GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Elly De La Cruz doesn’t remember the other shortstop’s real name, or even what became of him. But he does know that everyone called him Lindor.
As in Francisco Lindor, the Mets superstar and one of the game’s best shortstops. It was a sobriquet applied because of this young man’s talent on the baseball field, a shorthand meant to communicate that the guy was good. It certainly attracted major-league scouts, who flocked to the kid’s academy in the Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo to see him in action.
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But those scouts did not come out to see Elly De La Cruz.
It was 2018 and De La Cruz was 16 years old, one of hundreds of wiry Dominican baseball hopefuls populating the island. But he was not Lindor, although they trained under the same buscón. He had earned no flattering nickname. He was, he recalls, just “another guy.” While Lindor flashed his skills for scouts during showcases, De La Cruz was kept off the field. He was too skinny, he was told. He needed more work. Kids his age were already signing professional contracts — few Dominicans of note ink big-money deals past 16 — but De La Cruz did not seem destined to be one of them.
He loved the game, but he couldn’t help but feel discouraged. For more than a decade, he’d poured himself into the pursuit of a playing career. The youngest of nine children, he left home when he was just 6 years old, moving in with a relative of his coach so he could focus all of his energy on baseball. It was an odyssey meant to reach a crescendo, ideally in a major-league career, but at the very least in a professional contract. But in 2018, with little to show for all that sacrifice, he was thinking of giving up.
If he had, the memory of The Kid Called Lindor might hang in the air like a stench, a bitter reminder of a fate stolen from him. Instead, it serves as a signpost of how far he’s come. One day that summer, he was thrown into a showcase alongside Lindor, ostensibly to make the other guy look good by comparison. Instead, it was De La Cruz walking away with a $65,000 signing bonus from the Reds. That dollar amount isn’t much by the standards of the top Latin American prospects, but for him, it was a foot in the door of professional baseball.
He’s since torn it off the hinges.
Once just another guy, De La Cruz is now a top-100 prospect. In the three years between signing and reporting to spring training last year, he sprouted to 6-foot-5 and 200 pounds. He is lean but solid, already possessed of great strength but poised to add even more muscle. He is fast, athletic and powerful, with scouts dropping 70 grades on his speed, arm strength and raw power at the plate. He switch-hits and plays shortstop and hits titanic home runs.
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He inspires big dreams around the Reds, a glimpse of a possible blindingly bright future that stands in stark contrast to the otherwise dark and depressing current chapter of franchise history. If he pans out, that is. De La Cruz is also only 20 and, in three years as a pro, has yet to accumulate a full season’s worth of plate appearances. He is raw, with prodigious strikeout numbers and piddling walk totals. He might be a star, a perennial All-Star who mans the middle of the infield and peppers the outfield seats with homers. He also might never pass Double A. Neither fate can be ruled out.
That makes his development all the more interesting, and crucial, for the Reds. They might be holding the winning lottery ticket, if only they could make out the smudged final number. Is that a four, or is that a nine? A massive jackpot hangs in the balance. And while his performance will ultimately answer that question, De La Cruz is confident he knows it now.
Just another guy? Not anymore.
“Last year, I came from the D.R. thinking that I needed to make a club,” he says. “Right now, I’m coming with the mentality that I want to finish this year in the big leagues.”
“Me?” he thought. “Sign?”
De La Cruz couldn’t believe it. He’d been grinding so long, and with so little to show for it, that he figured it was never going to happen. Yet he’d found himself on a field in Santo Domingo for a showcase he hadn’t anticipated, fielding and hitting and running for scouts. Though he was not the main attraction that day, he’d performed so well that he siphoned all the attention from the higher-profile player alongside him. This was his chance.
He’d been at it for a decade. He had been a talented youngster, a 6-year-old playing against kids two to three years his senior. They used to pick on him because he was the youngest and the smallest. “Now, I’m the biggest one,” he notes. Six is an absurdly young age to declare oneself for a profession, and all five of De La Cruz’s brothers — including his twin, Pedro — had abandoned the game at some point. None had reached the professional ranks. But, especially once he transitioned to a Santo Domingo academy at age 10, De La Cruz was confident he could be the first.
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And then, slowly, he watched his chances dim. He was kept off the showcase circuit. “If they don’t show you to scouts, that means you’re not good enough and you won’t get signed,” he says, speaking through a team interpreter. “I was really close to giving everything up and going back home.” That would mean flushing a decade of dedication down the drain. He was up against the clock, too — if he didn’t find a deal before he turned 17, the odds of one coming along fell off significantly.
