The Unscoopable Elly De La Cruz

So I had this brilliant theory. My brilliant theory was that Elly De La Cruz wasn’t as bad a defender as the numbers would have us think. De La Cruz finished the 2025 season with 11 fielding errors, the second most in baseball, and 15 throwing errors, also the second most in baseball. Put those two together and you get 26 total errors, the most in baseball. I thought those totals might be shortchanging De La Cruz a bit. My brilliant theory was wrong, but before I get to why, let me explain my thinking.

We should start with the fact the advanced numbers do not say that De La Cruz is a bad shortstop. He makes up for most of his errors with length, speed, and the Mega Man cannon where his right arm should be. Statcast’s FRV loved De La Cruz’s defense in 2024, and it pegged him as perfectly average as he battled through a quad strain in 2025. Baseball Prospectus’ DRP, which tends to skew more conservative than the other advanced metrics, had him at 0.8 runs in 2024 and -0.4 runs in 2025. Sports Info Solutions’ DRS has always liked De La Cruz’s defense the least, pegging him at -2 in 2024 and -5 in 2025. So it’s not as if De La Cruz is grading out as a catastrophe. I just thought he deserved even more credit, and with that credit, we might have started seeing him as an above-average shortstop rather than a good-enough shortstop.

My hypothesis was based mostly on highlights. I have seen De La Cruz do plenty of amazing things in the field. I’ve also seen him make plenty of errors, but the errors tended to have something in common. See if you can spot it in the clips below:

You see what I’m getting at, right? These throws don’t look that bad. De La Cruz throws the ball so hard that first basemen don’t have enough time to react. They’re getting handcuffed over and over again. None of these throws is perfect, but they’re not all that far off target either. Six of the seven hit leather. Were they thrown by a shortstop with a lesser arm, at something a bit further below the speed of light, the first baseman might have picked them cleanly. Instead, they went uncaught. De La Cruz is getting dinged for errors on balls that aren’t all that far off target, and maybe that’s a little bit unfair.

I don’t mean to say that none of these errors was De La Cruz’s fault at all. The goal isn’t to be in the ballpark; the goal is to record the out. If you’ve got an arm that strong, you’ve got to know your margin for error is smaller and you’ve got know what makes a throw catchable. Still, when the shortstop throws a ball to the first baseman, the blame for an error should exist on something of a spectrum, shouldn’t it? Here’s a thought experiment to show what I mean.

Say I throw a perfectly placed ball right at the first baseman’s chest at 85 mph and it pops out of their glove. That’s 100% on the first baseman, right? That’s an easily catchable ball. What about if the same exact thing happens on a throw that’s 100 mph? My throw was still perfect, but the first baseman’s reaction time is a lot shorter. Maybe we shouldn’t expect them to catch it every single time, so if the blame is only 90% theirs, then I guess the remaining 10% has to go to me, because where else would it go? What if I throw the ball 105 mph? What if I throw it 400 mph and it blows a hole straight through the first baseman’s chest like a cartoon? Do we chisel a big E3 onto their tombstone?

So that was my thinking. An average shortstop throws a certain percentage of balls in the dirt, and an average first baseman scoops them a certain percentage of the time. I can’t say for certain whether De La Cruz throws more balls in the dirt or gets fewer scoops than the average shortstop. In order to do so, I’d have to watch thousands of throws and take meticulous notes, and while readers of this site know that is absolutely the kind of thing that I would normally do, it’s not how I wanted to spend Thanksgiving.

What I can say for sure is that De La Cruz was charged with a suspiciously high number of errors on balls that looked pickable (at least if you didn’t know how hard they were thrown). Right now, De La Cruz’s god-like arm giveth and it taketh away, but we should at least be noting that his throwing errors tended, at least in one sense, to be of the hard-luck variety. In order to take full advantage of De La Cruz’s gifts, the Reds just need to make sure they get a great defender at first base, one who majored in scoops. Such a first baseman could easily make De La Cruz’s rocket arm even more of an asset.

I will now ask you to recall that back in the first paragraph, I said that my theory was wrong. I may not have watched every shortstop throw from the 2025 season, but I did sit down and watch all of De La Cruz’s throwing errors from the past two years. That video I showed you contained seven plays, and they are the only seven instances I could find of this issue. Now, that’s still a lot. Over the past two seasons, 91 different players have spent at least 100 innings at shortstop, and only 21 of them have made more than seven total throwing errors. However, it’s not enough to change the way De La Cruz grades out as a fielder. Had all seven of those throws been caught and converted into outs, it would have resulted in a run value swing somewhere in the neighborhood of two total runs. That’s not nothing, but it’s nowhere near enough to put a big dent in De La Cruz’s overall defensive value.

That alone is enough to blow up my theory. More importantly, those seven plays made up just 25% of De La Cruz’s throwing errors and 13% of his errors overall. Even without them, from 2024 to 2025, he’d still lead all of baseball in errors and rank fourth in throwing errors. I watched all of De La Cruz’s throwing errors, and he really does throw the ball every which way. Watch them back-to-back and you will get very used to hearing Cincinnati play-by-play man John Sadak exclaim, “TALL THROW!”

This is just a thought, but the fact that De La Cruz misses high so often could even be part of the reason that first basemen aren’t scooping that many of his low throws successfully. If they’re worrying about high throws and getting ready to leap, they’re probably not going to be quite as ready for a throw that’s off the mark low. Like I said, that’s just a thought. Regardless, it really is possible that De La Cruz isn’t getting bailed out quite as often as the normal shortstop, at least in part because he throws so hard. That part of my theory may even be likely. But it’s not the reason he leads the league in errors. He’s still earning most of them fair and square.