Judgment Day is a long ways away
Many are claiming that the Brewers already won this trade, given that Shaw is off to a solid 30 games and Tyler Thornburg, the hard-throwing reliever who made up the Boston end of the trade, is currently shelved on the 60-day DL.
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But the winner of this trade won’t be decided on May 10, or August 1, or even after the 2017 World Series is said and done. This trade was made by both teams with the distant future in mind, and the distant future is when the winner will make itself apparent.
The 28-year old Thornburg doesn’t hit free agency until 2020. The 27-year old Travis Shaw doesn’t until 2022. Mauricio Dubon and Josh Pennington, the two minor leaguers that were sent to Milwaukee alongside Shaw, haven’t even cracked the bigs yet.
There’s plenty of story left to be written here; we’ve only just started chapter one. Let’s wait for Thornburg to throw a pitch for the Red Sox. Let’s wait for Shaw to wrap up a full season as the everyday third baseman in Milwaukee. Then let’s wait for their career trajectories to unfold in their given uniforms, and then we can announce a winner and a loser.
Next: Red Sox: Andrew Benintendi is the answer for the cleanup spot
Declaring Travis Shaw the unequivocal missing piece in the black hole that is the third base position for the Red Sox by translating his Milwaukee numbers over to Boston is about as accurate as putting this paragraph through Google Translate a dozen times and then back to English.
“Travis show, for example, back to English ten several hours to transform Google’s position, exactly as in the location of this point, then, by letting Black Shovel the third clear opening from the start of Milwaukee’s Boston Red Sox rooms the Department announced.”