Jason Ross

Bingo. He's made definable and noticeable changes in hit hit profile. He's added some launch angle, and it so far has resulted in more line drives and flyballs. Because the LA change, it's something that we can trace back to a reason; it does not appear random. The flyballs may conceivably lower his batting average and yes, he may lose a single or a few that way. To use last year's sample size, he hit 549 balls in play (I subbed out all PA's that resulted in some sort of baseball that did not land in the field of play. HR', K's, BBs, sacs, HBPs...you get the picture). Using his new numbers that would have resulted in (roughly, I'm doing some quick napkin rounding): GB's: 181 ground balls FB's: 209 fly balls LD: 157 line drives *Note this sample is two balls in play short because of rounding but it's not going to really effect the outcome, so don't @me when someone counts this as 547. I know! Using 2025 league xBA on those results it would have resulted in the following numbers of hits. This does not differentiate between singles, doubles, triples, whatever...but it is quick napkin outcomes: GBs: 45 hits FBs: 37 hits (I also subtracted HR's from league xBA here for this to be fair) LDs: 97 hits This quick, napkin math results in 179 hits on ball in play using this quick data. Obviously this isn't entirely scientific, there are lots of other factors in play (ev, pull%, does this change his approach?) but it's not really supposed to be a scientific experiment. It's just a quick thought experiment to ballpark us. Any error isn't likely to cause egregiously different outcomes than this napkin math. Adding back in the seven home runs, he would have been at 186 hits. In 2025 Nico Hoerner recorded 178 hits. So even if someone wants to +/- 10 the amount of hits, Hoerner is right there, and that's without adding a single home run to the tally of a guy hitting the ball in the air more often. To recap: the expected amount of hits Hoerner would lose using this approach is... seemingly none. It appears he would have had more non-home run hits based on league expected batting average. And this assumes he wouldn't hit any more home runs, which is probably unfair.

I have tried to explain this to you multiple times. If he were losing base hits due to his hitting the ball "in the air" then we'd see this reflected in xBA. Expected BA takes into account EV and launch angle. Meaning, if his xBA was sitting in the mid .200's this year, we'd be seeing someone who was losing hits. His xBA last year was .292. They're identical. I brought up an anecdote because it's pretty good timing for you to be complaining about him "trying to hit HR's" only for him, you know, like 3 hours later hitting one. It's quite coincidental, and frankly, pretty funny. And let's really look at your complaint about "balls in the air". So far this year he's hitting 10% less ground balls, 8% more line drives and 4% more fly balls. His xwOBA and xSLG are currently his best ever. He also has his highest pull flyball rate. Lets go back to that xBA thing because it goes directly to complaining about this. He's currently pulling fly balls at the his highest% of his career. in 2025 here is the difference between pull% in the air and just balls in the air: Pull: BA: .484 xBA: .394, wOBA: 889 Total: BA: .261, xBA: .252, wOBA: .426 Which is why what Hoerner is doing right now matters. Hoerner over the last three years has a pullair% that has gone from 14.5%, to 17.5%, to 22.5% this year. So sure, his HR% was lower before, but he's turning on more things and hitting the ball less on the ground and hitting more line drives. Remember, you're worried about him losing "singles" but league data says xBA goes up when you pull the ball in the air. Even if we eliminate all home runs, xBA is better on balls in the air pulL% by .40 points league wide. Line drives, which he's doing 8% more of this year has similar results. Data goes way up on ld% vsd gb%. xBA in 2025 on line drives were .619 vs .249. So even if you're worried he's going to lose a few hits with added fly balls, he will add far more by his LD% going up, and he's likely to hit a few more home runs. It's all going to balance out and then some if all of these numbers keep up. At what cost? Right now he's the best version of him ever. So what in the world are we whining about? It's just inventing "maybes" and "what ifs" to be worried about. It's pretty silly.

Yep. Shota is a very good pitcher at this velo. I know we are all bummed about losing Cade. Maybe no one more than me; Cade has been my dude since the draft. But if we get this Shota this year, that's a major upgrade. He is a very good SP when he sits here.

I shared this thread multiple times this off-season and I'd like to share it again. Shota at 92-93 mph is doing exactly what Langin said he'd do. Shota remains a razor thin pitcher with razor thin margins: at 91mph he isn't capable of this. But if the velo sits here in 2026, we have a guy. And this is why the Cubs offered a QO. Because this was worth that risk. 26 swings and misses tonight. 26.

That has everything to do with xBA haha. xBA takes into account angle and EV. What it doesn't take into account is directional hitting. But whoopsies, he hit another home run. Booooo! He really should lower that launch angle.

