How Cubs prospect Owen Caissie put himself on the map and reacted to the Yu Darvish trade

April 20, 2024

MESA, Ariz. — Owen Caissie’s agent had already notified him that he might get traded in the next few days when he stepped into a batting cage at Fieldhouse, a baseball training facility about 30 miles outside downtown Toronto, in Dec. 2020. Padres general manager A.J. Preller, one of the most aggressive executives in a conservative industry, kept pushing through the traditionally quiet period between Christmas and New Year’s Day and the economic uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic. Preller wouldn’t stop after acquiring Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell in a five-player trade with the Rays one day earlier, putting together another blockbuster deal for Yu Darvish because the Cubs wanted to slash payroll and accumulate lottery tickets after winning a short-season division title and getting swept out of the 2020 playoffs.

“I was actually throwing (Owen) BP when he got traded,” said George Halim, the director of Prep Baseball Report Canada and a scout for the Rangers. “When he started his first couple rounds, he was a Padre. He’s like, ‘I’m going to get traded, man.’ He would just put his phone down, take a couple swings. At one point, he took like three swings and checked his phone. He’s like, ‘I’m a Cub,’ and just kept hitting. He just didn’t give a shit.”

Halim burst into laughter at that memory of Caissie, who was 18 at the time and had not played a game in San Diego’s minor-league system. It’s not that Caissie didn’t care about his future. From Halim’s point of view, the moment showed Caissie’s determination, his obsession with the art and science of hitting. Caissie — along with the other players acquired in the deal, Reginald Preciado, Ismael Mena and Yeison Santana — represented high-risk, high-reward talent who will need years of development before the Cubs can do a full accounting of the Darvish trade. In explaining the deal, Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer memorably said, “Their time horizon isn’t our time horizon.” Hoyer also repeatedly declined to put a timeline on the organization’s plans — or even label it a rebuild — before Major League Baseball’s owners imposed a lockout three months ago.

“It’s out of my control,” Caissie said. “I got done with my round and got a call that I’d been traded to the Cubs. I was told to chill out and enjoy time with my family, so I turned off all my notifications on my phone. It was a really smart thing to do, because when I turned it back on, it was like thousands of notifications. I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ It was kind of a surreal moment.”

Clearly, there were information gaps when Hoyer’s front office pieced together the return for Darvish, but the Cubs once hosted Caissie for a predraft visit at Wrigley Field while he was in the Chicago area for a Prep Baseball Report showcase. The Cubs also had a scouting presence at Tournament 12, a Rogers Centre event that the Blue Jays helped organize to bring together the best amateur players in Canada. As a member of the Canadian junior national team, Caissie traveled to Florida in 2020 and launched a monster home run off a pitcher from Toronto’s minor-league system in an exhibition game on March 12 — right before MLB shut down spring training amid rising concerns about COVID-19.

“That was the moment he became a millionaire,” Halim said. “He hit that bomb and that was the last memory anyone really had of Owen before the draft.”

Then again, if Caissie had continued playing through the spring season, he might have climbed even higher and made more money. As Halim said, “If it was a regular year, that dude goes in the first round. The only reason he wasn’t a first-rounder, in his head, was because they just didn’t see him enough.” The Padres drafted Caissie, who had committed to play college baseball at Michigan, with the No. 45 pick and agreed to a $1.2 million signing bonus, betting on his physical tools, growing confidence and development rate in Ontario, where he spent countless hours and late nights inside the batting cage.

“Up here, with hockey, if you’re not identified at 12, 13, 14, you’re written off, right?” said Lee Delfino, a Fieldhouse coach who was drafted twice by the Blue Jays and played in the minor leagues and for Team Canada. “Typically, when Canadians are really good players, they tend to bloom a little bit later. Where down in the South, when you’re playing all the time, you can identify kids at 14, 15. Owen wasn’t one of those kids. You knew this kid’s pretty talented and showed a passion for the game. He looked a little bit like the string bean, Bambi (type). Not quite fully in control of his long limbs. But you kind of hoped — as a gym rat — that hard work and effort would kind of translate into something that looked a little more like poetry instead of binary math.”

Caissie is a good representation of the modern hitter. He devoured video, trying to understand what made the best hitters so special. At the age of 19, he understands the mechanics of his left-handed swing and his body to a degree that some veteran hitters still struggle with. His body also grew significantly during the early part of the pandemic. He said he was around 180 pounds when the shutdown began and now his 6-foot-3 frame is pushing 215 pounds.

“The best way I could describe Owen is as a student,” Delfino said. “He’s constantly trying to learn about himself and about the game and about the craft of hitting. I played with Joey Votto on the national team for a couple years, and (Owen) reminds me a lot of Joe in the way that he goes about his training, his work ethic and trying to be a student. As much as he wants to be perfect, part of that is learning as much as you can about how the game is changing, how pitchers are trying to attack. He constantly asks a lot of questions.”

Caissie understands that he can’t just take a look at any great hitter and copy that swing. He does, however, enjoy the process, searching for elements that make others great and figuring out how to apply them in ways that work for him.

“I try to focus in on the fact that elite movers do the same things but have a different lead-up,” Caissie said. “Aaron Judge has really good spine angle and I like to think I can adjust well with my spine. Barry Bonds is arguably the best hitter of all time, steroids or not. He stayed inside the ball so well while having so much extension. Extension is a really big part of the game. Mike Trout with torque — he’s such a stiff mover and I’m kind of a stiff mover, too.”

Caissie said he looks into how hitters get into their back hip and coil. He’s also focused on front arm action and how his top hand works. As a lefty hitter, he’s actually right-hand dominant, so his top hand is his weak hand. He pointed out that hitters who are bottom-hand dominant tend to dip, so he works hard on how his top hand handles the bat and believes he’s gotten to the point where he’s “an elite top-hand mover.”

The result is some of the loudest contact in the minor leagues last season, when he had a .923 OPS in 54 games split between Rookie ball and Low A. Caissie’s exit velocity data suggests that he’s not just special for his level, but elite among major-league players as well.

“Really simple,” Caissie explained. “Just put barrel on baseball. Let my mechanics and my swing work naturally. I kind of think of it like water, free flowing. My internal clock as well. But I really think I need to have a fluid motion towards the ball. Rigid movements don’t work. If everything works in sync, it’s kind of like an explosion on the baseball.”

It’s important for Caissie to have his own ideas about an offensive approach because the Cubs have shifted philosophies and hired and fired so many hitting coaches over the years. It’s now on the organization to follow through in player development, considering that even the young core players from the 2016 World Series struggled to consistently perform together at a high level after that championship run. Dumping Darvish’s contract — and then collecting more prospects at last year’s trade deadline and watching the farm system move up the rankings — was the easy part. It’s a good thing that Caissie — who could reach Wrigley Field by 2025, assuming MLB’s lockout ends by then — enjoys the hard work.

(Editor’s note: Sharma reported from Arizona, Mooney from Chicago.)

(Photo: Larry Kave / Myrtle Beach Pelicans)

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