Is Matt Shaw's Plate Discipline Purposeful, Or A Symptom Of A Larger Issue?

The 2025 Chicago Cubs have, thus far, proven to be a much more offensively-adept team than their predecessors from last year. Even with cold temperatures attempting to pin down the offense, they still sit 10th in ISO (.163), are walking at the league's second-highest rate (12.4 percent), and might just be the best baserunning team in baseball (25 steals against a single caught stealing). That doesn't mean it's been flawless, though. Especially in when it comes to their rookie third baseman. 

The success of the collective has certainly helped to minimize the impact of Matt Shaw's early struggles. Coming out of Tokyo, we noted his slow bat while expressing concern over the subsequent soft contact. Through nearly 60 plate appearances, it hasn't completely changed. His Baseball Savant percentile chart looks like he's taking swings on the planet Hoth, while his wRC+ checks in well below average, at 77.

Many of the same concerns from before are currently reflected throughout Shaw's stat sheet. The bat speed is in the 13th percentile, his 34.0 percent whiff rate is in the 14th, and he has just a single barrel to his name. His plate discipline, however, has checked in at a fairly admirable quality this early in his career. Whether that's reality or perception, however, is a reasonable question. 

Shaw's swing rate on pitches inside of the strike zone currently sits at 57.3 percent. That ranks as the 158th lowest among 179 qualified hitters. His overall Swing% (42.3) comes in at 141st. His Chase% (27.7) lands closer to the middle of the pack (52nd percentile). Those have the potential to be encouraging figures. A top prospect coming up and not wildly hacking out of discomfort or anxiety would typically check in as a positive. 

However: 

Despite a level of patience even on pitches inside the zone, Shaw isn't making contact with those at which he does swing. Only three players have a higher whiff rate on such pitches than his 31.7 percent clip. Perhaps even worse is that over 34 percent of those misses in the zone have come on fastballs. It's narrowly behind his work against breaking balls (36.4 percent), but he's also getting only 45 percent of fastballs inside the zone to begin with. For him to be whiffing on fastballs represents a concern, especially given the bat speed figures. 

That's another factor to consider, but not necessarily one for our purposes here. The game right now is discipline. And while the bat speed does likely cause some of the woes we're seeing in actionable output at the plate, the lack of contact in itself could indicate an absence of intentionality at the plate—there is such a thing as being too patient. If Shaw were making more contact inside the zone, perhaps we could dispel the idea that he is. As it stands, however, it's likely problematic. 

Of Shaw's contemporaries battling a similar zone-whiff conflict, only George Springer (62.1) and Byron Buxton (63.5) are even a little bit close to Shaw's actual swing rate inside the zone. The issues facing the others around him speak more to overall contact issues. For Shaw, though, it seems more rooted in a reluctance to swing manifesting in a direct inability to turn those rare swings into contact given a certain lack of experience.

On the positive side, though, the overall swing-and-miss does appear to be settling down: 

That chart doesn't discern the difference between a whiff outside the zone versus one inside. But a relative downward trend should bode well for him in the coming days, as he becomes more accustomed to this level. That should, ideally, lead to more consistent contact across various zones. 

So, while Shaw's current discipline may not be on purpose, it's possible he's starting to reach a point where it very well could be.