The Moose is Loose: Mariners prospect Michael Morales finds his stride

Three years into his pro career, high school draft prospect Michael Morales is starting to put it all together

The Mariners made a splash move in the 2024 draft, taking high school pitcher Ryan Sloan with their second-round pick, 55th overall. Sloan comes with all the bona fides you’d want to see in an early-round high school draft pick: he’s got a high-octane fastball, he’s built like a walk-in refrigerator, and he seems almost blissfully ignorant of the talent he’s been granted in his right arm (witness him talking about discovering his late-fade changeup like he found a dollar on the street).

But high school pitchers remain one of the draft’s riskiest demographics, and cold-weather preps some of the riskiest of all. It’s a reason the risk-averse Mariners have largely avoided that group as they aimed to build an MLB-ready starting rotation. With that goal largely accomplished, however, the Mariners have slowly been stocking the farm with a select few high school arms. Well before there was Ryan Sloan, there was third-rounder Michael Morales, a 6’2” righty drafted out of East Pennsboro (PA) in 2021. Morales’ journey through the pros so far illustrates the peaks and valleys of taking a high school pitcher, but through this season—his third full one as a big-leaguer—it seems the trajectory of his career is pointing steadily upward, illuminating a path for those who will come behind him.

The team slow-played Morales, whose nickname is “Moose”, in his draft year before sending him to full-season ball in Low-A Modesto in 2021. Morales was a workhorse for the Nuts, logging 120 innings over 26 starts, but his on-field results didn’t match up with his talent level; he recorded an ERA of 5.91, worst among qualified pitchers in the California League, and was tied for allowing the most hits in all the Cal League. Morales has had excellent command of the zone his whole career, but his stuff proved to be too hittable for the Cal League batters. Despite his strong command, he often ran behind in counts (leading to a walk rate of 9%, a tad high for a command pitcher), lacking a good putaway pitch to get hitters out, with only a modest strikeout rate of 22%.

Instead of sending him to the Northwest League to begin 2023—often a tough place for pitchers—the team instead sent him to repeat the California League. On a second trip through, Morales posted improved numbers, getting himself out of league leaders for hits and runs allowed, nearly halving his strikeouts allowed, and seeing a modest uptick in strikeouts, but didn’t dominate the league to the point where he could earn a mid-season promotion to High-A.

Repeating a level for a full season, especially at the lower minors, is often seen as a red flag, even for young players. But Morales took it as an opportunity to reflect on what he needed to do to improve his consistency.

“I think the biggest thing I learned [from repeating the level] was a lot about myself,” he said in an interview conducted this spring. “Just trying to learn more about myself, what gets me ready, what gets me prepared for an outing, what gets me prepared for a week, what keeps me prepared for the month.” Morales said he also has made adjustments every off-season, but especially coming into this one with his movement prep, to help his body get into better positions more frequently. “Now I’m just trying to build off that and build the consistency.”

“Year one, I felt lost, like trying to really figure out what is going to allow me to bring success on a daily basis. I’d get streaky, both on the negative side and on the positive sides.”

And even though the raw numbers don’t necessarily reflect this due to a late-season injury that knocked him out for part of August, Morales said he started to find that consistency in his second year at Modesto.

“Last year, especially from how we [as an organization] measure things, it seemed like through about halfway through the season I was climbing. Every start I was finding a way to get better. So that was one thing I learned, was how to get a little more objective and find different things to be able to make better on a daily basis to carry through a season.”

When he was finally promoted to High-A Everett to begin the 2024 season, he excelled, posting career-best numbers despite the more advanced competition. After 15 games, and just a few months shy of his 22nd birthday, the team moved him up the ladder again to Double-A Arkansas for his toughest challenge yet.

Morales’s arsenal has deepened and improved over his time in pro ball. When drafted out of his Pennsylvania high school, Morales came equipped with a fastball with some good late life but supbar velo (88-92), a tight curveball (77-80), and a changeup that he was developing but nowhere near a finished product. During his first year, he added a slider as another work-in-progress pitch.

Currently, Morales’s arsenal consists of five pitches: the four-seamer and curveball, the changeup, and two sliders, a sweeper and a newly-added gyro slider. Morales added the gyro slider this past off-season hoping it would give him more of an advantage to left-handed hitters. “I think it’ll give me more of an advantage to lefties. It’s a free strike pitch. I think I locate it at a really high clip,” he said. “I think with how big my arsenal has gotten, pitch-wise, it really helps me.”

Here’s what the slider looked like this spring:

And here’s a slider to a non-plastic lefty, in his Double-A debut:

But while the gyro slider gives Morales more weapons to play with, it’s a complementary piece to his other secondaries. “The gyro and the fastball are the small-moving pitches, so hopefully they’ll be like free strikes to be able to get to the bigger arsenal pitches.”

The fastball still comes in below average, around 91-92, but features some carry and late movement that can still produce whiffs when paired with the rest of his arsenal, especially when Morales is successful at spotting it up in the zone.

As for the fastball itself, that’s something that Morales needs to continue developing. The organization has been working with him on his strength and conditioning to try to get a little more oomph on the fastball, but so far he hasn’t made the kind of velocity jumps that you might hope to see from a projectable high school arm, which limits his ceiling at present. But a focus on developing more octane might have also led Morales a bit astray. He came into this season hoping to focus more on throwing strikes and cutting down his walk rate, rather than trying to chase strikeouts.

“I think both years I’ve gotten to 100 strikeouts, so I have the stuff to miss the bats,” he said. “My biggest thing last year was I chased the strikeouts a little too much, and then that would carry over into walks. So this year, more just raising the strike percentage clip, get in the zone a little more often so I don’t have to chase strikeouts. If I’m in the zone early, all I have to do is worry about getting back out of the zone late. Keep it a little more simple on myself. Last year it felt like I was trying to punch out dudes on 0-0 counts, 0-1 counts, 0-2 counts, and I was trying to strike out everybody all the time.”

Morales’s changeup has also come a long way from its underdeveloped early iterations, developing into a legitimate whiff-getter, although Morales is still working on landing it consistently around the plate often enough to tempt batters into swings.

Some of Morales’s biggest improvements, though, have come off the field, in working on the mental skills side. A perfectionist who only knew success in his baseball career before turning pro, Morales has had to adjust his mindset over his journey in pro ball.

“Try and think about the positives first before you go to the negatives. That was a big thing for me,” he said. “I’d spend all day thinking about what I can do better, and I’d never take a moment and actually like, thank myself and appreciate what I do well. So trying to add that in, that’s one of the major adjustments I’ll be working on for the year. After an outing, tell myself a couple things I did good before I get into the bad. Because the past two years, I probably couldn’t tell you much that I’ve done well. Or I couldn’t have then.”

“I don’t even feel like yet in pro ball I’ve had an outing where I’ve walked off the mound and been like, ‘that’s Michael Morales.’ So that’s a struggle too.”

Hopefully, that’s something that’s now changed for Morales, who was sterling for High-A Everett before earning his promotion to Double-A in July; he had two separate outings for Everett where he punched out 10 hitters, setting and matching a career high for him. The path for a high school pitcher is rarely a smooth one, with development often coming in fits and spurts rather than the steady incremental improvement the analytic, process-minded Morales would prefer. But 2024 has represented a tremendous step forward for Morales, and moreover, a blueprint going forward for every other young pitcher in the organization.

Morales will make his third start at Double-A today, Sunday July 21, at 11:35 AM PT, against San Antonio (San Diego’s affiliate), and you can watch the game on MiLB TV.