Finding Recent Comparables for Travis Shaw

It’s been a fun month for the Red Sox, who have gone from miserable cellar-dwellars to a merely bad team. It’s a stark change from other recent bad Red Sox squads that limped to the finish line in both 2012 and 2014. It’s been an especially fun run because it’s come on the back on the young players. They aren’t being led by turnarounds from expensive veterans. Instead, it’s been Xander Bogaerts, Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley, Blake Swihart, Eduardo Rodriguez and Henry Owens leading the charge, among others. It’s always more fun to see youth succeed than veterans. Someone who has been particularly fun to watch is Travis Shaw.

Shaw hasn’t gone on a better run than all other Red Sox players, as Jackie Bradley casually turned into Barry Bonds for a month. He’s also not the most talented guy on the team, as either Bogaerts or Betts likely takes claim to that title. However, Shaw has certainly come out of nowhere more than any of the other young players, and there’s something special about watching that kind of breakthrough performance.

While watching Shaw has been fun, however, it’s only natural to eventually start thinking about how sustainable this kind of performance is from a rookie. As such, I thought it might be useful to compare Shaw’s first MLB season to other rookies of recent past, and see if it can tell us anything about Shaw’s future. I looked through Baseball-Reference’s play-index to find similar rookie seasons from the past 15 years, and the following names were the most interesting.

Will Middlebrooks

Maybe it’s the eternal pessimist in me, but the first name that came to mind when I first really started thinking about Shaw’s season was Will Middlebrooks. They are both Red Sox corner infield prospects, and they look kind of similar [editor’s note: Will is infinitely more handsome] so I suppose it’s a natural comparison.

On the surface, these players have had similar debuts, but the more you look at it, the bigger advantage Shaw has. Although he has slightly less power than Middlebrooks, he has a much better approach at the plate, suggesting his performance may be a little more sustainable. That doesn’t necessarily mean Shaw’s career won’t follow Middlebrooks’ trajectory, but there’s certainly more to build from now than there was then, albeit in a slightly smaller sample size.

Jeff Francoeur

Alright, maybe I do have a pessimism problem. Francoeur is another guy who jumped out to an amazing start, only to later flame out. Sure, he still has a job in the majors, but he’s fallen a long way since being a rookie phenom on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

These lines are quite similar, with Shaw showing better plate discipline (something that Francoeur has never exactly been known for) while Francoeur showed a more refined hit tool. The good news is the lack of walks is what likely undid the latter. The bad news is that his power also dissipated in a major way as his career worn on. Shaw’s overall line is great, but he’ll need that power to stick around if he’s going to be an everyday player in this league.

Evan Longoria

Now we can safely put aside my pessimistic tendencies, as we have a bonafide superstar on the list of Shaw’s comparables. Both players are corner infielders, which is probably the only two things these players have in common. Shaw took a long time to push through the minors and had relatively little hype. Longoria made the majors shortly after he was drafted and was a highly-touted prospect at the time.

Despite the many differences in these players’ backgrounds, they had very similar experiences in their first taste of the major-league level. In fact, these players have been almost identical, with Longoria showing a bit more power but sacrificing some strikeouts in the process. Of course, it has to be mentioned that Longoria’s performance came over the course of a full-season while Shaw’s has come in just a couple months of work. It’s not a perfect side-by-side, but just going by the numbers, these are very similar first-season experiences.

Kyle Schwarber

This was, to me, the most interesting name on the play-index results. Schwarber was a top-ten pick just a year ago, turned into one of the premier hitting prospects in the game and has already carved himself a role at the major-league level. Simply put, coming into the season, Schwarber was on people’s radars and Shaw was not. How do their 2015 rookie campaigns compare?

Schwarber has certainly been the better rookie this season, but given their respective backgrounds, it’s surprisingly close. On top of that, Schwarber carries the higher strikeout rate, and that’s the one stat that has seemingly led to downfalls from top prospects. That’s not to say Schwarber won’t have the better career than Shaw — the opposite is almost certainly true — but the fact that you can make a case for Shaw’s long-term abilities is noteworthy on its own.

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So, we have a bunch of comparisons, but is there anything that can really be learned from them? If anything, Shaw’s long-term outlook seems much better after comparing him to other recent rookies. The two players he has most in common with are Evan Longoria and Kyle Schwarber. One is a current superstar and possible future Hall of Famer and the other one is a player many have pegged as a future star. While he does have some in common with Middlebrooks and Francoeur, he boasts much better plate discipline than both of them, which was the biggest contributor to their respective downfalls.

None of this means that Shaw is owed a full-time role in 2016, but it does give much more optimism about what his future holds. For a player who seemingly came out of nowhere to hit the cover off the ball, that’s a big first step.

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