Chicago Cubs News: Why the Cubs drafted SS Matt Shaw over a pitcher in the 1st round

The Chicago Cubs spent their first-round pick on Matt Shaw, a shortstop from the University of Maryland. The pick was the right move, and we’re going to spend some time diving into why that is true by removing Matt Shaw from the equation, but if you’re looking for a breakdown of the pick you should check out some of our recent coverage of Shaw and the draft as a whole. 

Baseball fans like to have their cakes and eat it too. They like to point out that a team should take the best player available in the draft, but then they decide that a perceived lack of quality at a position should necessitate drafting a player at that position. They like to point to a problem on the current major league roster and in the same breath point out that so much can change between the draft and the player being drafted getting promoted to the majors that the current construction of the roster shouldn’t matter.

Baseball is hard. Talking about baseball is hard. But at the end of the day, we all want the Chicago Cubs to field the best possible roster of major league players and minor league prospects, and drafting Matt Shaw was the correct decision to make that a reality for several reasons.

Drafting the best player is always the answer

There were plenty of fans that wanted a pitcher in this spot. Unfortunately for the Cubs (and any other team that wanted a pitcher), the class wasn’t as loaded as some previous classes had been with arm talent and therefore passing on Shaw would have meant reaching in a very significant way to solve a (mis)perceived deficit in the Cubs’ system.

After the Cubs drafted Shaw at 13 the next pitcher taken wouldn’t come off of the board until high school pitcher Bryce Eldridge went 19th and college pitcher Hurston Waldrep went 23rd to the Atlanta Braves. 

I could have seen an argument for drafting Kyle Teel, a catcher from Virginia. I would have made an argument for the leadoff-hitting, base-stealing, center fielder Enrique Bradfield Jr. However, both of them would have been college hitters and wouldn’t have solved the problem that some fans have with the pick.

This leads directly into the next reason that drafting Matt Shaw was the correct decision.

Drafting the college hitter is always the answer

If you read my article from May, you’d know that the Cubs have had significantly more luck drafting college hitters than they have had drafting literally any other kind of player. 

That being said, I did a deeper dive recently to determine if that was something that was specific to the Cubs, or if that was something that was true across the league over any meaningful period of time and the answer wasn’t surprising.

Since the 2013 draft, there has been a correlation between the age of a player at the time of the draft and their eventual major league success. Over the last ten drafts, the difference in WAR created by college hitters versus their high school counterparts was 296.5 to 111.1. Beyond that, the difference between college pitchers and high school pitchers was 216.1 to 43. There was not a single year in which high school pitchers or hitters earned more WAR than college pitchers or hitters.

So, by that logic, the Cubs made the correct choice going for the college player. However, the difference between a college hitter and a college pitcher is closer than I would’ve expected, especially when you consider that there isn’t a college pitcher drafted in the first round of the 2022 draft that has made his debut whereas there is a hitter (Zach Neto of the Angels) that has already earned 1.9 WAR for Los Angeles this season. 

That leads us to the next reason that the Cubs made the right choice in drafting Shaw.

The Chicago Cubs minor league system is loaded with pitching

If you’re looking at the Cubs prospect rankings on MLB Pipeline you’ll see that four of the top ten players in the system and eight of the top twenty are pitchers. That doesn’t even include players like Michael Arias who is making hitters look silly in Low-A Myrtle Beach or Nazier Mule or Drew Gray, over-slot prep pitchers from the 2021 and 2022 drafts respectively.

While most outlets have Pete Crow-Armstrong listed as the top player in the system (and with good reason) there is absolutely an argument to be made for any of Ben Brown (acquired in last year’s David Robertson deal with the Phillies), Cade Horton (last season’s first-round pick out of Oklahoma) or Jackson Ferris (last year’s second-round selection) to be the top prospect in a very solid system.

You never draft a player based on current or perceived future positional need, but in a world where “you can never have enough pitching,” the Cubs aren’t in a position where they have to draft that position. If the best player available had been a pitcher, I wouldn’t have loved it, but I could’ve gotten on board. 

Conclusion

The Cubs had been linked to a myriad of players leading up to the draft, but their decision was made for them when Rhett Lowder went off the board to Cincinnati, Chase Dollander went to Colorado, and Noble Meyer went to Miami. 

You have to draft the best player available, even if the previous ten drafts point to the fact that the best player is always the college player, and beyond that it’s almost always the college hitter. In the case of this pick, the best player available for the Cubs happened to be Matt Shaw, a shortstop with defensive flexibility and the arm to play third base.

The Cubs system has plenty of pitchers and it’s got plenty of young talent to wait for. Matt Shaw is a pick that says that the Cubs don’t want to wait an extended period of time. Their window of contention opens now and they want it to stay open for the foreseeable future.

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