Oneil Cruz Isn’t a Center Fielder Yet
It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Oneil Cruz is 26 years old and still has as much talent as just about any player in baseball. Here’s what I wrote back in August, when the Pirates moved him to the outfield and I eulogized Oneil Cruz the Shortstop: “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…” The early returns are not exactly making either Cruz or me look great.
Cruz spent 23 games in center to end the 2024 season, and the results were mixed. His best grades came from Statcast, which had him putting up a very encouraging 2 OAA and 1 FRV. However, Cruz was credited with -3 DRS and -2.1 DRP. On a per-inning basis, the latter number made him one of the worst center fielders in baseball. Still, all those numbers included two errors, which loomed very large in such a small sample size. Outfielders tend not to make that many errors, but Cruz was brand new to the position. He was fast. He had a rocket arm. Even if all he did was cut out the errors, he’d be at the very least a decent center fielder. It was reasonable to assume that he would only get better out there.
He has not yet gotten better out there. Cruz is currently sitting on -8 DRS, -2 OAA and FRV, and -0.1 DRP. Among all outfielders, those numbers respectively rank worst, third worst, fourth worst, and fifth worst. The advanced defensive metrics work on different scales and they often disagree, but on this point they are unanimous: Cruz has been one of the very worst outfielders in all of baseball this season. According to DRS, Cruz is the least-valuable defender in baseball, full stop.
It starts before the pitch. According to Statcast, Cruz is getting some of the worst jumps in the majors. Baseball Savant’s overall jump metric says that Cruz is 3.1 feet slower than the average outfielder in the first three seconds. That ranks 62nd out of 67 qualified outfielders. Moreover, Cruz is below average in every single component of that metric. His reaction time, which measures how far he moves in the first 1.5 seconds, is 0.7 feet below average, 11th worst. His burst, which measures how far he travels in the next 1.5 seconds, is 1.7 feet below average, ninth worst. His routes grade out as 0.6 feet below average, 17th worst. As I learned a few years ago, reaction time and route tend to work in opposition. Players with great reaction times tend not to take good routes, but the tradeoff is worth it because they end up covering more ground.
Not many players are below average in both, but there’s Cruz, the purple dot, exactly where no one wants to be. He’s not reading the ball well off the bat, and even when he gets going, he’s having trouble taking a good route. The odd thing is his burst. Of the four metrics I mentioned in the last paragraph, burst is the one most correlated with success. An outfielder can deal with a subpar reaction time or a subpar route as long as they really get after the ball. This should be Cruz’s specialty.
So far this season, Cruz has an average sprint speed of 28.4 mph, a step down from the 28.7 and 28.8 he averaged in the last two seasons, but it’s early and he might get back up toward that borderline elite territory with a larger sample size. Either way, he’s still very fast, even relative to his very fast cohort of center fielders. It’s not terribly surprising that he’s not getting great jumps yet. He’s only spent 38 games in the outfield and is still developing his instincts out there. But I expected him to be making up for that with raw speed, and not only is he not doing so, he’s falling further behind. Take this play for example.
This ball had a 95% catch probability. Cruz broke back instead of in, so he had a terrible jump. However, he got on his horse and very nearly made up for that mistake with a great sliding catch. I expected to see more plays like this, where he’d make a mistake but cover up for it with athleticism. However, it’s one of the few plays I’ve seen where he has really seemed to be running full speed.
Even when Cruz catches the ball, he’s carried over the tendency he had when fielding popups as a shortstop. He drifts after the ball. I’ve watched every fly ball Cruz has caught this season, and it’s pretty rare to see him get to the right spot and camp out under the ball. Even on lazy fly balls, he tends not to find his spot, but rather to map out an intercept route.
He seems to be on cruise control during tougher plays too. Granted, Cruz’s long, graceful strides often make him look like he’s moving slower than he really is, but still, he’s not yet moving confidently out there. He’s not going after the ball the way a good center fielder would. The play below had a 65% catch probability. It gets caught two-thirds of the time, but you’d never know that given how far away Cruz was when it bounced off the warning track.