Then came that fateful tryout. The Rockies and Blue Jays watched him but didn’t make him an offer. But veteran Reds scout Richard Jimenez, now with the Dodgers, liked what he saw. That night, De La Cruz received a call asking him to work out again for the team the next day. A day after that second showcase, he landed a deal that became official when the July 2 international signing period began. It all happened in the flash of a bat through the strike zone.
“Nobody was really paying attention to me, so I was another guy,” he says, “and all of a sudden, I’d signed.”
But not for much. De La Cruz’s bonus represented roughly 1 percent of Cincinnati’s international bonus pool of more than $6 million. That number, and the speed at which an agreement was struck, hardly suggests the Reds knew they’d found a stud. Chris Buckley, a longtime scout and the team’s vice president of player personnel, didn’t even see De La Cruz in person before approving the deal. He just relied on the say-so of his man on the ground.
Sometimes the general manager gets involved, and especially big signings are signed off on by ownership, but this was not that. The most pressing concern Buckley remembers having was not about De La Cruz’s talent but whether the team had room at its academy for one more kid. He could trust a scout on a $65,000 flyer, Buckley says, provided “we had the space and could take on another player.”
Happily for De La Cruz, there was a bunk bed at the team’s facility in Boca Chica waiting just for him. Over 43 games in the Dominican Summer League in 2019, his first professional action, he held his own, posting a solid .286 average and .351 on-base percentage, although he slugged a paltry .382. It was enough to prove he belonged in the DSL, but would it be enough to advance? The Reds academy was filled with guys like him. Though he was a professional baseball player, he’d essentially traded one version of anonymity for another.
And he knew it. When the 2020 minor-league season was canceled due to COVID-19 — which, along with the contraction of the minors, precipitated the release of swaths of players across the league — De La Cruz felt the urgency to improve. He needed to show he was not just another guy, but the guy. He wanted to excel, not just hang on. The next time he stepped on the field, he was determined to turn heads.
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“The pandemic year was the hardest year I’ve worked out,” De La Cruz says. “I knew I wasn’t going to play that year, and if I wasn’t going to be good enough for the 2021 season, I was going to get cut. I was going to released. That was my mentality.”
“Right now,” Elly De La Cruz says, “I’m coming with the mentality that I want to finish this year in the big leagues.” (Courtesy of Cincinnati Reds)The game wasn’t even over and Reds farm director Shawn Pender was certain. De La Cruz had spent just 11 games in the Arizona Complex League last summer, his first time playing in the United States, and already the switch-hitting infielder needed to move up.
For weeks, from extended spring training to the beginning of the rookie-league season, Pender had been hearing rave reviews about De La Cruz. The ACL was child’s play for him, his people told him. He’s a man among boys here. Pender’s instinct was to pump the brakes. “It’s not that I don’t trust anybody, but let’s just take it slow,” he says. So, he flew to Goodyear, Ariz., to see De La Cruz in person. Within five innings, he was converted.
“Good lord,” Pender said to himself as another hit hissed off De La Cruz’s bat. “He can’t stay here.” After hitting .400/.455/.780 in 55 plate appearances in the ACL — and recording more extra-base hits than singles — De La Cruz was headed for Low A, where the average player was almost two years older than he was.
De La Cruz had been on the radar before that, of course. If the young infielder had been worried about landing on the chopping block during minor-league contraction, Pender says such a fear wasn’t justified. At that point, he was still too physically projectable and displayed too much of a feel for the game to cut bait. “Those are the guys who are really impossible to release,” the farm director says. Some of them will suddenly fill out. De La Cruz certainly did — between 2019 and 2021, he grew four inches.
“The best part of our year is when kids walk through the door here in spring training and we go, ‘Oh shit, he put on 15 pounds,’” Pender says.
But even superheroes need the first act of the movie to figure out their new powers. De La Cruz, on the other hand, seemed to come out of the lost 2020 season fully formed. But while his genes deserve much of the credit — if you could teach 6-foot-5, everyone would be able to dunk — his improvement can’t be chalked up to nature alone. Nurture played a role. De La Cruz had spent the previous year working with a personal trainer who “helped me get stronger in my legs,” he says. That helped him add bat speed, which is the source of power. He threw harder. He blazed around the bases. “I wasn’t this fast,” he says, “until I met my personal trainer.”
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“He’s a five-tool player,” Pender says, and that package is incredibly enticing. Though the transition from man-child to man might necessitate a position change, he currently looks like he could stick at shortstop. He has natural contact skills and has hit for average from both sides of the plate. The move up to Low A didn’t slow him much. Before running out of gas in the final two weeks of the 2021 season, he owned an .834 OPS at the level. He goes first to third in a flash, fires lasers over to first base and wallops every pitch he touches with enough force to shift the Earth’s axis.
