Isaac Paredes is ready for a new opportunity with the Cubs

CINCINNATI — Despite having been traded two other times in his professional baseball career, dealing with the uncertainly around the trade deadline, like most other candidates, wasn’t easy for Isaac Paredes.

He was considered one of the best bats on the market with a number of teams rumored to be interested. Though he had a feeling he could be moved, Paredes had no idea where that might be. But finding out Sunday that he was being traded to the Chicago Cubs, the team who initially traded him to the Detroit Tigers in 2017, helped calm some of those nerves.

“It was difficult [dealing with the deadline noise],” Paredes said Tuesday before he made his Cubs debut, via interpreter Fredy Quevedo Jr. “Definitely just a lot of thinking. Just the uncertainty of which team am I going to go to, new faces, new players, new staff, new everything. But then just coming back to an organization that has some familiar faces that I already knew was different, and it was definitely good.”

Paredes originally signed with the Cubs out of Mexico exactly nine years ago Wednesday in the same international signing class as Javier Assad and Miguel Amaya (plus the guy who took his place on the Rays, Christopher Morel). Having some teammates from his early minor league days around will help with the transition to his new ballclub.

Getting inserted right into the lineup and taking over at third base should at least speed up the transition out of necessity, too.

While that quickness stems from suddenly being traded at the deadline, the behind-the-scenes work of getting Paredes to Chicago didn’t happen that quite that fast. Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer  said he’d been “circling around a deal like that” with his counterpart from Tampa Bay, Erik Neander, for “at least three or four weeks,” and he was aware the Cubs weren’t the only team bidding for the All-Star third baseman.

So what exactly drew Hoyer to Paredes? These are the three basic reasons he laid out: “The age and the control we have of him as a player, the position [third base] was really critical and the profile offensively.”

Paredes checked those boxes and fit into what Hoyer decided was his focus at the deadline: Making moves to help the team return to contention in 2025 and beyond versus making moves that only help the team in 2024.

Hoyer ultimately stuck to his word at the Tuesday’s deadline, but acquiring Paredes really falls somewhere in the middle. He can certainly be a key piece over the next few years (he’s under team control through the 2027 season), but he can also help the offense show real improvements and progress over the last two months of the season, which is what Hoyer said Tuesday he really wants to see.

For Paredes, just helping the team win ballgames is really his focus as he begins his Cubs career.

“I’m just here to contribute to the team in whatever capacity,” he said. “There’s a lot of good players here, players with experience, all kinds of good players overall. So I’m just here to do my part and help the team out.”

In adding a hitter like Paredes, one thing that stands out is his pull-heavy approach. Since the start of 2022 (entering Wednesday), no qualified hitter has pulled the ball at a higher rate than him (53.5 percent).

Taking that into consideration, combined with the fact that he’s every home run he’s hit has gone to left field, has some concerned that his pull tendency might not translate as well going from Tropicana Field (315 feet down the left-field line) to Wrigley Field (355 feet down the left-field line, plus wind that isn’t a factor in Tampa Bay).

But the Cubs see real value in him possessing batting attributes that aren’t easy to combine together.

“There are some guys who have all parts of the field available to hit a bunch of home runs,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “For most guys, it’s the pull-side, and pulling the ball in the air, while maintaining good strike-zone discipline, is hard to do. That’s what [Paredes is] good at as a hitter.”

To get an idea of what Counsell means, take a look at these numbers.

In 1,385 plate appearances between the start of 2022 and Tuesday, Paredes pulled the ball 53.5 percent of the time while hitting it on the ground 33.7 percent of the time. In that same time period, only four other hitters with at least 1,000 plate appearances pulled the ball 50 percent of the time or more while putting it on the ground 40 percent of the time or less.

Paredes was the only one with a walk rate above 10 percent (11.1) and a strikeout rate below 20 percent (17.3), and his 128 wRC+ led that group.

That’s obviously an interesting profile of a hitter, one the Cubs are confident can work at Wrigley Field — even if some adjustments end up being needed.

“We looked carefully to see how that would play. We felt good about it,” Hoyer said. “I do think he’s a little bit more [of an] adjustable hitter. That’s the profile that he’s adopted. I think he can adjust it a little bit.

“He sees the ball really well. You look at his walks and strikeout numbers, they’re really impressive in a league that you don’t see many guys with those walk and strikeout numbers. And yes, he does have a really pull-heavy approach, which I think is why some of his expected stats are lower, because he doesn’t spray the ball a lot.

“But I think that’s the approach he adopted in Tampa, and it served him really well with their ballpark. All the studies, though, said it would translate well to Wrigley.”

So far, Paredes has only gotten to show how it translates to Great American Ball Park.

He went 0-for-4 in his Cubs debut Tuesday, but he finally showed off some of that skillset Wednesday night. After grounding out, getting hit by a pitch and popping out in his first three plate appearances of the night, Paredes doubled twice down the left-field line, with his sixth-inning two-bagger ricocheting off the outfield wall.

He ultimately scored three times on the night, playing his part in the Cubs’ 13-4 win over the Cincinnati Reds.

“Those are the guys we don’t like facing at all,” said Kyle Hendricks, who got the ‘W’ with five innings of three-run ball. “The guys that just don’t chase, they put the bat on the ball and they got slug, hit it out of ballpark. That’s a nightmare for us. You really gotta make sure you execute. You make one mistake, they’re usually going to make you pay, and that’s what he does.”

Of course, he’s excited to get to Chicago and play in front of the Wrigley Field crowd in a Cubs uniform for the first time, something he likely dreamed of when he first joined the organization all those years ago.

“There’s a lot of history there,” Paredes said. “I signed when the Cubs won, so I know the fans are very drawn to the players. I think us as players, we definitely need that. We definitely feed off that.”

The Cubs hope that was just the start of a successful chapter with them for Paredes. They made the deal they did because he’s a strong hitter who can contribute positively on defense.

And again, he’s under team control for three more years (though he is a Super Two player making $3.4 million this season in the first of four arbitration years). He’s expected to be here producing on a winning team for years to come.

With that in mind, Paredes’ new teammates are excited to see him get his Cubs career underway.

“Obviously, coming into a new situation’s always difficult. You just gotta try and help him feel as comfortable as possible,” Cody Bellinger said. “He’s welcome here. He’s going to help us win a bunch of games. [He’s] a really good dude and a really good baseball player.”