CINCINNATI -- They're young. They're raw. But you'd be hard-pressed to find two young players with more power than Oneil Cruz and Hunter Greene.
Both were top 50 prospects at this time last year and had moments of brilliance in that first season. Cruz set the record for the hardest hit ball in the Statcast era a year ago, and Greene hit at least 100 mph on the radar gun on 44 of his 83 pitches in the Pirates' 5-4 win over the Reds at Great American Ball Park Thursday.
Cruz would wind up driving in the game-winning run in the eighth inning, but the Pirates' first run of the season was certainly louder:
OPENING DAY CRUZ MISSILE! pic.twitter.com/nIxDodAScA
— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) March 30, 2023
That 101.3 mph fastball somehow left that bat even quicker than it came in, registering a 111.1 mph exit velocity and traveling 425 feet. And going by Baseball Savant's data, that was the hardest thrown ball a Pirates batter has homered against in the Statcast Era (since 2015).
Factor in that it was the seventh pitch of the at-bat and that Cruz also walked twice and drove in that winning run, and you can say he had a pretty good first opening day.
"It couldn't be better," Cruz said via interpreter Stephen Morales. "I hit a home run and drove it the go-ahead run. It was a really good, a really good start to the season."
Not so much for Greene, who'd had Cruz in an 0-2 hole, then was called for a pitch-clock violation. After that, he threw another ball, then narrowly missed the next pitch to run the count full. Then, boom.
“Tyler and I were going back and forth on signs. Didn’t get to it quick enough," Greene would say, referring to his batterymate Tyler Stephenson. "Hopefully, it doesn’t happen again. But it does happen. I feel like we’re still in a really good place with making that adjustment on those new changes. We just didn’t get down to it before delivering that pitch. We went back and forth. Cruz had a good at-bat. He just got me on the pitch.”