But as impressive as De La Cruz has been, his track record would fit into the syllabic confines of a haiku. Some scouts, while acknowledging his physical prowess, are hesitant to buy in just yet. The history of the game is littered with athletic marvels who never converted raw talent into mastered skills. De La Cruz struck out more than 30 percent of the time last year. Some hitters can make that work, but not when they’re also walking at only a 5 percent clip.
Pender doesn’t deny there’s risk with a prospect like De La Cruz, but he thinks some evaluators miss something that he knows about the 20-year-old. The farm director has been in the game for decades, most of it as a high-level scout, which lends weight to his perspective. And he says that, for his age and experience, De La Cruz is one of the smartest baseball players he’s ever seen.
Even before his growth spurt, the boom-or-bust potential of De La Cruz was, quite literally, nearly off the charts.
Scouts rate players on the 20-to-80 scale by their current value and also their future value. When De La Cruz was a skinny 17-year-old in the DSL, his current value was as low as it could be, a 20 on that scale. But, especially considering how conservative scouts tend to be when forecasting a player’s development, his future value was much, much higher. De La Cruz was “pure projection,” Pender says, with the potential to be a star. A 20/60.
“You don’t do that much,” Pender says.
Now, as De La Cruz has sprouted and filled out, the ceiling has risen. The tools aren’t always consistent, but they show up enough to tantalize. “He’s not a 70 runner down the line, but he is when he’s underway,” Pender says. The same is true of his arm. “He doesn’t show you a 70 arm until he needs it. It’s there.” And though the bust risk remains high given De La Cruz’s lack of experience, Pender also would argue that the floor has been raised as well.
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The farm director raves about De La Cruz’s baseball IQ. Despite the strikeout numbers, he says he’s seen De La Cruz “spit on pitches that most 19-year-olds would chase.” Pender has watched the prospect hang in with two strikes against older, more experienced pitchers. The farm director says player development minds were blown earlier this spring when De La Cruz declined a green light to attempt a steal of third base. His explanation: He didn’t want to make the first out at third base, a faux pas that it’s not uncommon to see big-leaguers make. The coaching staff “just walked away mesmerized, saying, ‘This kid just told me something that guys who are 22 don’t understand yet.’”
As with his strength, that savvy is something De La Cruz can chalk up to more than just a natural gift. He thinks back to those days training as a 10-year-old at the academy in Santo Domingo. His trainer “gave me my groundballs and I took my swings, but it was like fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals,” he says, repeatedly pounding his hand on the table for emphasis. “Fundamentals when I was running the bases, fundamentals when I was on the field, fundamentals when I was hitting.”
If he realizes his potential, pairing his electrifying tools with the acumen to most effectively employ them, that mantra will be a large reason why.
“We’re a game of tools,” Pender says. “You’re not going to be on any of these lists if you don’t have the tools to play. But I do think there are players who don’t reach their maximum capability because they don’t have that baseball IQ.”
There are big developmental hurdles ahead. De La Cruz’s offensive approach is in need of significant refinement. His philosophy at the plate lacks sophistication. “I just look for a strike and I swing as hard as I can,” he says. That’s gotten him in trouble before, he admits. He remembers being ahead 3-0 in one at-bat in Low-A Daytona last year. “I swung out of my shoes and I was all the way open,” he says. Like most hitters, he’ll need to learn the difference between good strikes and bad strikes. The best hitters swing only at the former, while De La Cruz has a tendency to swing at everything. “Sometimes, there were pitches in the dirt I was swinging at,” he says. “I’ve been working on it.”
Whether he figures it out will be an important question for the Reds, especially if “aligning payroll with resources” is going to be a mainstay of roster-building strategy. To win consistently, the best budget-conscious organizations become experts at roster churn. The Cincinnati farm system isn’t barren, especially at shortstop, but it’s crucial it gets the most out of a prospect with as much potential as De La Cruz possesses. He is one of their best Latin American prospects in years, a potential development coup in an area where the organization generally has lagged behind the competition. Before the Reds conducted their post-lockout sell-off, Pender hinted at as much.
“No organization can survive just on the U.S. draft. You have to get real production out of Latin America, and that’s probably what we’re most pleased with,” the farm director said. “We’ve done it in the past, but if we can start to do that again in a way that’s impactful, it really makes a difference in your depth and your ability to move on for cost reasons from other players.”
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If you’re not going to pay to keep your established veterans, you’ve got to have elite young players ready to take their places. Few have the potential to be as elite as De La Cruz. He’s got a lot to polish, but Pender says the Reds are “not afraid of pushing this kid because of his makeup in preparation.” That’s fine with De La Cruz. He once doubted his place in the game, but now he’s sure of it.
“I came over here and I went off,” he says. “At that point, I knew the kind of player I am and I knew nobody was going to stop me.”
(Top photo courtesy of Cincinnati Reds)
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