Not really, though. He's already outpacing his xBA. If he were underperforming his xBA, for example, we could start to dig into why he was giving up hits. Instead he's outpacing it. So he's not giving up hits...he's finding more. He's even increased his xSLG over last year's numbers, but we're probably too early to say much there. If he keeps up his current pace of xwOBA, he'll smash his career high, there. As well, complaining about Nico's EV is just a bad argument. High contact, high swing hitters like Nico have profiles: they swing slower and have lower EV. Why? Because slower swings stay in the zone longer and create more contact. They create less EV and because he's capable of hitting more balls into play that he chases, this will also result in low contact numbers. He's 87th percentile in batting runs value right now. There's next to nothing to complain about here. Sometimes he's going to hit the ball hard and it's not going to be a home run. And to be very clear, he's not pulling the ball any more than normal and he's still "spraying line drives". He has 7% more LD's than last year. And his pull% is the same as last year. So I'm really not sure what more you want. He has traded ground balls in favor of line drives.

His BA is .303 and his xBA is .294.

His breaking ball has always been a really really good pitch. He's worked super hard on the velo aspect of his game. Reports from college were him hitting in the high 80's a bunch. He's such a cool story.

April Carson Kelly is a HoFer.

Well Tommy can't work with MLB arms and Double A at the same time, you know? He's the MLB pitching coach but isn't the Cubs organizational pitching strategy guy. Prior to Tyler Zombro, that was Craig Breslow who is now in Boston as their VP of Ops. This the changeover in the last 365. They have different jobs. And this year, Kantrovitz will continue to run the draft but Zombro will have a lot of influence this year. Last year he had none. Hottovy isn't really involved in that aspect. So the hope is that with a different structure and teaching and identification, that Zombro will develop them better in the minors and give Hottovy more to work with at the MLB level. It's like blaming Craig Counsell for the development of prospects on Knoxville. They just have different jobs.

Who's said anything about being proud of it? It's just kind of the reality of bullpens and hearing people whine that we didn't sign Brad Keller (who was a retread and has an ERA over 5 right now) and Drew Pomeranz (who was a retread and has an ERA over 5 right now) is just whining to whine a bit. I never said you said anything about Drew, though. I was trying to explain my post and then add in an agreement on Devin Williams so we all knew that I wasn't trying to say Phil Maton is an adequate replacement for them, only that I think Phil Maton is a good reliever (or whatever adjective you'd prefer me to use, I don't like that game of what we want to call someone). I'd sure love to have the Brewers bullpen! So we don't disagree that the Cubs development has been lackluster there. But a good reminder too: development takes a long time and the Cubs' current pitching structure and organization has been basically redone over the last 365 days with the intro of Zombro. The Cubs did get Palencia on track last year, and it looks like the early returns on Ben Brown are promising. Riley Martin might be a thing too, but we have a ways to go. Zombro can't magic-wand away years of mediocre development, and this will be the first draft he's truly involved in, so where we go from here will hopefully be up in that aspect. Add in how the Cubs worked some wonders with Brad Keller and Drew Pomeranz and even were able to help Kittredge really go super-sayin for a few months with some tweaks and there's some positive momentum. We're not there yet, and probably not even "on the way" but it's a start.

Also, we might just be cursed right now:

And just to add context, since 2023, one of these is Robert Suarez, and the other is Phil Maton: Pitcher 1: 3.15 ERA, 3.39 FIP, 27.3 K%, 9.1 BB%, 2.3 fWAR Pitcher 2: 3.10 ERA, 3.31 FIP, 24.8 K%, 6.6 BB%, 2.8 fWAR It's really horsefeathers close. We can add a fourth year and we can really widen that gap on the fWAR as Suarez was great in 2022 and Maton had negative fWAR. But the pitcher Maton was in 2022 doesn't really resemble the pitcher Maton is now (and frankly, 2022 was Suarez' best career year with numbers way off from the other 3 years of K's so I'm not sure 2022 Suarez resembles current Suarez, either). He changed up his pitch mix pretty heavily in 2023 and added his cutter then, which has been a great pitch for him, so while it probably is a bit unfair to Saurez to drop 2022 from the discussion, it's probably not a reflection of the two currently because Maton just isn't that guy any more.

