This story was excerpted from Jordan Bastian’s Cubs Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

CHICAGO -- There is a violence to the swing that Cubs slugger Christopher Morel unleashes in an effort to punish pitches sent his way. Cubs manager Craig Counsell has described Morel’s approach as “controlled aggression” in the batter’s box.

After watching Morel attack a pitch, it does not take an expert to say the third baseman possesses plus bat speed that generates hard contact. For the first time, however, there is now public-facing Statcast data to support what everyone can see. Morel indeed has some of the best bat speed in the Major Leagues.

“The way that Chris plays the game,” Cubs hitting coach Dustin Kelly said earlier this season, “he wants to go out there and impact the game and bring energy. And the way that he's done that in the past is launching balls out of the yard and hitting balls really hard and far.”

Earlier this week, MLB.com’s Mike Petriello detailed the process behind Statcast unveiling bat-tracking metrics. Fans should definitely dive into that article to get the full scope of the statistics being rolled out and the leaderboards now available.

When it comes to bat speed, Morel leads the way for the Cubs and ranks among some of the game’s top hitters in this department. Morel checks in at sixth among qualified batters in average bat speed (76.7 mph) and fifth in fast swing rate (71.4%). Let’s look at the top of Chicago’s leaderboard for those categories.

Bat speed (minimum 50 swings)
76.7 mph: Morel
74.7 mph: Patrick Wisdom
72.7 mph: Seiya Suzuki
72.6 mph: Miguel Amaya
72.0 mph: Ian Happ

Fast swing rate
71.4%: Morel
57.1%: Wisdom
31.5%: Suzuki
27.2%: Amaya
22.5%: Happ

Morel also boasts four of the five fastest swings on hits by Cubs batters this season. To date, he has topped out at 85 mph on a single on April 3 against the Rockies. Morel’s homer off San Diego’s Yuki Matsui on May 6 had a bat speed of 81.3 mph, which is the fastest swing on a homer for the Cubs this season.

Cubs general manager Carter Hawkins noted that the team already had internal bat-tracking metrics. Hawkins said that the data leans more toward being useful for working with hitters right now and less on being a tool to predict future production at the moment.

“It's definitely an awesome descriptive component,” Hawkins said. “It's telling us things that are happening in a really fun way. And I think that's great for the game. I think it's fun to read all the articles and have people try to figure out the different correlations and just kind of, ‘What is this telling us?’ And I think MLB does a great job with their graphs. It's great.

“It's a really great way to digest the game. So from that standpoint, it's awesome. The big challenge is you have to figure out either how something's gonna help you predict future performance or how something can tell you what to work on with a player.

“I think this bat information is probably a little bit more effective towards telling you what to work on with the player.”