Photo Credit: Scott Paulas/Milwaukee Brewers
The MLB offseason is only a week old, but Travis Shaw has already received some good news. Mike Moustakas’ decision to become a free agent instead of exercising his half of a $15 million mutual option with the Brewers for 2019 leaves Shaw in position to return to his everyday spot at third base and potentially have a big year there.
Shaw led the Brewers in at bats, hits, doubles, home runs and RBI in 2017, his first season in Milwaukee, but the Brewers’ surprise decision to acquire Moustakas from the Royals (and, to a lesser extent, Jonathan Schoop from the Orioles) cut into his playing time slightly in 2018. He still set a new career high with 32 home runs, but collected just 498 official at bats, down from 538 in 2017. He played in more games than he ever had before, but entered 14 of them off the bench. His rate stats also took a small but noticeable dip, with his on-base plus slugging falling by 37 points.
For what it’s worth, at least one metric suggests that bad luck could have held Shaw’s numbers down in 2018. Shaw batted just .242 on balls in play this year (a statistic commonly referred to as BABIP), which was the seventh-lowest mark in all of baseball among the 144 hitters with at least 500 plate appearances. That’s 15 points lower than the next worst Brewer: Moustakas, at .259. The MLB average for 2018 was .296. Several factors influence this statistic, but luck is widely accepted as one of them. Shaw hit .312 on balls in play in 2017.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Shaw had 358 at bats end with a ball in play in 2018, collecting 88 hits in those scenarios. Raising his batting average on balls in play to the league average .296 would have given him 18 more hits. Even if all the extra hits had been singles, getting average results on balls in play would have raised Shaw’s batting line from a .241 average, .345 on-base percentage and .480 slugging to .277, .375 and .516, respectively. His new .891 on-base plus slugging would have been the second-best among Brewers this season and would have finished just outside the top ten in the National League.
Shaw does have some factors that will likely prevent him from ever posting an exceedingly high BABIP: First of all, he doesn’t have the speed necessary to routinely leg out infield hits, although FanGraphs rated him as a roughly league average baserunner in 2018.
Shaw also has a strong tendency to hit the ball to the pull side: 46.6% of his batted balls in 2018 were hit to the right side of the infield and just 21.7% were hit to the other side, giving defenses strong cause to shift against him. Teams used three infielders to the right of second base around 23% of the time in 2018, according to Baseball Savant. That was up about 6% from 2017 and stands to increase in future years. Neither of these factors, should, however, prevent Shaw’s BABIPs from trending back towards the league average.
On the flip side, Shaw’s peripheral numbers also show he’s still hitting the ball hard enough to regularly do damage: FanGraphs’ data shows that Shaw made hard contact on 39.8% of his balls in play in 2018, which was up from 37.1% in 2017. Overall, FanGraphs classified more than 80% of his batted balls this year as either medium or hard contact.
Barring another surprise addition, the Brewers should be back to leaning heavily on Travis Shaw at third base again in 2019. If his luck on batted balls evens out, he could be in line for a big year in that role.
