How the Pirates reversed Cruz's luck against lefties

This story was excerpted from Alex Stumpf’s Pirates Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Oneil Cruz connected with a Brent Suter slider Friday and it was true, a 411-foot shot to dead center that left the bat with an exit velocity of 106.7 mph. That blast was the 20th of Cruz’s season, making him just the 10th Pirate to join the 20-20 club, a taste of his immense potential starting to be realized at the highest level.

“It means a lot, for sure,” Cruz said, via interpreter and coach Stephen Morales. “Especially since I’ve been through a lot health-wise with my ankle. To be able to accomplish that and help the team somehow through those numbers, it means a lot to me.”

It’s been a year of growth for Cruz, who has rebounded from his fractured ankle to steadily improve at the plate throughout the season. That swing against Suter is an example of his growth in what was one of his greatest weaknesses in his rookie season: He’s been mashing against left-handed pitching.

Lefty pitchers flummoxed Cruz during his rookie season in 2022, when he batted just .158 with 59 strikeouts in 111 trips to the plate against southpaws. Teams were quick to go to their lefty relievers against him and manager Derek Shelton dropped him to the lower part of the order whenever a lefty started. It carried over to the start of 2024, and Cruz hit just .103 in his first 61 plate appearances against left-handers through May.

That obviously wasn’t going to cut it, so the team challenged him at the start of June to work to improve in several areas, including against left-handed pitching. They wanted to give him some runway in the season to see how he would adjust to the speed of a Major League game after missing almost all of 2023, but once they knew he had his footing, it was time to push him harder.

“If you want to get absolutely nerdy on left-on-left sample size, you almost have to go over a three-year period because you just don’t see it and it’s so volatile,” Shelton said. “June 1, it was not in a position where we thought it was good. So, OK, we’re going to brainstorm: We’re going to talk about how we’re doing it differently. To say that’s right or wrong [to wait until then], I don’t know we know that because that sample size is so small, but at that point, it was kind of an inflection point of, ‘OK, we’re going to have to intervene here a little bit.’”

It’s worked, and Cruz has excelled against lefties of late. His .329 batting average against left-handers since the start of June is the best among all National League lefty hitters (min. 60 PA), and his .968 OPS is tied for the second best in the Senior Circuit in that timeframe.

That mini-intervention has yielded a new approach. Through May, Cruz’s average bat speed was 75.9 mph and average swing length was 7.4 feet whenever he faced a lefty in a two-strike count. He’s shortened up his swing in those situations since the start of August, averaging a swing speed of 73.8 mph with a swing length of 7.1 feet. It’s still the quickest bat on the team in those situations, and his whiff rate in those situations has dropped from 35.7% of swings to 25.9%.

Cruz also opened up his stance, especially in his upper body, to give him a better vantage point for a lefty’s arm angle. Like with the bat speed, he has plenty of natural raw power, and he can trade a bit of it to put himself in a better position to see the ball from a southpaw and put the bat on the ball.

“It’s hard work, working in the cage with [assistant hitting coach Christian] Marrero and the guys there, that's what’s transferring to the game,” Cruz said.

Cruz looks like a different, more confident hitter against left-handers, and the results speak for themselves. It’s also just three and a half months' worth of sample size, less than the three years Shelton and the team looked at originally. So how confident are they that these changes will continue to play moving forward?

“I think we feel confident in the approach that we’ve put into place and his willingness to buy into that approach, and the success we’ve had in it,” Shelton said, before cracking a smile. “Though the ultimate answer to that is, ‘Yes.’”