilities in a way that Morel, to this point, has not. Beyond pulling his fly balls, Paredes is simply hitting them more often, too: Morel runs a 45.8% ground ball rate, while Paredes sits at 26.8%. Certainly, that has to come down in order for Morel to evolve into Paredes. And it’s not outlandish to think his batted ball profile can mirror Paredes’s. Just look at last season. 

• 2023, FB% + LD%

• Paredes: 54.2%

• Morel: 50%

There’s a template here. If Morel can follow it, as well as pull the ball in the air more often — maybe not on Paredes’s level, but at least higher than 36% of the time — well, what if we told you that the Rays didn’t lose Isaac Paredes afterall.