It can be easy to lose Jorge Soler in the craziness that is the Cubs' rookie movement.
After all, he is the only one of the four rookies who made his big league debut last year, and he's not depositing baseballs in the Wrigley Field bleachers the way Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber are or making slick defensive plays like Addison Russell.
But Soler has been playing well as he flies under the radar, hitting .326 in August with a .415 on-base percentage and 12 RBIs in 13 games.
The problem is, Soler had just one extra-base hit in the month before homering with two outs in the ninth inning Sunday. It was his first homer since July 19 and only his fourth longball since hitting two on April 13 (though he did miss more than a month with an ankle injury in June).
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Soler is hitting the ball hard, lighting up the stat sheet with exit velocities above 100 mph, but he's just not getting much lift right now.
"Trajectory, man. Just the way he swings," Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. "Probably more than anything, the flatness to his swing. There's no real lift involved. It'll happen. He's done it before; he's gonna do it again.
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"Right now, if I had to guess, just the fact that he's trying to make hard contact is promoting more of a flat swing, and as he gets more comfortable, he'll be able to lift it a little bit more.
"It's gonna start going up, and it's gonna go out. But the velocity off the bat has been incredible to watch."
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The Cubs were expecting more power from Soler this season than the six homers he's put up in 84 games.
Soler hit five homers in his 24-game audition with the big league club at the end of last season and he also had 28 longballs and a .539 slugging percentage in 167 career minor league games.
The power is there; the Cubs are just trying to find a way to unlock it.
"I think his natural swing path lends itself to really hard line drives than lofted fly balls right now," Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein said. "But, traditionally, players who hit the ball that hard, through time, through learning their own swing, taking certain adjustments, learn how to loft the ball."
Epstein also referenced how many hard-hit balls Soler has has had over the last week-plus, where "with a little bit of elevation would've been long home runs. That's coming."
Soler showed off that power potential Sunday, and the Cubs hope he can turn it on entering the final seven weeks of the season.