Bryan De La Cruz Suffers From a Lack of Contact(s)

Proposition No. 1: Identifying the smartest front office in baseball would be a difficult task even if it weren’t such a loaded question to start. How do you weight scouting versus development? How do you factor the influence of ownership, for good or ill? Or injuries, or luck, or other elements of force majeure?

So I’ll state my premise this way: The Braves seem to be a competently run organization. They’ve made the playoffs seven years running — six of those by winning the NL East — and are set up well to continue contending in the future. They’ve had internal developmental successes, savvy trade wins, and the occasional opportunistic buy-low move for a veteran free agent. Are they the best-run team in the league? I don’t know, but I’d hear out an argument to that effect.

Surely they wouldn’t go out of their way to acquire a player coming off a historically bad season.

Proposition No. 2: Baseball teams are pretty good at identifying bad players these days. The theoretical replacement level is as theoretical as it’s ever been; anyone who spends long periods of time submerged below that line tends to get bounced from the lineup before he can do too much damage. In the past decade, you’ll find a full season of -1.0 WAR or worse roughly once in every 100 individual player campaigns. That’s 14 times in 1,375 qualified position player seasons since 2015, and just four times in 658 individual player seasons of 600 or more plate appearances.

Usually, a player that bad earns playing time through past performance. Or, more accurately, though path dependence based on a giant contract earned through past performance. Albert Pujols, Victor Martinez, Chris Davis, and Pablo Sandoval have all broken through this statistical thermocline. For a player in his prime to get 600 plate appearances while stinking out the joint to this extent… well, it’s rare.

But Bryan De La Cruz just did it. He hit .233/.271/.384 in 622 plate appearances for the Marlins and Pirates last season. That 77 wRC+, along with below-average corner outfield defense, was good enough to saddle him with a millstone WAR figure of minus-1.2.

Proposition No. 3: The Atlanta Braves just signed Bryan De La Cruz.

Why would they do such a thing? It makes no sense!

I’ll caveat this right off the top: I know that De La Cruz is on a non-guaranteed split contract, which means that he’d get paid a different amount based on whether he’s in the major leagues or the minors. (Presumably, De La Cruz’s donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation would be adjusted accordingly.) And because he has two option years left, De La Cruz could indeed get demoted.

But he currently has the inside track on at least a platoon role out of spring training, because — believe it or not — “historically bad” is not necessarily a downgrade on what the Braves have in the outfield at the moment.

It feels ridiculous to say that, given the splashy names at the top of Atlanta’s outfield depth chart. Michael Harris II is a must-start, but after that it gets a little dark. Ronald Acuña Jr. is one of the best players in the league when healthy, but he probably won’t be back from his torn ACL by Opening Day, so there will be at least a temporary vacancy in right field. And left fielder Jarred Kelenic did not react as well to his change of scenery as the Braves would’ve hoped. I could cite Kelenic’s unimpressive 86 wRC+ over a full season, but instead I think it’d be more illustrative to show you how many of Kelenic’s plate appearances came against left-handed pitchers on a month-by-month basis. For comparison, I’ve added the league-wide splits both for left-handed hitters and for all hitters. If you were graphing Atlanta’s confidence in Kelenic’s ability to play everyday, you could come up with worse proxies.

Having traded away Jorge Soler, cut loose Ramón Laureano and Adam Duvall, and having hidden Marcell Ozuna’s glove from him, the Braves are surprisingly thin in the outfield. Apart from the players I’ve already mentioned, there are three current members of the Braves’ 40-man roster with major league outfield experience: Austin Riley (has better things to do), Luke Williams (career 59 wRC+), and Eli White (also a career 59 wRC+).

At some point, you just need a guy to go stand out in right field. I haven’t measured De La Cruz’s temperature recently, but I’m confident that he counts as a warm body. So does Conner Capel, whom Atlanta signed to a minor league deal over the weekend.

Capel is a career minor league veteran. (Is 59 big league games over three seasons at age 27 enough to qualify him for Quad-A status? If so, I apologize; I don’t want to be unkind.) But De La Cruz was viewed as a promising talent not that long ago, and has been an everyday player for two-plus years before now. He brought back two prospects at the trade deadline just five months ago. The Braves have a propensity to screw around with lottery tickets with their fourth and fifth outfield spots — especially early in the season. God knows I fell for the Sam Hilliard okey-doke two years ago.

Is that all this is? Somewhere between a placeholder and this year’s Sam Hilliard? Or can he do more than make up the numbers?

Well, De La Cruz hasn’t been an above-average hitter, according to wRC+, since his rookie half-season in 2021. As of right now, he walks sparingly, strikes out as much as Mickey Moniak, and doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard. Despite average sprint speed, he has rock-bottom range in the outfield, though his arm is one of the few attributes that doesn’t seem to have atrophied.

De La Cruz does hit lefties better than righties, and while he’s not exactly Wily Mo Peña in “MVP Baseball 2005,” his 99 wRC+ against left-handed pitching last year was quite a bitter than Kelenic’s 41. Put the two together and you’ll have one slightly below-average hitter in left field.

Back in 2022, De La Cruz — while performing unremarkably at the plate in general — did make a lot of hard contact. But over the past three seasons, he’s gone from the 96th percentile in xBA to 36th, and from the 86th percentile in HardHit% to 58th. His overall numbers against fastballs and offspeed pitches have stayed in the same general ballpark, but he seems to have just lost the ability to square up breaking stuff.

There are few prospect profiles as contact-averse as “toolsy Marlins outfielder,” but even in that context, this is pretty shocking. While he’s backed up in terms of quality of contact, he’s also swinging more — 49.2% in 2022, 53.4% in 2024 — while seeing more strikes — 45.6% in-zone rate in 2022, 48.7% in 2024. Pitchers aren’t afraid of him, so they see no reason to avoid the zone. Next thing you know, De La Cruz — who was hardly a Joey Votto tribute act to begin with — is in the bottom 10 in walk rate among all qualified hitters.

That’s survivable for a hitter with 20-homer power at an up-the-middle position (Trea Turner, Ezequiel Tovar, Jackson Merrill) or for Luis Arraez, who has outlier bat-to-ball skills. Less so for a player like De La Cruz.

So one of two things is happening here. First: De La Cruz has just lost it. His bat’s slowed down, his pitch recognition, such as it was, is in the toilet, and there’s no coming back from this. The Braves will find this out quickly, and De La Cruz will be in Gwinnett — or worse, on the White Sox — by Memorial Day. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Or — and hear me out here — we could learn from another member of the Minus-1.0 WAR Club. Enrique Hernández hit .237/.289/.357 and dropped all the way to negative-1.1 WAR in 2023. He was even worse in the first half of 2024. Then he got glasses sometime around the All-Star break and everything was fixed.

Hernández hit .274/.307/.458, a 112 wRC+, in the second half, and cut his strikeout rate by more than 15%. By October, he was a regular starter for the Dodgers, and hit .294 with two home runs in 14 playoff games, en route to a second ring.

In other words, De La Cruz should go to the optometrist before we all write him off for good.