Oneil Cruz Is No Longer a Shortstop

One of the great things about sports is they let you witness the very limits of human capabilities. If you watch for long enough, you’ll see those limits get pushed even further. Usually it happens in increments so small and slow as to be all but imperceptible, but every once in a while someone comes along and stretches them right in front of your eyes. Never in his wildest dreams could James Naismith have imagined that a person like Victor Wembanyana was capable of existing, let alone of splashing threes and slashing to the hoop like a guard. If he had, he would have nailed his peach baskets a whole lot higher than 10 feet.

Oneil Cruz was a Lilliputian 6-foot-3 when he signed with the Dodgers as a 16-year-old shortstop in 2015. Despite adding another four inches to his frame, he managed to hang onto that position by his fingernails for nine more years, attempting valiantly to blow the doors off our preconceptions about what a shortstop could look like. He did his level best to make up for every errant throw with a rocket from deep in the hole, every routine grounder that clanked off his glove with a circus catch in the no-man’s land behind third base. Sadly, our preconceptions have outlasted his onslaught. The Pirates have finally decided that they no longer desire the distinction of fielding the tallest regular shortstop in the history of the game.

On Monday – just eight days after general manager Ben Cherington told reporters, “All I can tell you right now is he is our shortstop,” – manager Derek Shelton announced that Cruz would be transitioning to center field. “I think as of right now, we’re looking at him as a center fielder,” Shelton said. “It’s something we’ve been talking about. It’s not something that we took lightly. He’s an unbelievable athlete. We feel it’s probably the best position for him and for the Pirates.” Cherington told reporters that Cruz was disappointed about the move, but handled it professionally. On Tuesday, Cruz walked the same line with the media, saying through an interpreter, “I see it this way: I’m going to be playing in the middle of the diamond still, [but] in the outfield, and all I have to do is just erase it from my mind that I was a shortstop and do my best out there as a center fielder.” Either Cruz is truly broken up about moving off the position he’s played his entire life or he just watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

It’s not as if the Pirates are clearing room for some young shortstop who’s bucking for a promotion. In fact, when Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice updated the Pirates’ top prospects list, only one shortstop was above Single-A: the 35th-ranked Tsung-Che Cheng, who’s currently at Double-A with a 35+ future value. The Pirates are choosing to leave a real hole at shortstop going forward, and generally speaking, it’s harder to fill a hole at shortstop than in center.

Aside from six spring training innings in 2021, Cruz had never played center. His official outfield experience consisted of 81 innings in left field, 80 of them in the minors. Cruz spent two days as a designated hitter while he got a crash course on the new position. He was the first player out of the clubhouse on Tuesday, shagging fly balls in center before the game.

Oneil Cruz gets some work out in center field at PNC Park: pic.twitter.com/FW2gEs0EBa

— Danny Demilio (@Demilio22) August 27, 2024

On Wednesday, there he was in center field, and as the saying goes, the ball finds you. Ian Happ laced the first pitch of the game into the left field gap for a double, forcing Cruz to glide to his right and cut it off. In all, the Cubs hit nine balls to center, the second most the Pirates have allowed all season. When Cruz made his first catch, on a towering fly ball off the bat of Cody Bellinger, he jokingly signaled to the dugout that he wanted to keep it as a souvenir.

In a development that will not surprise you at all, Cruz also committed an error, though it’s hard to blame him for this one. With Nico Hoerner on second in the top of the second inning, Pete Crow-Armstrong sent a line drive single into center. Cruz charged and fielded it on a hop, then unleashed a 103.3-mph throw home. The ball came in just a few feet up the third base line and bounced roughly 12 feet in front of the plate, giving catcher Yasmani Grandal a pretty friendly hop. However, Hoerner was running hard all the way and the throw wasn’t quite in time. Grandal made a desperate attempt to catch it and apply a sweeping tag all in one motion, and when he failed, the ball squirted past him, allowing Crow-Armstrong to advance to third.

That was Cruz’s second throw of the game, and it was the second-fastest throw any outfielder has made over the entire 2024 season. It was exactly kind of play that made the idea of Cruz as a center fielder so enticing, and he executed it flawlessly. Of course it ended up as an error. Chalk it up to the morbid humor of the baseball gods.

It makes sense to let Cruz get his feet wet over the last month of the season. In order to make it happen, the Pirates recently placed Michael A. Taylor, an excellent center fielder who is having arguably the best defensive season of his career, on waivers. The plan is to play the versatile Isiah Kiner-Falefa at short once second baseman Nick Gonzales returns from the IL. At TribLive, Tim Benz advanced the hypothesis that the Pirates really plan on moving Cruz to right field, and are simply starting him out at the premier outfield position now in order to cushion the blow. “Then,” he wrote, “when it’s clear that’s not working out after a few bumpy weeks during meaningless September games… down in the wind and sun of Bradenton next spring, they’ll broach the topic of moving him over to right field.”

