Matt Mervis watched the crowd give Jason Heyward a standing ovation last weekend at Wrigley Field. As part of a development program for a select group of upper-level prospects, the Cubs arranged for 14 players to tour the facilities, meet with major-league coaches and support staff, and stay at Hotel Zachary across the street from the ballpark. As if that behind-the-scenes look wasn’t enough motivation to work hard this offseason, Heyward walked out of the home dugout to a roar of cheers, reached into his back pocket and put on his World Series ring.
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“The players at breakfast (told us) when you play well, you do things for this city, they’ll love you, they’ll treat you like royalty forever,” Mervis said. “Everyone talks about the core of guys that won it in 2016, and we all want to be a part of the next core.”
Mervis forced himself into the organization’s plans by piling up huge numbers this year at three different minor-league affiliates. His season was so dominant — hitting .309 with 36 home runs and 119 RBIs while rising from High-A South Bend to Triple-A Iowa — that it’s fair to wonder what else he has to prove to make it to The Show. If Mervis had been eligible for the Rule 5 draft this offseason, then he probably would have already been added to the 40-man roster and on the field for that Heyward moment.
Matt Mervis crushes his 35th home run of the year to give us a 2-0 lead over Omaha! pic.twitter.com/rSwLRj53gq
— Iowa Cubs (@IowaCubs) September 21, 2022
But it wasn’t a smooth ride for Mervis to this point. In fact, his 2021 season was largely a disaster. He looked like any other undrafted free agent last year at Low-A Myrtle Beach, where he posted an 85 wRC+ at the age of 23, which made him nearly two years older than the average age of players in that league.
“When he struggled initially, like a lot of minor-leaguers will do, he started to look at his numbers as a whole,” Cubs director of hitting Justin Stone said. “He was like, ‘Oh, man, these aren’t what I want,’ and he started chasing numbers. And when you start chasing numbers and get out of your approach, you have to be perfect every night. When he wasn’t perfect, the first thing he always went to is, ‘It has to be something in my swing.’ And when players chase mechanics, they’re often chasing the wrong thing that is not making them perform the way they want to perform.”
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Perhaps Mervis wouldn’t have been pressing as much if his senior season at Duke hadn’t ended after only 16 games. Between being pulled in different directions as a two-way player — and the 2020 draft getting cut to five rounds during the COVID-19 pandemic — he didn’t come into professional baseball with a lot of hype or leverage.
Once the 2021 season ended and Mervis had a winter to think things over, he knew his mentality had to change. He understood he had put too much of a focus on his initial poor start, and his desire to make tweaks only compounded those issues. He went into his meetings with Stone and vice president of player development Jared Banner with a clear mind and let them know he was ready for a fresh start.
“He flat out told us in our one-on-one meetings we have (in spring training),” Stone said. “‘I gotta get out of my head. I gotta quit thinking about my swing.’”
Mervis didn’t need much guidance. He started to realize it was as simple as avoiding chase and swinging at pitches he knows he can do damage on. A seemingly straightforward concept, but of course not as easily executed as proved by so many who fizzle out in this game. The Cubs loved how Mervis affected the ball, and as his confidence grew over the season, he was doing it more and more often even as the competition was improving.
“Really what’s impressed me the most is there’s never been a tailspin this year with him,” Stone said. “All hitters typically go through an eight-game stretch where they’re just not performing.”
Mervis rarely even went eight at-bats without a base knock. Throughout the season, he only had six instances of multiple games in a row without a hit, just one of them a three-game stretch. In South Bend to start the season, Mervis struck out 24.1 percent of the time. Not alarming, but a number that one expects will rise as a player continues to move through the system. But in Tennessee, that number dropped to 20 percent in nearly double the number of games (53) and then fell to 14.6 percent at Triple A. All this as his power output remained steady (an ISO of .300, .296 and .297 at each level this past season), and his overall production was elite.
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“Going into the draft, we knew that he hit the ball really hard and could put the ball in play,” said Dustin Kelly, the hitting coordinator the Cubs recently promoted to field coordinator. “There were a couple minor swing things that we wanted to address. But with Matt, it was really about getting playing time, right? Because he didn’t play a ton in 2020. He was a two-way guy at Duke the first two years. We knew that we had something in there. We just didn’t know when it was going to click.
“I didn’t think we expected that he was going to ascend as fast as he has, but the tools and the bat speed and the impact were all there. We knew he had that. It just needed to get into the games and come out and it’s showing. It is so good right now and the swing hasn’t changed a ton, right? There hasn’t been any major mechanical stuff. He made great decisions. He’s still making good decisions. And he still hits the ball really hard.”
As the Cubs weigh their options for first base next season and think about how they want to rotate designated hitters in the future, Banner offered this view of the 6-foot-4, 225-pound slugger: “Another piece of this that people don’t talk about is he’s actually a good defender at first base. I know he’s a big guy and he might look like he’s lumbering, but he’s very athletic and he does a lot of things well.”
No one player — much less a prospect — is going to replace the aura and the production that Anthony Rizzo brought to those great Cubs teams. But the drop-off from Rizzo’s Gold Glove defense has been noticeable since the Cubs traded him to the Yankees last year. Power — especially from the left side — has been lacking since the Cubs deconstructed their lineup. The Cubs can’t make promises to Mervis in October or hand him a job in spring training. As long as he keeps hitting, though, the Cubs will have to find him a spot at Wrigley Field.
“I want to be a Major League Baseball player,” Mervis said. “That’s been my goal since I was 4 years old. I’m going to keep doing what I can do to get there and let the front office make their decisions.”
(Photo: Danny Parker / Four Seam Images via Associated Press)