Oneil Cruz Slides Onto the Injured List

The Pirates are off to a surprisingly hot start, winning six of their first 10 games and sitting in second place in the NL Central. But that fair weather cloud has a dark lining, as the team’s young shortstop, Oneil Cruz, landed on the injured list on Monday with a fractured ankle. While Cruz’s injury was (thankfully) well below Jason Kendall’s broken ankle running to first in 1999 on the gruesomeness scale, it was enough to require Sunday night surgery. The early timetable for Cruz indicates that his 2023 season isn’t necessarily finished, but it’ll likely be four months, or sometime in mid-August, until he’s likely to be back in playing form.

Cruz’s injury came on a literal bang-bang play, one which led to some fisticuffs, or at least some minor shoveicuffs. With runners on the corners and no outs in a 1–0 game in the sixth, Ke’Bryan Hayes hit a bouncer off of White Sox starter Michael Kopech. Yoán Moncada at third was shallow enough that trading a run for a double play wasn’t really possible; the play at home was the easier one. What exactly happened is a minor controversy, but the basic facts are that after running on the outside of the foul line, Cruz took an inside line as he approached the plate, appeared to stumble on the dirt, and careened into catcher Seby Zavala knees first.

I don’t get the impression from the play that Cruz intended to take out Zavala; if you were going for the 1970s-style demolition derby smash that looked great on highlight packages and poor in CT scans, you don’t intentionally put on the brakes and then kind of fall into the catcher clumsily. You don’t see a lot of NFL coaches advising their linebackers to tackle with their knees. Zavala was mic’d up and instantly offered a few not-so-minced oaths, but from his point of view, it’s hard to blame him. From his perspective in the heat of the moment, a runner altered his path slightly to make contact, even though he left space for a good slide, and practically groined him with a couple of knees. It wasn’t quite as bad a slide attempt as Adley Rutschman‘s Tekken-style spin kick into Christian Arroyo’s head, but it was up there. Carlos Santana then came out to have words with Zavala, which resulted in the benches emptying. Control of the situation was restored quickly, however, and we had no Royal Rumble-style brawling. I’m not here to judge behavior, though, at least unless you vote Szymborski to be the Grand Inquisitor of Baseball in the 2024 election.

It would be silly to suggest there’s ever a good time for a serious injury, but the broken ankle comes at a crucial time in Cruz’s career. He’s one of the most exciting young players in the game, and someone the Pirates hope to become a foundational talent for the franchise (at least until he’s paid as such), but he’s also not a finished product in the way players like Rutschman or Julio Rodríguez are. A power lefty bat isn’t something you typically see from a shortstop, and Cruz has the potential to be a .200 isolated power guy at the position. In at least 5,000 plate appearances, only five shortstops in history have been .200 ISO hitters: Alex Rodriguez, Ernie Banks, Nomar Garciaparra, Troy Tulowitzki, and Jose Valentin. You also doesn’t see a 6-foot-7 shortstop all that often, either. That tantalizing upside is why the Pirates are prepared to be patient and see if Cruz can work out his flaws. His defense at short is decidedly a work in progress, and the fact that he’s ludicrously fast for a man his size — in 2022, he ranked 12th out of 582 players with 10 opportunities in sprint speed — is making up for a lot of sins. At the plate, his power has to compensate for the fact that he’s still connecting with pitches by coincidence more often than intent.

This was supposed to be the year in which Cruz started 140–150 games at shortstop for the Pirates, and in the early going, he appeared to be making progress, at least at the plate. He had already walked seven times in nine games, a rate nearly double what any projection system had for him entering the season. And while nine games isn’t enough to get too excited about his improvements in contact rate (66% to 71%) and zone-swing rate (54% to 63%), the fact that those numbers were moving in the right direction was a positive takeaway as well.

You might wince at seeing Valentin’s name on that list of power-hitting shortstops a few paragraphs ago, but he is what makes Cruz so interesting. Valentin never truly solved his flaws as an offensive player, but he became a solid defensive one, and a 30-WAR career is one that should never cause him to have any sleepless nights wondering “what if?” Before the season, ZiPS saw Cruz as a 300-homer hitter over his career with nearly 2,000 total hits, a triple-slash of .246/.321/.436 and 39 WAR. Like Valentin’s career, that’s one that he could be proud of, even if the denouement wouldn’t involve a speech in upstate New York on a hot July day. And with unexpected growth in one area or another, it could be even more. I talked about it in my breakouts piece, in which Cruz was featured, but a five-percentage point improvement in his contact rate is enough to create a domino effect — the good kind — in his projections. An unexpected five-point improvement results in a projection of 60 WAR and 450 homers, with batting averages in the .260s instead of the .240s, and that’s the kind of thing that could end up with that trip to Cooperstown.

Just what the Pirates will do with Cruz when he comes back won’t be known until the summer. While they are competitive at the moment, they’re likely to be safely below .500 by the time he has a return date, and I don’t expect them to be motivated to get him back in the lineup as soon as humanly possible if it has negative repercussions for him long-term. I don’t expect he’ll be shut down for the season; it’s way too early to throw in the towel on an important developmental year. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Cruz’s return is more a September cameo than a six-week sprint. There don’t appear to be any tendon issues (or at least the Pirates haven’t mentioned it), so the hope is certainly that this injury won’t slow him down enough that they need to 86 the plan to keep him at short for the time being. Sure, the Padres moved Fernando Tatis Jr. off the position, but his injury history is more extensive than Cruz’s, and the Friars have other very high-end talent at the position.

Rodolfo Castro and Ji Hwan Bae are the most likely candidates to fill the shortstop position until Cruz returns, and while you don’t like to see it happen for this reason, the Pirates ought to make the most of the opportunity to take a look at other players as well. Mark Mathias was called up to take Cruz’s spot on the roster, and I hope he gets a huge chunk of the playing time at second base. A third-rounder picked by Cleveland in 2015, he was promoted quickly and initially flamed out in Double-A but made progress in his second attempt in Akron, hitting .266/.355/.442 in 2019. He was one of the older fringe prospects who really suffered from a lost minor league season in 2020; the Brewers did give him time on their taxi squad, but he managed only 36 plate appearances for the year. His 2021 was then ruined by a torn labrum. Healthier in 2022, Mathias hit .322/.422/.518 combined in two Triple-A stops and .247/.319/.506 with six homers in 91 plate appearances for the Brewers and Rangers.

Mathias has played some shortstop, but he’s a bit stretched at the position and he’s more a second baseman/third baseman who also has some outfield experience, giving him utility player value for a team that has a viable spare shortstop. ZiPS was the most positive about his bat in the preseason, with a projected wRC+ of 103, but all the projection systems saw him as someone who could contribute at the major league level. He turns 29 in August, so he doesn’t have a lot of time, but I hope the Bucs get a good look at him in the next four months; if he works out, they’ll have four more years after 2023 before he can become a free agent.

Cruz’s injury is a testament to the occasional cruelty of the Baseball Gods. Hopefully, they’ll be merciful this time, and return a potential star relatively unscathed. At least nobody can sensibly blame this injury on the World Baseball Classic!