Matt Shaw update adds injury to insult of Cubs cheaping out on Alex Bregman

This is why it pays to add depth.
All-Star Futures Game
All-Star Futures Game / Matt Dirksen/GettyImages
facebooktwitterreddit

The Chicago Cubs fell short in the Alex Bregman sweepstakes, and while Jed Hoyer defended the team's pursuit of the star third baseman — calling the four-year, $115 million offer that included multiple opt-outs the "best offer we could make" — it's hard not to notice that the "best offer" the team could make fell short of the Detroit Tigers in both years (six) and total value ($171.5 million) and the Boston Red Sox in average value per year ($40 million). Bregman was an obvious fit, the best player available at the biggest question mark in the lineup, and all the team in the third-largest market in the country could do was come up short.

The Ricketts family budget is what it is, and Hoyer likely comforted himself and his ownership group by saying that the team had a pretty nice fallback plan at third base in top prospect Matt Shaw. But the baseball season is long and full of uncertainties; if the Los Angeles Dodgers have taught us anything, it's that "good enough" is never good enough, and you should always do whatever you can to add more talent if you're as motivated to win in 2025 as the Cubs should be. Chicago ignored that lesson, and it didn't take long for it to come back to bite them in spring training.

For more news and rumors, check out MLB Insider Robert Murray’s work onThe Baseball Insiders podcast, subscribe to The Moonshot, our weekly MLB newsletter, and join the discord to get the inside scoop during the MLB offseason.

Matt Shaw injury throws Cubs' perilous infield situation into sharp relief after Alex Bregman whiff

Shaw is one heck of a prospect, a former first-round pick who's spent the last 18 months or so blitzing every level of the Minors put in front of him. Unfortunately, what seemed set up to be a breakout year has gotten off to a rough start, as the infielder has had his spring training delayed by an oblique issue.

The team did do its best to downplay the severity of the injury, calling it "day to day" while emphasizing that they didn't expect it to meaningfully impact Shaw's ramp-up to Opening Day. But oblique issues are notorious for their ability to linger, and Shaw needed all the reps he could get if he was going to win this third-base job and run with it — something the Cubs were relying on without Bregman in the fold.

Now, though, Chicago just has one more question mark to add to the pile. The argument for Bregman was never to block Shaw entirely; it was that adding him would raise the team's ceiling in 2025 considerably while providing Shaw with a bit of runway to work with, knowing that both he and Bregman had enough positional flexibility to find playing time for everyone if and when it came to that. Now, though, the position has become perilous, the sort of paper-thin situation that can be derailed by a single injury or a player's development timeline being slightly slower than expected.

Shaw may yet develop into a star, but his injury goes to show just how much Chicago had riding on him as a rookie, a position that isn't fair to put him in. The Cubs had the money in the coffers to make an honest run at Bregman, but instead they decided to roll the dice.

feed