“Now batting for the Chicago Cubs, first baseman Matt Mervis.”
The slumping Cubs called Mervis up from Triple-A last week and immediately inserted him into the starting lineup. The former Duke star had an RBI single in his first game. He’s batting 4-17 (.235) through May 8.
In one sense this wasn’t much of a surprise. The sweet-swinging lefty pummeled minor-league pitching for 36 home runs over three levels last season, driving in 117 runs.
He had a .976 OPS at Triple-A.
But the Cubs signed veteran Eric Hosmer to play first base and it wasn’t clear when Mervis would get a chance. But Hosmer wasn’t the answer and the Cubs made the move sooner than expected.
“Everyone is really excited about Matt, and they should be,” Cubs president Jed Hoyer told The Athletic.
Mervis said that he “kind of blacked out for a minute” when he got the call and said his mother cried when she heard the news.
The Show.
Mervis was the proverbial Swiss Army knife at Duke. He pitched, he DH’d, he eventually saw action at first base and he was pretty good at all of those tasks.
But what skill translated to the next level? Every conversation I had with Mervis seemed to come back to that question. Are you a pitcher, a hitter, both, something else?
At 6-4, 225, Mervis certainly had the stuff to pitch professionally. But he also had the bat.
He was a senior in 2020 and the questions were starting to be answe
Then COVID-19 shut down the season, ending what likely was [so far] Chris Pollard’s best team at Duke.
Mervis pitched two innings and batted .304 that season. So, the trend towards position player was already in place.
You may have read that Mervis was undrafted in 2020. True but misleading. Because of the pandemic the 2020 draft was truncated to five rounds. Mervis would have been drafted in a normal season.
He signed a free-agent contract with the Cubs and began working his way up the minor-league food chain.
But there’s a reason why Mervis’ arrival in the bigs may have opened some eyes. He’s the first Chris Pollard-recruited Duke position player to make the majors; pitcher James Marvel had a cup of coffee with the Pirates in 2019. As far as I can determine Mervis is the first former Duke position player to appear in the majors since Nate Freiman at the end of the 2014 season.
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