He never really got into gear, and despite the 65% catch probability, it never really looked like he had a chance. He’s just not at a place where he can track the ball and utilize his speed to go out and get it.
Lastly, Cruz is still making errors. He’s tied for the most in baseball with four, twice as many as any other outfielder. One of those errors came on a fly ball deep in the gap. The play only had a 60% catch probability, making it a three-star chance.
This was arguably Cruz’s best read as an outfielder. He didn’t seem to get a late break, and he was closing on the ball hard. Approaching both the wall and the right fielder at high speed distracted just him enough for the ball to clank off his glove. This is a play Cruz makes once he’s more comfortable. Amazingly, the other three errors came on groundballs, the exact plays you’d think a shortstop would be able to nail.
In a way, you could read all of this as encouraging. Cruz is still getting bad jumps and taking bad routes. He’s still not comfortable enough to chase the ball down. He’s still making errors. In other words, there’s a lot of room for improvement. He just hasn’t figured it out yet. He won’t be this bad forever. He’d still grade out as solid right now, according to some metrics, just by cutting out the errors. However, he’s been a center fielder for a while now. It’s clearly not coming naturally to him, so when the improvement does come, we probably shouldn’t expect it to be dramatic, burying any dreams we may have had about watching him transform from iffy shortstop to excellent outfielder like Jackson Merrill or Mookie Betts. Over four seasons, Cruz put up -9 DRS as a shortstop. He’s already at -11 as a center fielder.
Lastly, Cruz isn’t going to stay this fast forever. He’s 6-foot-7 and listed at 240 pounds, and age isn’t always kind to players that big. He’s still just 26, but he’s bound for a corner soon enough. Cruz has all the tools in the world, and although it was disappointing to see him move off shortstop, the upshot of the move was that it rekindled for a while our hope that he might finally tap into a couple of them. After these first few weeks, though, we should probably adjust our expectations. Cruz is still one of the most exciting players in the game and it would be foolish to count him out entirely, but right now the case for optimism is pretty thin.
Davy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based musician and a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @davyandrewsdavy.bsky.social.
“cruise control”? Really?
Greg Brown on the Pirates broadcast always calls his home runs as Cruz missiles. If they had drafted Dylan Crews it would’ve been unbearable.
Greg Brown is mostly unbearable anyway.
He is mostly unbearable and yet is still better than Joe Block.
Thems some generic names for a broadcast duo.
He just doesn’t seem to have the instincts for CF and looks super uncomfortable. To an extent you either have this or you don’t. Worth trying a little bit longer but i’m not confident and would cut bait on this experiment soon. He also clearly has the highest ceiling of any of there bats. Stick him in LF/RF and he still looks bad there just make him a 1B/DH.
It looks to me like he never really bought into the idea of moving to the outfield. Combine that with little to no reps before the move and these are the results that you get. He isn’t even getting simple fundamentals that are taught in youth leagues correct, like throwing home on a single to center with the tying run at the plate.
He is so frustrating to watch because he is so talented. Someone close to him (family, agent) needs to sit him down and explain that he is throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars in free agency.
I also think that his issue may not be so much effort or will to succeed as ability to focus. Like the baserunning play the other night where he didn’t believe/realize that the left fielder had trapped the ball so he went back to first and got Tommy Pham forced out. That’s not being out of position, or lack of effort, or failure to pay attention–he was paying attention but to the wrong thing and he locked up when he was unsure what to do.
Maybe what he needs is a good ADHD test. (I say this as someone who was diagnosed a couple years ago.)
Nutting is too cheap to supply the clubhouse with Adderall.
Unless you have a good shot at the assist, don’t you want to keep the tying run out of scoring position?
Think what jdspud meant is that Cruz did throw home on a single with the tying run at the plate, which violated fundamentals and in fact wound up costing the Pirates the game on opening day (this play). Even worse, this probably doesn’t show up on DRS.
This is what happens when you have a management team that is the last to realize their own player can’t play his original position until it might be too late. Oneil Cruz wasn’t bad for a 6’7 guy playing shortstop. But that doesn’t mean he was a good shortstop, which BC realized about 3-4 years too late.
