Matt Shaw's Struggles Against Fastballs Means The Cubs Still Have A Third Base Problem

After his recall from AAA Iowa, Matt Shaw briefly looked like he was starting to figure things out. His first game back with the big league club was on May 19. From then through June 7, he hit .339/.379/.500, good for a .879 OPS.

Since then, he has been so putrid that I am starting to wonder if the Cubs have a legitimate Matt Shaw problem. In 41 plate appearances, he has just four hits and one extra-base hit, giving him a slash line of .105/.171/.132. 

This would be easy to forgive if the under-the-hood metrics looked better. The issue is: they don’t. Shaw has the lowest average exit velocity of any big league hitter that has at least 100 batted ball events, according to Baseball Savant. Exit velocity isn’t everything, but when it’s that low, we’re usually talking about a light-hitting, defense-first, utility type of player. Like, for example, Caleb Durbin, who sits just above Shaw on that leaderboard. 

For anyone that has routinely followed my writing, you might know I enjoy blind player comparisons. So, let’s do one here, in an attempt to illustrate how concerning Shaw’s current offensive profile is. All stats courtesy of Baseball Savant:

The "Mystery Player" in this instance probably isn’t a power hitter; they don’t hit the ball very hard, they hit the ball on the ground a lot, and aren’t a heavy pull or fly ball hitter. For reference, the league as a whole hits 38.8 percent of balls to the pull side this year, and 26.4 percent of balls in play have been fly balls. This appears to be a slap hitter, aiming for doubles down the lines rather than home runs. 

Turns out, Mystery Player is someone that Cubs fans are intimately familiar with: Nico Hoerner. Hoerner is not at all a power hitter, but compare him next to Shaw like this and suddenly, he almost looks like one! This isn’t an insult to the Cubs’ second baseman. To be clear, I love Nico Hoerner, and I love watching him play baseball. He’s posted three-straight four win seasons, per Fangraphs, and has a really good shot at a fourth this year. 

Hoerner succeeds for three reasons: he is arguably the best defender in baseball at second base, he is an elite baserunner, and his bat to ball skill is bested only by Luis Arraez. He might not hit for power, but he’ll always run a batting average well above league average just because he puts the ball in play almost every time up there. Shaw might be a decent baserunner, and he has improved defensively, but Nico Hoerner he is not. 

After all, Shaw is a guy that slugged 21 home runs in the minors last year. Hoerner topped out at three in the minor leagues and 10 in the majors. Take one glance through Shaw’s page at Baseball Savant, and it’s easy to see where a huge part of the issue lies: he is hitting .106 on fastballs with just a .206 wOBA (wOBA is an all-encompassing offensive statistic where roughly .320 is considered average). Both of those numbers are in the bottom-10 among all qualified big league hitters. 

Taking a look at where Shaw is being pitched in the month of June, and the issue becomes even greater:

I am not a major league pitcher, in fact, I am far from it. But that big red dot that sits in the upper and inside part of the strike zone looks like somewhere I’d want to throw a fastball to someone I didn’t think could catch up to it, resulting in the low exit velocity and pull rate numbers from above. 

Here’s one example from just this past weekend. Shaw gets a 2-2 fastball on the inner part of the plate. While he almost drops it in front of the right fielder for a single, most hitters aren’t making a ton of money off of line drives at 83 mph off the bat. The best case scenario for that ball is a single. The result there looks very, dare I say… Nico Hoerner-ish. 

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, but the Cubs have a very tough line to toe here. Lucky for the team, they can afford one lineup spot of subpar production since they are getting so many contributions from just about everywhere else. Shaw is their number one prospect, and sometimes, development needs to happen at the big league level. It took a year and a half for Pete Crow-Armstrong to figure it out, and he has figured it out in a big way, it seems.

On the flip side of things, the Cubs are a team looking to compete right now. They have the fourth best record in baseball, and could easily rocket up to number one with a decent week — they have the second best run differential in MLB. All numbers point to them having a legitimate shot at a World Series. A team like that cannot afford to field a complete zero at third base, and it’s legitimately concerning that he can’t seem to be able to consistently hit a big league fastball. Their number one need is still on the pitching side of things, but if Matt Shaw doesn’t start to turn things around fast, the Cubs might need to look to replace him at next month’s trade deadline, at least for the remainder of this season.