PITTSBURGH -- There is a moment when Oneil Cruz makes perfect contact with a baseball that unleashes a spectator’s inner child. As the ball soars, there’s no thought of wRC+ or wOBA, of DRS or OAA, of xBA or xSLG. When Cruz makes perfect contact with a baseball and sends a ripple throughout the confines of a cathedral, there is really only one thought that comes to mind, a thought that returns an audience to one of the reasons they fell in love with the game.

Where is that ball going to land?

On a chilly Tuesday evening at PNC Park, on a night when the Pirates beat the Mets, 8-2, the answer was the Allegheny River. In just his 30th career game on the North Shore, Cruz became the latest left-handed slugger to send a ball into the great depths, a feat that many believed was bound to eventually happen -- including Cruz himself.

• Facts & figures on every Allegheny River HR 

“It's about time,” Cruz said with a smile through interpreter Mike Gonzales.

Cruz, who recorded his first career three-hit game, didn’t have a morsel of doubt that the ball was gone off the bat. He was a bit out in front of Tommy Hunter’s payoff curveball, but Cruz has a history of turning awkward swings into roundtrippers. What Cruz wondered as the ball shot through the Pittsburgh night was whether it had enough loft to clear the right-field seats.

He certainly hit the ball hard enough -- 113.4 mph, to be exact. But unlike Rodolfo Castro’s skyscraping two-run home run in the third inning, which hung in the air for 6.6 seconds before banging off the right-field foul pole, Cruz’s liner didn’t have much loft. But it had just enough, barely clearing the stands before bouncing into the river. A Mets fan, who just saw his team go down by six runs, couldn’t help but raise both arms wide and allow his jaw to drop to the floor.

“That's why we play,” Cruz said. To give the fans a show and give everything we have on the field. To see the crowd respond in that way, it feels amazing.”

“That was awesome,” said Mitch Keller, who threw six shutout innings. “Just goes down and gets the slider there. Speechless, man. He’s awesome, a great player. I don’t even know what to say about him. Not much like him.”

Cruz’s home run was the exclamation mark on arguably his best offensive game of the season, one in which he showed off the unteachable tools that make him one of baseball’s most tantalizing youngsters.

In addition to the two-run cannonball, Cruz scorched a 115.3 mph double, his sixth-hardest-hit ball of the season. He complemented the two-bagger by registering a sprint speed of 30.7 feet per second (30.0 feet per second is considered elite) when scoring from second on a single by Bryan Reynolds.

As fun as it was to electrify PNC Park with his bat and with his legs, Cruz was a little shaken up in the bottom of the first when he chipped his tooth on his helmet when sliding into second base. Once the play finished, Cruz put his hands on his knees for a few moments before being met by head athletic trainer Rafael Freitas, who tended to the blood. Cruz was in good spirits after the game, but when asked if the tooth was causing him pain, he smiled and nodded.

Despite being on the wrong side of an errant helmet, Cruz has been dishing out a fair amount of pain with more regularity over the last several weeks. In his last 15 games, he is hitting .268/.328/.589 with four home runs. On Sunday he made an impression with an opposite-field home run that landed in the bullpen, a tough task for any left-handed hitter.

Cruz has endured his share of struggles over the last couple of months, but the rookie is beginning to translate.

“I gotta give credit to my work ethic, the work that I'm putting in, the cage work that I'm putting in, just having better pitch selection at the box and focusing on a zone in the box,” Cruz said. “I think that's giving me results right now.”

On Tuesday, the results were in the water.