Matt Mervis is Tearing Up the Arizona Fall League
Matt Mervis has vaulted up prospect boards, and rightly so.
Across 625 at-bats in 2022, across four different leagues, Mervis has hit 41 home runs. Before 2022, the 24-year-old from Washington D.C. was a notion prospect.
Drafted in the 39th round in 2016, a round that doesn't even exist in current iterations of the MLB Draft, Mervis was less than an afterthought, he was a roster filler.
Often times players drafted that late are selected simply because a scout owes someone's dad a favor, or as a curtesy. That's how Mike Piazza got drafted in the 62nd round of the 1988 MLB Draft.
But Mervis didn't even sign with the team that drafted him in 2016 at age-18. Instead he went to Duke University and signed with the Chicago Cubs as an undrafted free agent after the 2020 draft which only featured five rounds.
In his first year of pro ball, Mervis was a disappointment. But he wasn't letting anyone in the organization down, there are no expectations for undrafted free agents.
"I don’t want to sound completely like the underdog, but that is how I look at it. I was not drafted and I was not a priority," Mervis said in a Cronkite News article from Keenan O'Rourke.
Few really put any stock in Mervis. What's a first baseman who can't hit?
But out of the blue something changed for Mervis in 2022.
"I really just focused on keeping my swing simple and repeatable," he said about his newfound success at the plate. "I just trusted myself that my swing would work that day and if it did not, just take that same swing into the next day and trust it."
Starting the year at High-A, Mervis earned a May promotion after hitting seven home runs in 108 plate appearances with a 1.039 OPS.
A second promotion came two months later from Double-A to Triple-A, and for two months, Mervis hit the upper minor just as well as he had hit the lower minor leagues.
For his season with Cubs affiliates, Mervis slashed .309/.379/.606. Most impressively though, his strikeout rate was only 18.5%. For a power hitter in today's game, that's almost unheard of. Mervis has a unique ability to put the bat on the ball. Ideally it will translate to the Major Leagues as well as it has the upper minors.
One step closer is the Arizona Fall League, which began several weeks ago.
There some of baseball's highest ranked prospects go to test their skills in front of scouts and coaches alike, and Mervis has continued to rake.
Somehow, he's slashed his strikeout rate even further in 47 plate appearances, getting rung up just three times, balancing that with five home runs and an OPS of 1.031.
First base has been a black hole for the Cubs ever since Anthony Rizzo departed following the 2021 trade deadline. If the Cubs don't deign to patch that leak with a free agent this offseason, Mervis could hold down that position with aplomb for the foreseeable future.
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