There Are Encouraging Signs, But Matt Shaw is a Long Way from Ready to Succeed in MLB

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Cubs' 2023 first-round pick is a good player, and he's hit very well in the upper minors this season. That said, there are big adjustments (and therefore, plenty of risk) left to make for him, and it's premature to hope he can help the big-league team any time before the middle of next season.

Image courtesy of © Cody Scanlan/The Register / USA TODAY NETWORK

One of the privileges of living in our time is that we all have considerable access to highlights of even minor-league players. It's easier to get tangibly excited, and to gain a real sense of a player's strengths, than it was for fans who wanted to follow top prospects a decade or two ago--let alone those who sought to do so in the 20th century.

We've had that ever-growing treasury of highlights for several years now, as decent broadcasts proliferated through the minor leagues and intrepid Twitter users learned to clip them and share short videos. Only very recently, though, have we also gained advanced data on some players in the minors, so we can try to marry up what we see on Twitter with what the numbers say. This is a crucial step. No one shares highlights of a great pitching prospect giving up two ringing doubles in one inning, or of a future slugger striking out three times. We can, and do, get carried away when we focus only on highlights. The numbers ground us, and for players who reach Triple A, we have better numbers than ever.

If that preamble has you a little bit nervous about what I'm here to say about Matt Shaw... well, good, actually. That's appropriate. While Shaw is a legitimate and solid prospect, Twitter hype around him is getting out of control, and the major purpose of this piece will be to rein it in a bit. Shaw, 22, has had a very good first full season in professional baseball, but there are big questions remaining and some important things he will need to work hard to change this winter, if he hopes to contribute to the Cubs at the MLB level any time before next year's All-Star break.

Shaw has 433 total plate appearances this season: 371 at Double-A Tennessee, and 62 at Triple-A Iowa. For the Smokies, he batted .279/.373/.468, and since his promotion, he's barely missed a beat, hitting .255/.387/.451. The highlights are flying, fast and furious.

Ah, but when it comes to the minor leagues, neither the highlights nor the surface-level success tell a full story. After all, the question for Cubs fans is: Will Shaw soon, or eventually, be able to hit the best pitching in the world? And the problem with the International League, as a place to seek answers to that question, is that those aren't the best pitchers in the world. If you want to know how Shaw will fare when he does encounter that level of competition, you have to look under the hood--and you have to watch the highlights with a critical eye, rather than a merely excited one.

Here's one important data point: Shaw is whiffing on 29.9% of his swings so far against Triple-A pitching. He's done better against fastballs, but that only underscores the problem here. His whiff rate on offspeed and breaking pitches is around 42%. We don't have pitch-type breakdowns for his time in Double-A, but we can say that his overall whiff rate there was a more manageable 23.2%. That's good, but not exceptional, and probably not good enough for a hitter most people expected to be a hit-over-power player in the big leagues.

Then again, Shaw has shown a bit more pop than those same people might have expected. He only has 32 extra-base hits on the season, but 17 of them have cleared the wall. In his short time in Iowa, he's hit 13 balls at more than 100 miles per hour off the bat, and his 90th-percentile exit velocity is 106.2 miles per hour. It's impressive that, in just a few weeks at the level, he already has at least one batted ball with a triple-digit exit velocity and a positive launch angle against five different pitch types. Is there a whole lot more power here than was projected from Shaw?

In short: probably not. That's a slightly cruel pun, but a necessary one. Shaw is listed at 5-foot-9, which might be generous. Being short does not disqualify one from hitting for power, of course. José Altuve does alright for himself. So did Dustin Pedroia, to whom Shaw has drawn the odd comparison anyway. The smaller you are, though, the more work has to go into generating power. So far, in his professional career, Shaw is doing that work with a huge leg kick. You can see it in the video above.