Using FIP and fWAR (RP fWAR is fractional and so tiny) to explain Phil Maton is missing the forest for the trees, IMO. Since Houston worked with Maton, he has a 3.33 ERA, struck out 27% of hitters, has a 43% GB%, and has beaten his FIP every single year. He induces a very high amount of chase and soft contact; he's a classic FIP beating profile which is why I'm just not interested in that aspect of his game. If we move the goalposts to 2023, he's got a 3.15 ERA, and a 3.39 FIP over that span. That puts him right in line with Robert Surez, Tyler Rogers, Kenley Jansen and Andrew Kittredge. I'll stick by my overall assessment using whatever adjective you'd like; but he's someone any contending team would be glad to have in a high-leverage role and has been for 3 or 4 years. On the last part: I think that's a pretty unfair assessment of my post. I can't hit every single point every single diatribe, but none of that was saying "it's okay that the team ignores Devin Williams when he's available". So we are very crystal clear: 1. The way the Cubs build a bullpen, by generally going with one-off contracts is a modern and fine way of building the majority of your bullpen. Being mad that the Cubs, and almost every other MLB franchise out there right now does that, is missing modern trends. 2. Getting upset that we sign "retreads" while also saying we should have signed Drew Pomeranz feels quite contradictory as Drew Pomeranz was a player we literally bought off of Seattle, hadn't really pitched since before Covid and is now 37. 3. It'd be sure nice if the Chicago Cubs signed a Devin Williams to supplement their bullpen, too! I don't think any of those things are mutually exclusive. My response was only really about parts 1 and 2. But part 3 is also real and I don't want to be characterized like I'm not onboard with that, too.

All relievers get moved from organization to organization. Brad Keller, Drew Pomeranz, Caleb Theilbar were all fine last year with their first year with the Cubs. So was Andrew Kittredge being traded mid year. Thielbar hasn't been as good this year as he was last year. There's just no correlation to these things. Phil Maton and Hunter Harvey are not "retreads". Maton has been an excellent reliever for years, for example. Harvey when healthy is great. In fact, all of the best Cubs' relievers last your except for Palencia, who wasn't even on the MLB roster on day-1 (because he was a yo-yo arm from Triple-A who couldn't establish himself) were retreads last year. Again, it's kind of disproving your point to clammer for "no retreads" and then also clammer to "sign Brad Keller and Drew Pomeranz" Relievers are small sample size and tend to randomly throw in a bad year or two. And it's also why relievers are rarely signed to multiple years. Either they're monsters like Edwin Diaz, players on pre-FA deals like Palencia, or a host of one-offs. The Rangers have the 2nd best BP in baseball based on ERA right now and they're using Jacob Junis (1 year), Cole Winn (pre-FA), Robert Garcia (a retread they grabbed from Washington 2 years ago), Chris Martin (the same retread Chris Martin the Cubs signed a few years) and Tyler Alexander (1 year, under $2m deal). Relievers just have such a small sample size that they tend to bounce weirdly like this. And why teams only sign them for one year at a time.

Keller: 5.17 ERA Pomeranz: 5.40 ERA Kittredge: 3.40 ERA Two of them haven't been very good. Kittredge has been great. Both Keller and Pomeranz have much lower K% than with the Cubs. It's super early so I'm not really worried; bullpen pitchers are super weird and some of their underlying numbers say they should bounce back (particularly Keller). But probably good to point out that if both of them had their 5+ ERA's with the Cubs, people would instead be saying things like "that's what happens when you sign a 37-year old Pomeranz, last year was obviously lucky". I agree it sucks that the Cubs are in a position where they're down to Barnes and Rollison and Little and Assad right now. Part of that is Maton's mechanical issues he's working through (I think his injury is for side work) and Harvey's injury stuff, and part of that is because Horton blew up his arm and Boyd is hurt, too. So not trying to at anyone there, mostly just adding context that Keller and Pomeranz haven't been rocks for their new organizations right now, either.

Scoring runs and RBI are immaterial as they are team dependent and not individual player driven, so probably not important here. However I do think we need to add context to these data points that you added: 2024: .370 BABIP, .252 xBA, .348 xwOBA 2025: .282 BABIP, .247 xBA, .352 xWOBA So I think you can probably make an argument that "It didn't really make him much better" but that it also didn't make him any worse. He had some weird bad luck in 2025 and his BABIP in 2024 was his career high. His career BABIP is in the .320s. Most of his statcast data was basically the same between the two, though he did barrel more balls in 2025, so there's little reason to think his BABIP should be so wildly different. The xwOBA's tell the best story here. He was probably a bit lucky in 2024, and was a bit unlucky in 2025. But basically, similar run values.

Luke Little and Ryan Rollison are being called up. No known corresponding moves yet, though Barnes back to Iowa feels like one. And maybe Rollison is here to take over for Martin if he goes more than 1 tonight.

I mean, I'm also not really against that, but I'm not sure I find this scenario is likely. If it does, cool! But I think your better bet is going to be a Tolle/Early type of a SP prospect who's in a similar situation to Shaw versus, a TORP with 1.5 years of control. if that makes sense. More or less, I think a team trading someone who's able to be a #1 or a #2 in the rotation mid July, and who has more than half a year of control is probably not looking for a player who's in a Matt Shaw situation. They'll probably be looking for more control and more bullets back in the form of prospects who have yet to make their debut. Maybe you find the perfect storm of a situation, but it feels more likely that the Cubs would be able to swap one Matt-Shaw situation for another than to find that one. Those are usually pretty bad teams and immediate MLB help isn't what they're typically gunning for, unless it's a surprise team who fell out of contention. But who knows?

