How Christopher Morel’s career almost ended before it began originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago
Seven years ago this fall, in a small town called Capitan, not far from the Cubs’ Dominican Republic academy, a high-energy, 16-year-old Cubs prospect sprinted to catch his bus.
What happened in the next few seconds almost cost him his left eye and a professional baseball career that had yet to include a game — a career that led Tuesday night to the major-league debut and home run that shook Wrigley Field in the eighth inning of an otherwise ordinary weeknight win over the Pirates.
“God is good,” said Christopher Morel, whose pinch-hit homer in his first big-league at-bat cleared the last row of the left field bleachers to finish off the Cubs’ 7-0 victory.
“And I’m here now.”
Morel, who was called up from Double-A Tennessee before Tuesday’s game, was just a kid looking for lunch on his way home from instructional-league work with the Cubs that day in 2015 when his baseball dreams turned to nightmares in the flash it took him to recognize his bus was pulling away and to instinctively sprint.
He was inside a cafeteria next to the stop at the time. And the glass door did not give — until it broke in razor-like pieces around him, slashing a nerve and tendon in his left forearm and badly cutting the left side of his face.
The nerve damage required surgery. “And I [came] close to losing my left eye,” he said.
“I could show you the pictures if you want,” Morel said.
He didn’t have to show the pictures to new teammate Willson Contreras, who saw him in spring training in 2016 and was stunned.
“It’s a blessing that he’s still playing baseball,” Contreras said Tuesday night, “because what happened to him wasn’t easy. But he never gave up.”
Morel missed a full season. He was told by doctors after the injury he would miss two.
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“But I said I feel ready to play in 2017,” he said, “and then I played in the Dominican Summer…