Matt Mervis has found a new home after he was released by the Marlins earlier this month. The first baseman signed a minor league contract with the Diamondbacks today, according to his transaction log on MLB.com. He will report to the Triple-A Reno Aces. A lefty power bat, Mervis will slot in as a nice replacement for Seth Brown, who opted out of his minor league deal with the D-backs over the weekend.
The Cubs signed Mervis as an undrafted free agent in 2020. He got off to a slow start in 2021 but started mashing his way through the minors in 2022. He continued swinging a hot bat at Triple-A in 2023, earning his first MLB call-up that May. Unfortunately, he just couldn’t figure out big league pitching, a theme that continued in 2024 and again this year after the Cubs flipped him to the Marlins for Vidal Bruján. All told, in 261 plate appearances from 2023-25, he has hit .165 with a .560 OPS and a 53 wRC+. His 10 home runs are nothing to sniff at, but he has struggled to do damage when he hasn’t hit the ball out of the park, and he’s struck out more than one-third of the time.
There’s no denying how disappointing those MLB numbers are. Yet, perhaps the right organization can teach Mervis how to limit his strikeouts and tap into the prodigious power he has flashed in the minor leagues. In just over 1,800 minor league plate appearances, he’s hit 95 doubles and 95 home runs, good for a .517 slugging percentage and .250 isolated power. The Cubs and Marlins couldn’t help him reach his ceiling, but now the Diamondbacks will give it a shot.
This guy raked in the minors for the past few years. I thought if he got a real shot that he might capitalize on it, but the Marlins basically gave him that this year and he wasn’t very good. Maybe he’s a left handed Bobby Dalbec.
I thought the same thing about Mervis. Marlins gave him a decent look but he didn’t capitalize on it. Might be a 4A player. Too good for AAA but a guy who can’t cut in in the Show.
Hey Backup
When he’s hot, he can hit in the Majors, but when he’s cold, he can’t hit in AAA either.
When he’s hot, he’s fun to watch, when he’s not, it’s pretty ugly. The cold spell was just too long for the Marlins. I think the Marlins decided it was a mental make up thing and decided to move on. After all, those modest numbers this season include a hot streak in MLB and AAA
Mervis is a great example of why scouts have jobs, because he always put up numbers, but professional evaluators had specific, consistent concerns about him and were skeptical. They mentioned the stiffness of his upper body and how he might have trouble getting around on stuff in the bigs. They mentioned that his approach was heavily focused on capitalizing on mistake pitches of a type he wouldn’t see as often in the bigs. And he got to the bigs and both of these factors ate him up.
I saw him play two games a couple of weeks ago. A HR to right in both games, a bunch of either rollovers to 1B or soft flies to short RF, a bunch of strikeouts, and a fly to the LCF warning track.
I’m not sure there is anything more to unlock. Korea is probably his best bet.