BCB After Dark: Who needs Alex Bregman when you’ve got Matt Shaw?

Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in out of the cold. The companionship is warm in here. Let us take your coat for you. We still have a few tickets available. Bring your own beverage.

BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.

Last evening, I asked who was the Cubs’ top third baseman of the quarter century. By a vote of 57 percent to 43 percent, you went with Aramis Ramírez over Kris Bryant. That surprised me a bit, because Bryant had more awards, the World Series title and a higher career WAR with the Cubs. But Ramirez was in Chicago longer and I do admit their numbers were close. Both of them would have been worthy winners.

Here’s the part dedicated to music and movies. Those of you who skip that can do so now. you won’t hurt my feelings.

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Tonight we are joined by pianist Julius Rodriguez, who will play four songs for us. Rodriguez is joined by Giveton Gelin on trumpet, Philip Norris on bass and Brian Richburg, Jr. on drums.

This is from 2022.

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You still have time to vote in the finals of the BCB Winter Hitchcock Classic between Psycho and North by Northwest.

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Welcome back to those of you skip the movies and music.

There’s been a lot of criticism of the Cubs losing out to the Red Sox on free agent Alex Bregman and on one level, I totally agree. If the Cubs didn’t get Bregman because the Ricketts don’t want to spend the money to compete, that’s a valid criticism that I can get behind.

But on the other hand, I wonder if the Cubs should have been chasing Alex Bregman in free agency in the first place. This article from two weeks ago in Fangraphs by Dan Szymborski put the Cubs near the bottom of teams that would benefit by signing Bregman. The reason is because Bregman would just take at-bats away from either Seiya Suzuki or Matt Shaw and Bregman is not necessarily much better than either of those two.

(As an aside, it’s hilarious that if the White Sox had signed Bregman, their playoff odds would go from 0.0 percent to 0.1 percent, the smallest increase of any team.)

All of this assumes, however, that Matt Shaw is going to have a strong rookie season and seize the third base job out of Spring Training. Fangraph’s ZiPS projection for Shaw’s rookie season is a line of .247/.320/.402 with 16 home runs and 18 steals over 117 games. They estimate that would work out to an fWAR of 2.2.

Bregman, on the other hand, is projected to a line of .252/.333/.430 with 22 home runs and 2 steals over 143 games. That’s a projected fWAR of 3.9. That’s certainly better than Shaw, but when you consider that he’s projected to play 26 more games than Shaw and put up that batting line in a much better hitting environment at Fenway Park, it’s a really marginal increase.

Now you can argue that championships are sometimes won on the margins and you’d be right. But tonight, I’m just going to ask you “How much better do you think Alex Bregman will be than Matt Shaw this year?’

Now it’s hard to predict Shaw as he’s never taken an at-bat in the majors before. I used to argue that the difference between Triple-A and the majors is smaller than a lot of people think. Now with the changes in the minor leagues, I think the difference is bigger than ever. At least a lot more than I used to believe. Pete Crow-Armstrong struggled badly over his first sixty games in the majors before he figured things out and got to be much better over his final sixty games last season. It’s entirely possible that Shaw struggles that badly. It’s even possible he doesn’t figure things out in 2025 at all.

On the other hand, Matt Shaw has hit everywhere he’s been. He didn’t have those high strikeout totals in the minor leagues like PCA had. While we’ll never know until the rubber hits the road in the majors, Shaw doesn’t appear to have any holes in his swing that major league pitchers could exploit. He has an approach that is geared towards making hard contact to all fields. He could hit the ground running and never look back.

On defense, Bregman is a Gold Glove winner and Shaw is an untested rookie. But while his arm might be a tad fringy for third base, there are lots of observers who think he’s stellar there.

It’s a tall ask for a rookie who hasn’t taken a major league at-bat to be as good as an All-Star like Bregman. So I’m just going to ask you how much better will Bregman be than Shaw in terms of WAR. If you think Bregman will be about a 5 WAR player and Shaw about a 1 WAR player, that’s a 4 WAR difference. I’ll also give you the chance to say you think Shaw will be better outright than Bregman.

Thank you for stopping by this evening. We hope you were able to warm up a little. If you checked your coat, we can get that for you now. Get home safely. Stay warm. Tip the waitstaff. And join us again tomorrow evening for more BCB After Dark.

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