Elly De La Cruz: An Anomaly and One of The Brightest Young Stars This Season
22-year-old phenom Elly De La Cruz has come out of the gates hot in the 2024 season for the Reds, showing fans around the sport that he may be the next big MLB star. The shortstop comes in at a lanky six feet and five inches tall which is quite tall for a shortstop, as the average height for shortstops across the MLB is just six feet tall. He is one of the fastest players in the league, with an average sprint speed of 30 miles per hour, which places him in the 100th percentile. This makes De La Cruz somewhat of an anomaly, as players of his height typically don't have the speed that he does. Something that plays more into his height, however, is his arm strength and exit velocity. His average exit velocity comes in at 92 miles an hour, placing him in the 87th percentile, and his average throw comes in at 91.2 miles an hour, placing him in the 92nd percentile. All of these statistics are provided by Baseball Savant, here’s De La Cruz’s page if you want to see some of his insane advanced statistics yourself.
Through 50 games this season, De La Cruz is batting .254 with nine home runs, 23 runs batted in, and an .815 OPS. These stats are, obviously, amazing for such a young shortstop, but the most eye-catching stat is his 31 stolen bases already. He has the potential to be the first player to steal 80 bases since Vince Coleman did it all the way back in 1988, and bring back the 100-steal season for the first time since Coleman did it the year before. If you were to have one gripe about his game is that he isn’t a great defensive player besides his arm strength, racking up negative one-outs above average and negative five defensive runs saved. However, he is still a young, developing player, and for someone with as much natural talent as De La Cruz has, it won’t take him long to become better in that aspect.
De La Cruz is exciting to watch and has Reds fans packing the stadium even though the team as a whole isn’t playing too great. There aren’t many players with his talent at such a young age. Similarly, he has enough time to develop the weaker parts of his game. His ability to hit for power combined with his speed and arm strength is something unprecedented and gives him the potential to be a star in the game if he is not already.