They did this with Hank Davis too, although that ended up being even more egregious. Their attempt at making an outfielder out of Davis amounted to this: “Hey kid, you’re awful behind the plate, here’s an outfield glove. You have a dozen games to learn the position at AAA before you’re called up to hit big league pitching and adjust to that new position.” What the hell is that?
Pre-draft scouting of Konnor Griffin indicated he’s better suited for center field, rather than shortstop. Guess where he’s playing for Bradenton?
BC did this back in his Red Sox days too. Forcing Xander Bogaerts to play 3rd base and hurting his offense, the infamous Hanley in LF experiment
*shudders*
I honestly don’t know how BC keeps his job. He has 9 seasons as a GM with 7 last place finishes, 1 fourth place, and somehow won a world series in the other season.
Flags fly forever?
He must work cheap.
Every team tries to get their star hitters to stick at SS for as long as possible, but there’s clearly levels to this. The wisdom goes that if you’re athletic enough to play shortstop, then you’re probably athletic enough to play any other position (other than maybe catcher). But if you’re a bad shortstop, there’s no guarantee that you have the instincts to just pick up another position. Defensive Adjustment might be flat scaling, but flesh and blood players are hardly that linear.
And no one would care if he was on a Pirates team expected to win 70 games, except now they’ve got some sparkling young talent and should be competing for a wild card soon.
I agree with much of this regarding keeping a player on a valued position as long as possible. However, the Pirates (and the Cardinals with Walker) clearly made the move at the wrong time. Maybe they’d still have poor instincts, but I have to think more time (especially if you’re moving from the dirt to the grass or vice versa) would help.
When’s the right time to move a player off a position? I have no idea, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t start it at the MLB level or right before it. For a player like Davis, whose bat was ahead of his glove (as a prospect), he was considered fairly athletic for a catcher to handle another position. If they felt that in 2023 he didn’t have the chops to catch, he should have had most of the rest of the year in the minors to learn RF. Maybe he wouldn’t have had any instincts anyway, but how would more time learning a new position in a lower stress environment hinder him?
The wild thing is that, as far as I can tell, Davis is now fine behind the plate? Probably better than Bart.
The weirdest fielding-related thing about the Bucs this season is that, by the numbers and occasional eye test, Cutch has been good in the outfield.
Ideal defensive alignment once everyone is healthy:
Reynolds LF
Cutch CF (Suwinski backup)
Cruz RF
Hayes 3B
Triolo SS
IKF 2B
Horwitz 1B
Davis/Endy C
Bart DH
prove me wrong
The infield is fine. No way I’d put Cutch in center now though. Jack actually might be their best CF, which is saying something.
Davis was noticeably better last year coming into the season. Unfortunately, his bat cratered and he then got hurt. I’m not sure if he’s better than Bart, who isn’t that good himself.
This is before they were trying to shoehorn Endy into an emergency 1B a week before the season began. I’m fine with having players be versatile, but there is no rhyme or reason as to why they do it. This team, man.
Jordan Walker played similar defense last year, also after transitioning from infield to outfield. They are actually pretty similar players–long, strong, and fast. Walker has made big improvements thus far on the year, and even if he regresses, he’ll likely still be much better than last year.
I think this may be a good comparison, because maybe the position change will take an equally long time for Cruz to accommodate to.
Great analysis, and the one thing I’d add is that he’s also had significant, recurring problems keeping throws to the plate low enough to enable a cutoff or just not throwing to second. 29 franchises have field staffs that I like to think would prevent that from happening, but he plays for the 30th.
As an IF — especially SS — you are more often fielding a bouncing ball, so you don’t always need to get all the way to the ground..
As an OF, you are frequently fielding a rolling ball — which was the case with two of those errors. If you’re 6’7″, I imagine getting in position to pick a rolling baseball has to be difficult.
It’s awkward, because he’s a key part of your offense, but is clearly unfinished defensively. I do think he winds up in a corner OF and is passable there until he isn’t, then he spends the rest of career DHing.