Matt Shaw drove in his first run of the season as a member of the Iowa Cubs during Saturday’s 5-2 loss to the Louisville Bats.
Shaw took a 95 mph inside sinker and lined it up the middle for a single to score the Chicago Cubs’ No. 3 prospect Owen Caissie and tie the game 2-2 in the third inning. He finished the game 2-for-4 with one RBI and another single in the fifth.
Shaw’s hardest contact of the night came during at-bats in which he recorded outs. In the first inning, he grounded out with an exit velocity of 108.2 mph, and he lined out at 86.8 mph in the seventh.
The Cubs sent Shaw – their top prospect who’s ranked No. 18, per MLB Pipeline – back down to the minor leagues on April 15. Through six games and 27 plate appearances in Triple-A, Shaw has three hits, one RBI, five walks and one strikeout. It’s a small sample size, but that strikeout-to-walk ratio is noticeably different from his time in Chicago.
The 13th overall pick in the 2023 MLB Draft made the Cubs’ Opening Day roster and appeared in 18 games to begin the season. Across his first 68 big-league plate appearances, the 23-year-old third baseman recorded 11 runs, 10 hits, one double, one home run, three RBI 10 walks and 18 strikeouts. That equates to a .172 batting average, a .294 on-base percentage, a .242 slugging percentage and a .535 OPS.
Upon sending him down to the minors, Cubs manager Craig Counsell shared his message to Shaw.
“If you’re a major league baseball player, you’re going to face adversity, you’re going to struggle, and to realize that right around the corner is growth,” Counsell said on April 15. “That’s how you get better. So he’s gonna get better from this. He’s going to look back on this and say, ‘I learned a lot from that experience, and I learned a lot from the struggle or the adversity.’ And that’s how you have to take it. The game is great about presenting challenges to you constantly, and we don’t always get to like the challenge that’s put in front of us. Sometimes it’s a fun one, and sometimes it’s a tough one. And this is a tough one for him, but he’ll handle it great and be the player he knows he can be and that we expect him to be.”
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