Cubs acquire Isaac Paredes from Rays for Christopher Morel, 2 pitching prospects

The Chicago Cubs made one of the more stunning baseball moves just two days away from the trade deadline.

While Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said Monday that the team’s focus at the deadline would be making moves with 2025 and beyond in mind instead of moves only for 2024, he did leave the door open to bringing in players that could potentially help this season.

“The only thing I would say definitively is that I think making moves simply for ’24, given where we are, is probably not what we’re going to do,” Hoyer said. “But if there are moves that make sense that help us in ’24, we’d certainly look at those things.”

Sunday afternoon, he made another deal that fits that idea.

The Cubs acquired All-Star third baseman Isaac Paredes from the Tampa Bay Rays, and in exchange, they traded away Christopher Morel and pitching prospects Hunter Bigge (had been ranked No. 29 in the system by MLB Pipeline) and Ty Johnson.

The Paredes trade comes a day after the Cubs made a deal to acquire Nate Pearson, a reliever from the Toronto Blue Jays who’s experienced struggles in the big leagues but has some very strong stuff, plus two more years of team control after 2024. Paredes himself has three more arbitration-eligible years after this season.

“As we have stated, our goal is to add players that will help us not just this season, but into the future,” Hoyer said in a statement after the trade became official. “In the last two days, we feel we have worked toward that by trading for those types of controllable players. Acquiring Paredes adds a proven bat to our lineup immediately and for years to come.”

Paredes, 25, originally signed with the Cubs on July 31, 2015, as an international free agent. He was traded to the Detroit Tigers on July 31, 2017, and the Tigers later dealt him to the Rays on April 4, 2022.

Though he made his debut in 2020 with Detroit, it was with Tampa Bay that he truly blossomed at the big league level. He posted a 116 and 137 wRC+ in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and he entered Sunday with a 130 wRC+ this season. That, along with what’s considered at least an average glove at third base, helped him earn his first All-Star nod earlier this month and has made him worth 2.9 Wins Above Replacement (FanGraphs), following a 4.3 WAR season in ’23.

He’s proven to be a good all-around hitter over the last few years. Entering Sunday, he’d homered 16 times and driven in 55 RBIs, posting a slash of .247/.355/.438. He’s got very low strikeout (16 percent, 82nd percentile) and whiff rates (16.9 percent, 89th percentile), and he walks a lot (12 percent walk rate, 91st percentile).

There are some concerns based on his underlying numbers, as his contact quality metrics (hard-hit rate, average exit velocity, barrel rate) are all in bottom 26 percent of the league. His expected stats also suggest some good fortune in his overall results, and maybe the fact that none of his 69 career home runs have gone the opposite way — he’s also just been the second-most pull-heavy hitter in baseball since the start of 2022 — concerned some teams.

But those weren’t hurdles the Cubs were unwilling to clear. Plus, that wall in the left-center gap does help turn some fly outs into home runs. Regardless, the Cubs now bring Paredes back into the organization almost exactly seven years since dealing him away.

Paredes has in a way been having the opposite season of Morel, who is the main piece heading back to Tampa Bay. Morel’s numbers entering Sunday (.199/.302/.374/93 wRC+) were far from what the Cubs hoped they’d get out of the 25-year-old in his third season, but his contact-quality numbers were well above league average, and his expected stats said his overall results should’ve been better. There is seemingly plenty of untapped potential there.

Of course, at some point your results are your results, and Morel just hadn’t been able to produce while Paredes’ numbers propelled him to an All-Star season.

The other side of the coin is that Paredes presents a possible longer-term solution to the Cubs’ third-base dilemma. With Morel, there were just too many ups and downs this year as the Cubs tried to mold him into an everyday third baseman. It was to the point that Morel was still getting late-inning defensive replacements or was starting more often as the designated hitter altogether.

With Paredes, the Cubs now have someone they can immediately slot into third base, where he’s got 2,297 career innings. He also has the defensive versatility to play across the infield, as he’s got major league experience at first base, second base and shortstop, too.

All that should make Paredes an upgrade to the roster — for the rest of this season and in the next few seasons to come.

Bigge, a 26-year-old reliever who sits in the upper-90s with his fastball, just made his major league debut on July 9. He’d moved back and forth between the Cubs and Triple-A Iowa, and he posted a 2.70 ERA in his four big league appearances. He was originally selected in the 12th round of the 2019 MLB Draft.

Johnson was the Cubs’ 15th-round pick in the 2023 MLB Draft. This season, the 22-year-old right-hander posted a 3.54 ERA in 18 games (10 starts) between Low-A Myrtle Beach and High-A South Bend.

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