Oneil Cruz Has Shaken Off the Rust

Oneil Cruz is a player of extremes. The 6-foot-7 shortstop — the tallest man ever to play the position regularly — doesn’t just have incredible bat speed and power, he can lay claim to the hardest-hit ball of the Statcast era, and he once held the record for the hardest throw by an infielder as well. But for as loud as his contact is, the frequency with which he makes it has been an issue, as he’s particularly prone to chasing pitches outside the zone. Defensive metrics don’t love him either. Yet he’s the kind of player you can’t take your eyes off, because when it all comes together, it’s a sight to behold — and gradually, it’s been coming together more frequently.

Case in point: Last week found Cruz in a prolonged funk, hitting just .151/.224/.283 in his previous 58 plate appearances dating back to May 15 while striking out 23 times (39.6%) in that span. After going 0-for-4 in last Tuesday’s series opener against the Dodgers, he collected a pair of hits the next night, including this three-run homer off Evan Phillips:

That’s a 462-footer into the Allegheny River, the longest homer of Cruz’s major league career by 25 feet, and the third splash hit of his career; he also had ones on September 6, 2022 and May 3 of this season. The 117.7-mph exit velocity on his shot off Phillips made it his hardest-hit home run to date by 0.2 mph, surpassing an August 28, 2022 dinger in Milwaukee. For both distance and exit velocity, he’s up there with the big boys; the homer off Phillips is the majors’ seventh-longest this year behind three from Aaron Judge (a 473-footer from May 9 being the longest) and ones by Mike Trout, Bobby Witt Jr. and Shohei Ohtani. Cruz’s homer is the fourth-fastest in exit velocity behind two by Giancarlo Stanton (a 119.9-mph shot from May 8 being the fastest) and one by Ohtani. He’s right there in flavor country when it comes to some of the new bat tracking metrics, second only to Stanton in average bat speed (78.0 mph) and fast-swing rate (74.6%); he’s below average in terms of his squared-up rate (23.1%) — that’s the rate at which he obtains at least 80% of the maximum exit velocity for that swing — but a respectable 15th in blast rate (16.2%), the rate at which he squares up balls on fast swings.

Cruz’s homer against the Dodgers was his eighth of the year, and his first since May 12. The next day against the Twins, he hit a towering 422-footer, 114.4 mph off the bat. Contrary to whoever called this one, it did not go into the Allegheny, instead bouncing around the upper deck of PNC Park:

As for those aforementioned extremes, on July 14, 2022, in just the 25th game of his major league career, Cruz recorded the fastest throw by an infielder to that point, a 97.8-mph bullet on a groundout. That record fell by the wayside at the hands of Elly De La Cruz last year, with Masyn Winn’s relay throw from May 6 of this year dialing the record up to 101.2 mph, though unlike Cruz and De La Cruz, he didn’t actually make an assist. As for the bat, on August 24, 2022, Cruz recorded what still stands as the hardest-hit ball of the Statcast era, a 122.4-mph single off the right field wall at PNC Park that surpassed a 122.2-mph single by Stanton from October 1, 2017. On May 21 of this year against Giants, Cruz collected the two hardest-hit balls of the season, first a 120.4-mph single in the first inning and then a 121.5-mph double in the ninth; in the third, he also smoked a 116.3-mph double, making him the first player ever to record three batted balls of at least 115 mph in one game, as well as the first with two of at least 120 mph:

That three-hit game happened amid the aforementioned slump; Cruz had collected one hit in his previous four games and would add just two hits over his next six.

Through the feasts and famines, Cruz is now hitting .243/.298/.429 for a 102 wRC+, and .239/.301/.441 (105 wRC+) through 158 major league games overall, with 28 homers, 18 steals and 2.9 WAR in 655 PA; his 220 strikeouts would be three shy of Mark Reynolds‘ single-season record if he’d done them all in one year. The bulk of his time in the majors came in 2022 when he played 87 games and launched 17 homers with a 105 wRC+ and 1.4 WAR. His numbers this year constitute respectable production for a 25-year-old shortstop, but were short of star caliber, and star caliber is the expectation for a player who placed eighth on our Top 100 Prospects list two years ago for pairing 80-grade raw power with an 80-grade arm and plus speed. Then again, some slack is in order given that Cruz was limited to just nine games last season after fracturing his left fibula in a home plate collision on April 9. Following surgery to stabilize the bone and repair the syndesmosis (the fibrous joint held together by ligaments), he was expected to miss four months, but he didn’t heal quickly enough to start a rehab assignment and return to the majors.

Under those circumstances, some rust could be expected. Cruz stumbled out of the gate, but since May 1 — right around halfway through the sample — he’s been much more productive:

Pirates general manager Ben Cherington recently acknowledged the expectation that Cruz could struggle in the early going, saying, “I think I’ve already said or would have said that if the first six to eight weeks were a little up-and-down for him, that wouldn’t have surprised me coming off of basically a missed year and a major injury.” Cherington has publicly stressed that the team would “just let him play” through his ups and downs while working behind the scenes to help him improve.

