Todd Brommelkamp / 1600 ESPN
Luis Salazar’s 1992 Score trading card
Matt Shaw began the 2025 season in Tokyo as a member of the Chicago Cubs.
This week the former Big Ten standout will be occupying third base at Principal Park as the Iowa Cubs host the St. Paul Saints.
Life, as Ferris Bueller once told us, moves pretty fast.
Will Shaw, who has hit at every level of the minors but struggled to go 10-for-58 in his Major League Baseball debut, reach the level of stardom some Cubs fans hoped he would when the club drafted him out of Maryland in 2023?
Few can answer that question with any certainty, though plenty will tell you they know definitively one way or another.
Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz shared an anecdote recently from longtime NFL exec Bill Polian about quarterback evaluation and the top of drafts, saying at best teams get one out of every two right. For every No. 1 hit, there’s at least one or more duds.
You bring a kid up, put them on the diamond or field, and you see what you’ve got. If at first they don’t succeed, well, hope they figure it out and come back better off.
During the 2011 baseball season, my now-wife and I caught a Double A game featuring Mike Trout and his teammates on the Arkansas Travelers. Less than two weeks later, the former first round draft pick made his big league debut with the Angels…and flopped.
If you scooped up Trout’s rookie cards following that first 40-game trial during which he hit a paltry .220, you did quite well for yourself if you sold them at their peak value during the pandemic when a PSA 9-graded Topps rookie was bringing in north of $1,500. (Much to my chagrin, they’re selling for considerably less now.)
If you snatched up Brett Lawrie cards following his solid .293 debut in 2011, sorry, but you won’t be going on vacation anytime soon due to your investment. Like Trout, Lawrie was also a highly-touted first round pick. He last played in the majors in 2016 and had a solid but unspectacular career WAR of 15.6.
Back to Matt Shaw.
The Chicago Cubs had multiple opportunities this offseason to address third base via free agency and trade. Alex Bregman was an attractive option, especially with former Astros teammates Kyle Tucker and Ryan Pressly joining the Cubs. The Cardinals were openly shopping Nolan Arenado at a discounted rate.
Chicago’s front office, likely bowing to pressure from ownership, once again spent conservatively in supplementing the big league roster after trading top prospect Cam Smith for Tucker last December. They trusted third base to Shaw in the early going, and their faith in the one-time first round pick went unrewarded.
If you’re a long-time diehard Cubs fan, a problem at third base should come as no surprise to you. Between Ron Santo in the early 1970s and Aramis Ramirez’s arrival in the early 2000s, the hot corner was a revolving door of mediocrity on the north side of Chicago.
Remember Luis Salazar?
How about the guy he replaced, Gary Scott? Scott is perhaps the best-known example of the Cubs hoping a wunderkind third baseman would be the answer to their prayers.
A couple of years later, failing to learn from Scott’s failure, the Cubs trotted out the highly-touted Kevin Orie at third. What was it Albert Einstein said about insanity?
I was lucky enough to see Shaw face the Cedar Rapids Kernels in 2023 during a weekend trip with my family to South Bend. His red-hot debut resulted in his finishing the season in Double A. He looked like a sure-fire, can’t-miss bat.
Maybe he still is.
The Cubs are off to a solid 12-8 start as of Wednesday morning. They’re atop the National League Central by 1.5 games. Their margin for error, especially after losing starter Justin Steele to a season-ending elbow injury, isn’t going to be very forgiving.
The frustrating part in the Shaw experiment is how easily avoidable it all was if only the Ricketts family opened their TD Ameritrade-branded coin wallet and invested in a proven veteran, with Shaw serving as a backup policy in Des Moines.
Vidal Brujan, acquired this offseason for failed first base prospect Matt Mervis, was activated from the injured list and will presumably take Shaw’s place in the lineup for the foreseeable future.
Once a top prospect in the Tampa chain, Brujan looks every bit the part of a journeyman bench player at this point in his career. I’ve had him on a dynasty league roster for fantasy baseball purposes since he was in rookie ball. I probably could have traded him half a dozen times but held on to him because he felt like he couldn’t miss.
The Marlins — the Marlins of all teams — designated Brujan for assignment after last season.
The next time someone tells you a player is a certain star in the making, gently smile at them, nod politely and excuse yourself from the conversation.
Todd Brommelkamp is the host of “The Todd Brommelkamp Show” and can be heard weekday mornings on 1600ESPN from 6:30 to 9 a.m.