You can also see how vulnerable that will be to elite stuff, especially from more polished and wily pitchers. Shaw false starts while waiting for the pitcher to kick and fire. That can happen, if a hitter is balanced and very talented, which Shaw proves himself to be by staying through the ball and driving it the way he does. Still, pitchers with more looks at him and more, better pitches at their disposal will wreck him until he creates a more balanced timing element for his swing.

When we talk about timing in hitting, we tend to think of making a fast enough swing to keep up with the fastball, and about having hands smart enough to adjust the bat path when it turns out not to be a fastball coming. It's really more than that, though. The fight to get timing right starts before the pitcher even delivers the ball. It's an adversarial dance between batter and pitcher, and when you use a leg kick as big as Shaw's, you can pretty easily be forced out of step.

Moreover, we shouldn't fail to notice the low number of overall extra-base hits, just because more than half have cleared the shallower fences of the minor leagues. If Shaw can't consistently produce gap power, the pressure on his profile increases. He'll have to either adopt an Isaac Paredes- or Altuve-style pull-heavy approach designed to get him to 20-plus homers (unlikely to work, in his case), or dramatically increase those contact rates. Doing the latter with the leg kick intact is even more unlikely than Shaw maturing into a surprise slugger.

Athletes good enough to find success this far up the competitive chain have already been through some adjustments, and know they'll have to make more. Shaw might very well make a big set of changes this winter, quieting his leg kick or modifying the way he balances his body during it, and come to camp next year ready to compete for a roster spot.

He's nowhere near ready to have success in the majors yet, though, and in fact, it would be wise to keep a lid on optimism about him for the time being. He's likely to be a big-leaguer, but paradoxically, his success in his pro stops so far doesn't actually augur stardom. Rather, pro pitchers have shown him what he'll have to do to catch up to and eventually beat their betters. Hopefully, Shaw and the Cubs see that writing on the walls, even as fly balls keep carrying over them off Shaw's bat.

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[Transmogrified Tiger]

If I were to nitpick this it would be that Shaw has played 15 games at AAA, and purely from a results standpoint has seen a fairly stark adjustment in the first week's worth of games to the 2nd week. I struggle to make macro conclusions about his profile's readiness when a couple games of post-promotion adjustment that are likely less predictive weigh so heavily on the numbers.

That said, the nitpick does still gesture towards the broader point given that there aren't 100 games left in the AAA season.  It would be irresponsible to be counting on Day 1 MLB contributions from Shaw this year, and at his current overall trajectory it would be pushing it to expect anything meaningful in the first half of the year.  That's fine!  He was drafted 13 months ago.  But it also means that you can't approach the offseason as if he's a plug and play solution unless he repeats this week's outcomes while improving on his overall peripherals for the remainder of the AAA season.  That's not a very realistic expectation, so the likely optimistic case is Shaw is broken into MLB a bit slower than PCA was this year, and PCA wasn't a meaningful contributor until summer.

[CubinNY]

The best guess for me and I'm far from an expert is he's traded or Nico is traded by the deadline next year. He's shown the ability to adjust quickly and in the rare glimpses where we hear him talk, seems to have a pretty good idea of the type of player he is and can be. 

[Bertz]

I don't understand the conclusion that Shaw will have to radically transform himself into a dead pull hitter like Isaac Paredes to be productive immediately after pointing out his preternatural ability to frequently hit the ball hard?  Isn't the former a response to a physical inability to do the latter? 

And are we really worried about a lack of doubles from a guy that hits the ball that hard?  7 of those 13 100 MPH balls were hit with launch angles between 10 and 30 degrees.  Assuming his metrics were similar in AA his lack of doubles feels like SSS nonsense (or the weird Southern League dead ball)

Overall I'm aligned with pumping the brakes on near term expectations for Shaw, but that's IMO more because of the broader widening in the gap between AAA and MLB.  I miss a couple years ago when if you thoroughly dominated AA a quick little 100 at bat stopover was plenty, but we all need to shift our expectations.