Cruz has now made 25 errors this season, second most in baseball, and his .939 fielding percentage is the worst among all qualified players. If you’ve watched Cruz play, you’ve seen a whole lot of throwing errors, especially when he’s moving to his left, but you’ve also seen a lot of dropped popups. Rather than getting into position, he has a tendency to drift with the ball, then he’ll misplay it because he ends up fielding it at an odd angle, finds himself on a collision course with the neighbor whose territory he has unknowingly entered, or both.

Watching such plays, it’s hard to come away thinking that Cruz needs to be playing in the outfield. Benz takes that concern a step further, writing:

The issues that are present with Cruz at shortstop will just manifest themselves in different ways in the outfield. Instead of loading up to break the Statcast numbers with a 100 mph throw from shortstop that sails wide of the first baseman, he’ll throw one 100 mph from the outfield that misses a cutoff man.

Instead of running out to left field and banging into [Bryan] Reynolds from the infield dirt, he’ll come screaming in from the outfield on a pop-up and crash into Nick Gonzales behind second base.

Instead of rushing a double-play attempt at second base and having the ball go off his glove, he’ll boot a grounder rolling into the outfield as he is attempting to scoop and throw on the run.

If the Pirates could properly coach Cruz, they’d coach him to be better at his natural position. Now, we are supposed to expect that he is going to be morphed into a capable outfielder at the most difficult spot in the middle of his career?

While the point Benz makes is a reasonable one, it’s worth remembering that at this point in his career, Cruz is still just 25. I do think it’s more likely that he’ll be fine in center, and possibly even great. Quite simply, there’s more margin for error in the outfield. He’ll take some bad routes and make some bad reads, but he’ll be able to make the most of his speed, and as we saw on Wednesday, when he has the chance to come in on the ball and put all his weight into a throw, he’ll no doubt put up the kind of radar gun readings that get the Statcast team all hot and bothered. That said, I’m not as interested about who Cruz will be as an outfielder. I care more about who he was as a shortstop.

This isn’t strictly on topic, but let me tell you a secret: Giancarlo Stanton might lead the league in bat speed and fast swing rate, but no player has taken more swings at or above 85 mph than Cruz. When I looked closely at the bat tracking data, accounting for factors like height, pitch type, and swing length, I came away with the impression that Cruz could swing harder if he wanted to; that having the second-fastest average bat speed in all of baseball was the result of a conscious decision to throttle back his aggression some. My point is that calling Oneil Cruz a gifted athlete is a bit like calling an aircraft carrier a big boat. You’re technically right, but you’re still leaving your listener woefully unprepared for the reality of the situation. To some extent, he needs to be seen to be believed.

Watching the 6-foot-7 Cruz straighten up to his full height and unleash a laser from deep in the hole was a transcendent experience, but it wasn’t the most fun part of watching him man the six. The most fun part was simply sitting there and seeing him creep toward the plate before the pitch, so much bigger – not just taller, but bigger – than all the other enormous professional athletes on the field that it felt like your eyes weren’t focusing correctly, like someone painted a perfect photorealistic painting but forgot how foreshortening is supposed to work.

Even his errors, of which there were many, served at least in part to emphasize his gifts. Regardless of what I wrote about his problems with popups, it requires an absurd amount of speed and confidence to end up far enough into left field to have a chance at this ball in the first place. His long strides make it seem like there’s nothing he can’t reach, because the dimensions of the field were set in place long before anyone had contemplated the possibility of Oneil Cruz playing shortstop.

More than a few of his throwing errors were the result of throwing the ball so hard that the first baseman simply didn’t have enough time to catch the ball. There’s no way to check this, but Cruz was almost certainly the most frequent victim of what MLB.com’s Film Room calls “missed catch errors.” His low throws came so quickly that the first baseman didn’t have time to figure out the right angle for a scoop. Here he is handcuffing Connor Joe on a ball in the dirt.

A better shortstop probably turns this into an easy play by charging in and fielding it on the short hop, but Cruz hangs back for a big, juicy hop because he knows he’s got a bazooka in his back pocket. Once that decision has been made, a good throw gets the runner, but only if you can throw the ball as hard as Cruz can. He only gets dinged for an error because he was able to get enough on the ball to beat the runner to the bag in the first place.

Then there was the time he threw the ball so hard that he knocked Rowdy Tellez’s glove clean off. The throw was undeniably high, but how often do you see a major league first baseman literally get his glove knocked off his hand?

Watching Cruz play shortstop was a gift, and one that was all the more precious because we knew all along that might be snatched away from us. His run was equal parts electrifying, exasperating, and improbable. While it’s not his natural position, Cruz will make much more sense as a center fielder. He’ll still make his share of incredible-for-both-good-reasons-and-bad plays, but he’ll no longer break your brain while he does so. For now, at least, the possibilities of baseball have shrunk.