BCB After Dark: Is Moises Ballesteros ready for a shot at the big league roster?

Your late coffee shop home for indy vibes and Cubs musings

BCB After Dark — Indie Coffee Shop (with libations, of course) edition is on the road this week — greetings from the Arizona Fall League! We’ll be bringing you some chill vibes, good music, Cubs relevant questions and more from here in the desert. Bring whatever drink warms (or chills) your heart this Halloween. Here in Mesa I’m prone to variations on margaritas, but there’s no judgement at this bar — all we ask is that you bring great conversation and bus your tables on the way out so there isn’t a mess for Josh to deal with on Monday when he re-opens the jazz club.

I’m actually writing this column in the shadow of the Cubs Spring Training Home, Sloan Park, where there is still a massive picture of Christopher Morel up on the side of the building, just to break my heart:

But that leads me to tonight’s focus where I’m going to look at a guy who is raking in the Arizona Fall League. A guy I’m fully prepared to fall head over heels for the second he arrives at the corner of Clark and Addison. A player so dynamic that had to think a bit about Josh’s question yesterday — yes, even though it involved a reunion with my all-time favorite player (I swear to God Josh and I did not coordinate this at all). But before we get into the baseball, let’s talk about some music…

---

Since it’s prospect o’clock at the Arizona Fall League, I can’t get the song “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn & John out of my head:

This 2006 breakout hit had a lot going for it even before it landed on the pilot episode of Gossip Girl. It’s a solid pop anthem that addresses that always murky area between meeting someone new that you share a bit of infatuation with while testing out the waters of reality and wondering if it can really be a thing.

Young Folks begins with that quintessential whistle, and it may amuse people to know that Bjorn (the whistler) struggled with a consistent whistle originally, as this write up of the song makes clear:

The most striking thing about the song is the infectious whistling which was provided by Björn. “After touring I got to be really good at whistling, but at the beginning I was terrible.” he told The Guardian. “It was worse if I had a slight cold or a hangover, which happened at a lot of those gigs in the early days. People were like, ‘This band sucks – they can’t whistle.’ Also the whistling was pitched up on the recording, which made it harder to do.

The song itself really hits the mark in that gray area between Gen X and Millennials feeling their way through relationships, love, indifference and more.

---

Which brings us back to the Cubs and those players we love who are gone, but also those players we may yet be on the verge of loving.

Moises Ballesteros looks ready to rock MLB at the plate. The 20-year-old Venezuelan catcher is tearing up the Arizona Fall League hitting .370/.419/.704 with five home runs so far this fall. Now, admittedly, the AFL has been a hitters environment in recent years with more premier bats showing up in the desert than premier arms, but Ballesteros has done this before. His numbers after being called up to Triple-A last season were an impressive .281/.340/.454 with 10 home runs in 285 plate appearances. That was good for a wRC+ of 106 as a 20-year old at the level. Perhaps as impressively, while his strike out rate did get worse moving from Double-A to Triple-A, it “got worse” from the tune of a 14.8 percent strikeout rate in Double-A to a 21.1 percent strikeout rate in Triple-A. For reference, the MLB average strikeout rate in 2024 in MLB was 22.6 percent.

The bat looks ready, as evidenced by this home run off the parking garage:

Which leads me to tonight’s question — why are the Cubs even messing around with any bridges to Moises Ballesteros at all? There aren’t a lot of catchers out there who have the pop Ballesteros does in his bat. Just watch him tee off during the Fall League:

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing I’d love more than Willson Contreras returning to Chicago to mentor Miguel Amaya and eventually Ballesteros. This would make my whole life as a Cubs fan in a way that only the World Series has ever rivaled.

But honestly, if Ballesteros stays this hot the Cubs would do well to give him a real shot at making the 2025 team out of Spring Training. I know the front office is concerned about his defense, but it isn’t like the Cubs have a great track record of developing peak defensive catchers. All they risk by leaving him him Triple-A is injury and the bat development plateauing.

Take a chance and let Ballesteros show you what he has at a level that can challenge that bat. There’s Salvador Pérez upside here and absolutely zero evidence he’s going to transform into a plus defensive catcher if he stays in Iowa for another year.

We’ll be back tomorrow with some fantasy baseball inspired questions straight from First Pitch Arizona to power you through the first weekend of the offseason before turning the club back over to Josh on Monday.