In late April, Cruz spoke of battling to regain his confidence after last year’s absence, and as of early May, his surgically repaired ankle wasn’t yet back to 100%. Pirates hitting coaches Andy Haines and Christian Marrero have introduced some tweaks to his swing in order to help improve his path to the ball. He’s holding his hands higher, and his stance is more closed off, with his legs slightly closer together, his body slightly more upright. There’s a side-by-side GIF here showing the changes.

Those adjustments seem to be working, as one of the most encouraging aspects of the above split is the decline in Cruz’s strikeout rate. He struck out a hefty 34.9% of the time as a rookie and was even higher in March and April, but he lowered that to 30.9% in May and is down to 26.7% through seven games in June. Where he walked just once for every 5.6 strikeouts in April, he’s down to once for every 3.7 strikeouts since.

The area where we really see Cruz’s improvement — both relative to 2022 and to the early part of the season — is in his batted ball stats:

Within that span, Cruz’s average exit velocity trails only Judge’s 99.2 mph and likewise for his barrel rate, which has nearly quadrupled since March/April; his hard-hit rate is seventh within the same timeframe. As you might surmise given the increases in average launch angle and expected slugging percentage, he’s hitting the ball in the air more often lately; his overall 49.7% groundball rate reflects a drop from 57.4% through April to 42.9% from May 1 onward, with his overall 1.53 groundball-to-fly ball ratio falling from 1.95 to 1.22 using those same cutoffs.

Though he made a point of showing that he could go the other way early in the year, Cruz’s current 41.4% pull rate isn’t far below his 43.7% from 2022. As with the data above, we’ve seen a dramatic course correction since the early going, with a 25% pull rate from March and April growing to a 55.8% pull rate since. He pulled just one fly ball before May 1, but has 11 since, with five of them going for homers.

The big issue for Cruz is chasing pitches out of the strike zone. While the story to this point would suggest that lately he’s dramatically cut down on the chases and is making more contact in the zone, that’s actually not the case, at least if we’re sticking to the May 1 cutoff:

On the contrary, Cruz is chasing more often than in 2022, and only about one percentage point less often since May 1 than before that date. He’s swinging at more pitches in the zone lately… but making less frequent contact, both in and outside the zone (though still more than in 2022). His swinging strike rate has gone up, not down.

But that’s just one admittedly arbitrary point from which we can measure, a convenient one given the calendar and the similar sample sizes on either side. When we examine Cruz’s rolling chase rate, we can see that he’s gone through periods when he was especially chase-prone, generally coinciding with drops in production:

That set of red spikes near the middle coincides with early May; on a 10-game basis, he reached maximum chase rate on May 8, and while he’s largely reined in that tendency since then, he regressed on that score right at the end of the month.

If it’s not quite what we expected, it’s at least been offset to some degree by a better two-strike approach; through April, Cruz was hitting .176/.228/.189 (21 wRC+) while striking out 57% of the time with two strikes, but he’s found some power (.135/.198/.284, 34 wRC+) since then while trimming his strikeout rate in such situations to 45.7%. This counts as progress, but it’s still a lot of chasing pitches with little success. Cruz is chasing offspeed pitches (changeups and splitters) 48% of the time and breaking pitches (curves, knuckle curves, sliders, slurves, and sweepers) 34% of the time; he’s 2-for-30 with 17 strikeouts in plate appearances that end with him chasing a breaking ball.

Cruz’s bat-tracking splits aren’t as dramatic as those of his batted ball stats; the big takeaways I’ll offer are that he’s increased his average bat speed (from 77.5 mph to 78.3%), his fast swing rate has increased by five points (from 71.7% to 76.7%, and his blast rate has improved a touch (from 15% to 17%).

On the defensive side, the metrics are a mixed bag, which shouldn’t be too surprising given the samples (678 innings in 2022, 502 this year). Statcast faults Cruz for his lateral range, but he’s improved from -6 to -1 by FRV; DRS and UZR offer a split decision, with decline in the former (from 1 to -4) and slight improvement in the latter (-7.5 to -3.6). His long-term future may not be at shortstop, but it makes sense for the Pirates to keep him there and hope for improvement.

If you’re only looking at the top-line numbers, it’s easy to miss Cruz’s gains relative to 2022. And while it’s OK to be wary of any arbitrary endpoint splits, for the most part the ones I’ve shown illustrate that he’s making some truly awe-inspiring contact and is generally headed in the right direction, towards improvement. Along with Jared Jones, Paul Skenes, and Nick Gonzales, he’s made the Pirates a more compelling and competitive team; at 32-34, they’re second in the NL Central by 6.5 games and in a virtual tie with the Giants for the third Wild Card spot, with four other teams just half a game behind them. Cruz’s progress only makes the race that much more worth watching.