So I had this brilliant theory. My brilliant theory was that Elly Dela Cruz wasn’t as bad a defender as the numbers suggest. 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. Add the two together and you get a total of 26 errors, the most in baseball. I thought those totals might sell De La Cruz a little short. My brilliant theory was wrong, but before I get into why, let me explain my thinking.
We should start with the fact that the advanced numbers don’t mean De La Cruz is a bad shortstop. He makes up for most of his flaws with height, speed, and the Mega Man cannon where his right arm should be. Statcast’s FRV liked De La Cruz’s defense in 2024, and it ranked him as perfectly average when he battled through a quad strain in 2025. Baseball prospectus’ DRP, which tends to be 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 rated De La Cruz’s defense the least, with a score of -2 in 2024 and -5 in 2025. So it’s not like De La Cruz is being labeled a catastrophe. I just thought he deserved even more honor, and with that honor we might have come to see him as an above-average shortstop instead of a good enough shortstop.
My hypothesis was mainly based on highlights. I’ve seen De La Cruz do plenty of them amazing things in the field. I’ve seen it made too many mistakesbut the mistakes usually had 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 the first basemen don’t have enough time to react. They are captivated again and again. None of these throws are perfect, but they’re not that far off the mark either. Six of the seven hit leather. If they had been thrown by a shortstop with a smaller arm, a little further below the speed of light, the first baseman might have been able to catch them cleanly. Instead, they went unnoticed. De La Cruz has been criticized for making mistakes with balls that aren’t that far from the target, and perhaps that’s a bit unfair.
I’m not saying that none of these mistakes were De La Cruz’s fault not at all. The goal is not to be on the margins; the goal is to capture zero. When you have such a strong arm, you have to know that your margin for error is smaller and that you know what makes a throw catchable. Still, if the shortstop throws a ball to the first baseman, blame for an error should lie somewhere on a spectrum, right? Here’s a thought experiment to show what I mean.
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Suppose I throw a perfectly placed ball at 80 miles per hour at the first baseman’s chest and it pops out of his or her glove. That goes 100% for the first baseman, right? That’s an easy ball to catch. What about if the exact same thing happens with a throw of 100 miles per hour? My throw was still perfect, but the first baseman’s reaction time is a lot shorter. Maybe we shouldn’t expect them to pick it up every time, so if the blame is only 90% on them, then I guess the remaining 10% should go to me, because where else would it go? What if I throw the ball at a speed of 170 km/hour? What if I throw it 400 miles an hour and it blows a hole right through the first baseman’s chest like a cartoon? Do we chisel a big E3 on their tombstone?
So that was my thought. An average shortstop throws balls into the ground a certain percentage of the time, and an average first baseman scoops them up a certain percentage of the time. I can’t say for certain whether De La Cruz throws more balls into the ground or gets fewer scoops than the average shortstop. To do that, I would have to watch thousands of throws and take careful notes, and while readers of this site know that this is absolutely the kind of thing I would normally do, this is not the way I wanted to spend Thanksgiving.
What I can say with certainty is that De La Cruz was accused of a suspiciously high number of fouls on balls that looked like they could be retrieved (at least if you didn’t know how hard they were thrown). At this point, De La Cruz’s divine arm gives and takes away, but we should at least note that his throwing errors were, at least in some sense, of the bad luck variety. To take full advantage of De La Cruz’s gifts, the Reds just need to make sure they get a great defenseman at first base, someone who has a major scoop on firsts. Such a first baseman could easily make De La Cruz’s rocket arm even more of an asset.
I will now ask you to remember that in the first paragraph I said that my theory was wrong. I may not have seen every shortstop throw from the 2025 season, but I did watch all of De La Cruz’s throwing errors from the last two years. The video I showed you had seven plays in it, and these are the only seven examples I could find of this song. That’s still a lot. Over the past two seasons, 91 different players have logged at least 100 innings at shortstop, and only 21 of them have committed more than seven total pitching errors. However, it is not enough to change the way De La Cruz performs as a fielder. If all seven pitches had been caught and converted to 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 not nearly enough to make 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 accounted for just 25% of De La Cruz’s throwing errors and 13% of his total errors. Even without them, he would still lead all of baseball in errors from 2024 to 2025 and rank fourth in pitching errors. I’ve looked at all of De La Cruz’s throwing mistakes, and he really throws the ball all over the place. Watch them back to back and you’ll 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 first basemen don’t successfully hit as many of his low throws. If they’re worried about high throws and getting ready to jump, they probably won’t be as ready for a throw that isn’t good enough. Like I said, that’s just a thought. Either way, it’s really possible that De La Cruz doesn’t get saved as often as the normal shortstop, at least partly because he throws so hard. That part of my theory may even be probable. But that’s not the reason he leads the league in fouls. He still earns most of them fair and square.
#unstoppable #Elly #Cruz