Just 141 plate appearances into his rookie season, Oneil Cruz is hitting .218/.255/.451. On any given day, he can look like a future Hall of Famer or someone who needs more time at Triple-A.
111+ MPH off the bat of Oneil Cruz for a 416 foot HR! pic.twitter.com/NZwY147FBr
— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) July 26, 2022
Oneil Cruz down on strikes#Pirates 4 #Yankees 1 T3 pic.twitter.com/e1ulmHJX47
— Sᴘᴏʀᴛs 24/7 (@Sports_24x7_) March 27, 2022
Cruz is a huge talent and one of the most interesting players in baseball, but he’ll need to produce more to keep everyone’s attention.
His attention should be on breaking balls.
To date, Cruz has been bedeviled by curveballs and sliders, which has led to these splits, per Baseball Savant:
| PITCH | PITCHES | BA | SLG | xwOBA |
| Fastball | 263 | .239 | .507 | .347 |
| Breaking | 186 | .103 | .103 | .137 |
| Offspeed | 73 | .304 | .739 | .432 |
He has just four hits on breaking pitches and all are singles. Three of those came off righties, and just one came off a lefty, who as a group are pounding Cruz with breaking balls on 50.8% of all pitches.
Digging into pitch types further by whiff rate, you can see that Cruz is struggling to connect with breaking balls:
| PITCH | PITCHES | WHIFF% |
| Slider | 131 | 59.6 |
| 4-Seamer | 130 | 15.8 |
| Sinker | 106 | 21.2 |
| Changeup | 75 | 48.6 |
| Curveball | 58 | 61.9 |
| Cutter | 39 | 0.0 |
| Splitter | 1 | 0.0 |
Pitch recognition, swing decisions and swing efficacy can all improve, so the scouting report isn’t written in stone. In his first full season (2017), Aaron Judge’s xwOBA was 176 points lower on breaking balls than fastballs. The gap is only 76 points this year. Juan Soto had a 249 point gap his rookie year, compared with 117 this year.
But there are also cautionary tales of hitters who struggled to master the breaking ball and fell shy of prospect projections, like Chris Carter and Mark Trumbo.
Cruz will have to work favorable counts that put him in a position to see more fastballs. MLB Pipeline wrote last year that the Pirates “spent a lot of time with Cruz talking about chase rates and committing to a gameplan and approach for each at-bat during his time at the alternate camp last summer, with positive results.” More of that is needed.
But beyond that, Cruz just needs more experience facing breaking balls to show whether he can eventually handle them. If he does, he could be a superstar. Major league pitchers have higher Stuff+ and Location+ scores on their breaking pitches than their minor league counterparts – not to mention better advance scouting reports and pitch sequencing – and for Cruz, it’s a matter of learning and adjusting to reach his potential as a hitter.