Probably, but Martin was being stretched in Iowa so he could conceivably go more than just one if they wanted him to. Maybe a 2/3 inning stint and then piggy with Colin Rea.

Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I think the Cubs will view it more as the idea that when Seiya Suzuki is healthy, they can play him more at 2b, SS, and 3b (or maybe 2b/3b with Hoerner at SS) through the week to give Bregman, Hoerner and Swanson more time off and they'll find hidden value in the form of things like added rest for their best players, Shaw being a good bench player over others, etc. While also having a built in depth option for an injury., Hoerner had his fair share of knocks early (and an arm surgery last offseason), Swanson and Bregman are on the other side of 30... I really don't think it maximizes Matt Shaw's value, but it may in theory get closer to maximizing their ability to grind over 162 games. And if the goal is team wins, Shaw's individual value matters less than the team value he can provide, at least in 2026. Personally, I'm probably on team "if someone offers you something good for the MLB roster you do it" but I think that's a pretty narrow landing strip still. You'd need a team to both value Shaw but also be willing to trade their version of Matt Shaw (a player who probably isn't being entirely maximized on an MLB roster but has plenty of control) who is also playing a position the Cubs can maximize. Not impossible, but not entirely easy right now.

Just to be fair, I didn't really talk much about where I'm feeling about his bat. I just kept it as a "if you feel" type of a thing. However, I'll expand on my feelings there now: I do think there is a reasonable argument to him being a 100-105 wRC+ hitter. His second half of last year showed that with tweaks, there's improvement. I won't go as far as to say he's a 130 wRC+ hitter like he was from ASB on last year, but so far in 2026 he's running much better batted ball data. His EV is up to 87.7, he's got a below 2026-league average ground ball rate, his barrel rate is up, his hard hit% is up and his xwOBA is .328. To put the xwOBA in perspective, league average RF was .317 last year. I will throw cold water on that: his pull% is way down and usually when we see low BA/wOBA compared to xData, we want to see that pull% up. Balls not pulled don't land as often, so I'm going to be fair to the information. It's typical for low-pull hitters to underperform xData. He was a super heavy pull guy in the second so that's going in the opposite direction. So maybe the xwOBA is not telling us a good story. We'll need a bigger sample. That said, I don't think we know what defense he plays in RF yet. Again, his RF DRS is a +1 and his OAA is a 0. I've seen him run around awkwardly out there, but metrics say that he isn't costing runs. I can't really say where I'm sitting there. I don't think he looks pretty, but looks can be deceiving and Matt wrote an article on it. Ultimately, he doesn't have to be a league average RF bat with average defense there to be useful in that roll for, say, 150 PA's. If he were, he'd just be a starting RF'er. But if he can be a bit of an underwhelming RF'er and a bit better than average at, say, 3b and 2b it'll all even out into a nice 400-450 PA's guy you can use when the game favors him. You don't have to start him against super tough sinker heavy RHP's in RF or anything and that should also keep the numbers artificially up. He'll likely be out in RF more against LHP which he has a 125 wRC+ last year, too. So we should keep that in mind. To be very clear: I'm torn on Matt Shaw overall. I think he's probably a much better standard infielder than the 400-450 PA guy the Cubs are using him as. But there's some positive things happening with the batted ball data in most spots (obviously pull% is a negative) and defensive metrics in RF seem to suggest that maybe our eyes or perception could be lying to us more than we think they are. For the Cubs if they find a team who truly values him as a +defensive 3b and a 100 wRC+ hitter and can offer the Cubs something for their MLB roster,. you probably get more value with a trade. But if they don't I think he can succeed his his role to a pretty decent degree even if it isn't entirely maximizing him.

I don't find it incoherent. The reality is that you can easily find 400-450 PA's for a 10th "regular" in today's game if you have versatility. Injuries will happen as well. Shaw has played OF in the past (college) and can play 2b, 3b and moonlight at SS. The 1b thing feels more of a "out of necessity" thing, but the other positions? Yeah, I think it's coherent. Now, you may not love the idea of Matt Shaw as that type of a player for X reason, but if you think he's a 100-105 wRC+ bat, that will play. It's as little underwhelming for RF, but much better than league average at 2b or 3b and should even out. Defensively, we can talk vibes and feels, but so far he's been a +1 DRS and 0 OAA as a RF'er so eye test isn't matching very early defensive stats, either. I'm hesitant to say one way or the other though because defensive metrics get wonky, so it's more "let's re-evaluate it" but metric wise he isn't costing the team runs it would seem. I don't disagree that it may eventually be best to move Shaw for something else you need, but a lot of times that's easier said than done. We can say "well you should just trade Matt Shaw" but it requires a second team to offer what you deem value north of what 400-450 PA's of Matt Shaw off the bench will provide.