Oneil Cruz Looks Like a Center Fielder Now

Two months ago, I checked in on Oneil Cruz, the center fielder. Things weren’t exactly going well. The Pirates shifted Cruz from shortstop to center at the end of the 2024 season, and the early returns were so discouraging I felt the need to write about the experiment just 17 games into the 2025 season. Here’s where the numbers stood at that point:

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.

There’s great news, though. Last week, reader AJ wrote into our newly introduced mailbag to ask for an update, because Cruz’s stats look totally different now. I decided the turnaround was worthy of a full article instead of a few paragraphs. I’ve broken everything down with my first article as the dividing line. There’s a chasm between Cruz’s first 17 games and his last 48.

Deserved Runs Prevented is inherently more conservative than the other defensive metrics, but all of the advanced numbers agree Cruz has completely turned things around over the past two months. He hasn’t just stopped racking up negative numbers, he’s dug himself all the way out, grading as a net positive in every metric except Defensive Runs Saved. Over the past two months, they pretty clearly see him as one of the better defenders in the league. Put that together with career-best hitting and baserunning numbers, and Cruz is on pace for a career year.

The most obvious improvement is Cruz has, to some degree, cut out the errors. After committing four errors over the first two weeks of the season, he’s made two over the past two months. That’s still way too many for an outfielder, but it marks a big improvement. And that’s not the exciting part. Cruz’s instincts are improving.

Just look at Statcast’s outfield jump numbers. Two months ago, Cruz graded out as one of baseball’s worst outfielders in all three components: reaction time, route efficiency, and total distance traveled over the first 1.5 seconds. In all, he was 3.1 feet slower than the average outfielder, which ranked 62nd out of 67 qualified players. He’s now just 0.5 feet slower than average, which means he’s made up 2.6 feet. There’s no way to know exactly how the sample sizes have played out, but if we go ahead and assume Cruz has had the same number of chances per game over both periods, then he’s been something like 0.9 feet faster than average since we last checked in on him. That would put him just outside the top third of qualified outfielders. This would-be gapper from Geraldo Perdomo tells the tale nicely.

Statcast gave it a 70% catch probability, making it a three-star catch. It required Cruz to travel 79 feet in 4.7 seconds, and he did so very comfortably. He was already moving by the time the broadcast cut to the high home camera, and he played the angle well, accounting for the fact that the ball would slice away from him. From looking at it, you’d never know this ball goes for extra bases 30% of the time.

As a quick refresher, Statcast determines the catch probability of every play an outfielder has to make, and helpfully breaks down those chances into categories, assigning between 0 and 5 stars depending on the difficulty. Cruz still hasn’t made a five-star catch and his only four-star catch came back on April 6. But he’s made all four of his three-star opportunities in the last two months, and he hasn’t missed a one- or two-star opportunity over the entire season. If that’s who he can be going forward – a guy who doesn’t make any truly unbelievable plays, but absolutely feasts on balls with a catch probability above 50% and has a cannon for an arm – that’s enough to make him a really good center fielder, even if he keeps making the occasional error.

It’s also possible Cruz will keep improving. His average sprint speed is 29.1 feet per second, which puts him in the top 10% of the league. Those four- and five-star catches, on which Cruz is 1-for-16 this season, require perfection from an outfielder. You have to get an amazing jump, take a great route, and possess great speed to track the ball down. Cruz has the speed, and his jumps and routes have improved dramatically. There’s at least a chance he could turn into the kind of player who can make the occasional five-star catch. This ball from Victor Caratini two weeks ago, another three-star catch, is a great example.

The camera certainly makes it look spectacular because it’s following the right fielder, which allows Cruz to jump into frame like Superman. Cruz traveled 120 feet to get to it, and after the long run, he made a leaping catch and negotiated the wall perfectly. It’s hard to imagine him making that catch a few months ago. That’s not to say he’s been perfect. Here’s a play he made just two days earlier. It was a low liner with a 55% catch probability, making reaction time and route of the utmost importance. Cruz got there with no problem, but he misread it slightly and the ball got on top of him. He undershot the angle and had to alter his route at the last minute. If not for his height, he probably wouldn’t have made the play.

We’re near the end now, so it’s caveat time. We’re still talking about a small sample – or really, one tiny sample and one other small sample. Right now, Cruz’s +2 OAA grade comes from converting 89% of his catches when the average center fielder would have made 88%. That’s it. He’s been 1% better than average over the course of 167 batted balls, so that 1% is probably closer to 1.67 catches. He hasn’t looked great on balls hit in front of him, and he still grades out poorly there according to OAA. As I’ve noted in the past, outfielders tend to grade out better when their chances skew toward three-star opportunities and are light on five-star opportunities. It’s possible Cruz has been getting a bit lucky with his batted ball distribution. Still, while it’s probably too early to say definitively that Cruz is a great center fielder, this is really encouraging. He looks the part more and more of the time, and both the errors and the advanced metrics are improving. The sample really matters, and outfielders don’t get to decide what balls get hit their way. For now, he’s making those plays, and that’s a welcome change.