It's been a while since the Pirates have produced a young player with as much hype around him as Oneil Cruz. The 6'7" shortstop broke franchise records in exit velocity, sprint speeds and arm strength in his rookie season, all giving a taste of his massive potential, but he didn't quite set the league on fire.
That doesn't mean he had a bad season. It was still quite good, homering 17 times with 54 RBI, a .744 OPS and a 107 OPS+ over 87 games. Baseball-Reference valued him at 2.3 WAR and 1.1 wins above average, so it's reasonable to assume he would have been in the mix for rookie of the year if he made the team out of spring training.
And for someone who had to go through some rookie pains up in the majors, he was still on pace for a 30 homer, 100 RBI season as a rookie. Only 11 shortstops in baseball history have achieved that in a season.
With that said, it's safe to say this isn't Cruz's ceiling. He has the potential to go from a good player who will occasionally wow to a great player. One that can be the face of the franchise, something the Pirates have arguably not had since Andrew McCutchen was traded.
“I would love to be the face of this franchise, but I understand I have a lot of work to do," Cruz said via interpreter Mike Gonzalez at the end of the season. "I have to work hard and continue to work hard for that.”
But for him to reach that level, he's got to continue to improve his swing decisions.
This isn't a simple matter of "just swing at the good pitches." Back when I did an extensive sit down with hitting coach Andy Haines in August, he said Cruz is "feared, and with that he gets pitched a little more carefully than most young players." He was right.
I pulled all 277 hitters across baseball this year who saw at least 300 pitches in what Baseball Savant considered the "heart" of the zone. This isn't just middle-middle, but the whole strike zone minus the areas on the edge. Only 21.1% of the pitches Cruz saw were in that attack zone. That was the second-lowest in baseball.
There's a good reason for that, too. His slugging percentage was .702 on pitches over the heart of the zone. That was the 21st highest of the 277 hitters. When you take those two stats, Cruz becomes quite the outlier.
BASEBALL SAVANT
I wanted to highlight a couple names there who were also outliers, including Matt Carpenter (who slugged a ridiculous .727 this season), Byron Buxton (one of the best players in baseball when healthy) and Aaron Judge (who, you know, hit 62 home runs this year). All of them saw far more strikes over the heart of the plate, and it undoubtedly helped them.
I posted that to Twitter Sunday, and was casually given a reason why that happened by game planning/strategy coach Radley Haddad.
— Radley Haddad (@RadleyHaddad) October 16, 2022
Judge was thrown more pitches in the zone because he chased less. Pitchers had no choice but to throw him strikes, and more hung in there.
I did a Mound Visit on Cruz's chase rates back in June, focusing on that he had cut down on his chase rates in the minors, but that he can still run into a couple of pitches down low. That still applies, but early on this year, we saw that pitches had adjusted by throwing Cruz more breaking stuff low and that he was prone to chasing.
Again, he did cut down on chases, which is a good sign and will force pitchers to go in the zone more. But there's still room to grow.
FANGRAPHS
But getting pitchers to throw more strikes to Cruz is only part of the equation. He has to offer at more of those prime pitches.
Cruz swung at just 56.2% of the pitches he saw over the heart of the zone last year. Of the 277 hitters I pulled, that was 276th, ahead of only Daniel Vogelbach. Vogelbach's approach works for him, but that doesn't mean it's going to work for Cruz. Cruz barely sees prime pitches to hit and then watches almost half of them go by. That's a problem.
Cruz has the potential to be a great player in this league. We got tastes of that in 2022, and it's not fair to assume that he would hit the ground running in his rookie year. He showed tangible improvement in his chase rates and OPS as the year went on. He was more selective, but it might have come at the cost of him being aggressive.
That's a fine line to walk in the majors. If he figures it out, then we'll see why he was regarded as a top prospect.
