This article is part of our Collette Calls series.
I will just open this weekly installment with a mea culpa. I had strong convictions, and stated them on many podcasts, that I would prefer to have Oneil Cruz in the 5th round over Elly De La Cruz in the 2nd or early 3rd round where he was going. To date, that conviction has served me incredibly poorly as De La Cruz leads all of fantasy baseball with $60 of earned auction value as play begins on May 17th while Cruz is coming in at a respectable $13 figure. I prefer not to look at this as a massive failure, but as yet another lesson to be learned in the process of forecasting future performance of players. With that in mind, I'd like to bring you through my own after action review to see where I had blind spots in making this prediction and what we can all potentially learn from that process.
Let's begin by resurfacing the fantasy outlook we had for De La Cruz before the season began:
De La Cruz took the baseball world by storm upon his arrival to the major leagues. He immediately flashed the incredible power/speed combo that made him a top prospect and hit for the cycle in just his 15th career game, helping spark the Reds to a 12-game winning streak in June. Eventually things went south for both player and team, though De La Cruz showed once again that speed doesn't slump with 18 steals in his final 50 games despite
I will just open this weekly installment with a mea culpa. I had strong convictions, and stated them on many podcasts, that I would prefer to have Oneil Cruz in the 5th round over Elly De La Cruz in the 2nd or early 3rd round where he was going. To date, that conviction has served me incredibly poorly as De La Cruz leads all of fantasy baseball with $60 of earned auction value as play begins on May 17th while Cruz is coming in at a respectable $13 figure. I prefer not to look at this as a massive failure, but as yet another lesson to be learned in the process of forecasting future performance of players. With that in mind, I'd like to bring you through my own after action review to see where I had blind spots in making this prediction and what we can all potentially learn from that process.
Let's begin by resurfacing the fantasy outlook we had for De La Cruz before the season began:
De La Cruz took the baseball world by storm upon his arrival to the major leagues. He immediately flashed the incredible power/speed combo that made him a top prospect and hit for the cycle in just his 15th career game, helping spark the Reds to a 12-game winning streak in June. Eventually things went south for both player and team, though De La Cruz showed once again that speed doesn't slump with 18 steals in his final 50 games despite hitting just .199/.285/.361 during that stretch and falling to the bottom of the batting order. Overall, De La Cruz hit 25 homers and stole 46 bases in 136 games between Triple-A and the big leagues at the age of 21. There are swing-and-miss issues that he'll need to address and he may not reach his true potential for a while yet, but the loud tools combined with regular playing time in a band box park make it tempting to overlook his flaws. The downside potential is he ends up back in the minors after a prolonged slump.
The tl;dr summation of that outlook would say, "high risk, high reward." De La Cruz was coming off a season with a .235 batting average and a 33.7 percent strikeout rate, finishing the year with an 84 wRC+ while having a lot more blue than red on his final slider profile:
He had defense, speed and the ability to square up certain pitches well going for him, but the rest of the foundation here was incredibly risky on the surface given what we have seen from similar skill profiles in the past. The sophomore slump label persists in fantasy baseball for reasons like this where the talent takes a step back before taking a step forward. After all, we were talking about a player whose ability to make contact within the strikezone worsened as the season went on in 2023:
In hindsight, I should have given more credence to a few things. Primarily, the organization was going to give De La Cruz every chance to succeed or fail because of his talent ceiling, so he would have plenty of time before the club did anything reactionary such as sending him back to Louisville amidst a prolonged slump. Secondly, there was no way David Bell was going to let De La Cruz's speed go to waste given Cincinnati led the league in steals, stealing 190 bases as a club with an 80 percent success rate.
To that end, Cincinnati attempted a stolen base just over 10 percent of the time when the next base was unoccupied; De La Cruz attempted steals 41 percent of the time when presented with the opportunity. He was 35-of-43 in his attempts last season, and that production was only limited with his .271 second-half OBP. He went 12 of 14 in steals in September with a .311 OBP, which in hindsight was a strong leading indicator of what was in store for this season. Lastly, a final look back at 2023 showed how De La Cruz was eliminating an issue where he was getting himself in bad situations by expanding the strike zone:
Overall, the high risk and high reward profile was ever present, with a few indications that it was worth the risk to get out in front of the upcoming surge in fantasy value. De La Cruz has raised his on-base percentage 70 points from last season and is running at a rate we have never seen in baseball. Baseball-Reference defines stolen base opportunities as a runner on first or second with the next base unoccupied. Rickey Henderson, in his best year, attempted a steal 76.4% of the time. Tim Raines, in his best Expos season, attempted a steal 69.4 percent of the time. Vince Coleman, at his best, attempted a steal 63.9 percent of the time, while Lou Brock ran 50.5 percent at his best.
De La Cruz is attempting a stolen base in 81.4 percent of his opportunities, as he has attempted 35 stolen bases in 43 chances when the next base was unoccupied. He has nearly doubled his attempted steal rate from last season, which was already among the best in the league, and has taken it to historic levels to date. We have not seen a 100-steal season since Coleman last did it in 1987 to close out a three-year stretch of 100+ steals seasons. Coleman stole 326 bases over three seasons with 4 homers and a batting average anywhere from .232 to .289.
What we're currently seeing from De La Cruz borders on Eric Davis levels of production. Davis hit 27 homers and swiped 80 bases in 1986 despite playing in only 132 games, and both of those totals are within reach for De La Cruz this season, as he's a third of the way to the homer total and 38 percent of the way to the stolen-base total. He is but four homers and five steals away from matching last year's numbers and could end up doing so in just over half the playing time.
This is in no way projecting De La Cruz can sustain his current level of production, because while he has been able to maintain his strike zone discipline gains from last season, there is still some risk with him within the strike zone if we extend the two graphs above to include his performance to date this season:
The simple matter here is that high risk, high reward situations are sometimes worth the risk. De La Cruz is making those who took him in the top-30 overall look like geniuses while those of us who criticized the pick and took a safer player are left choking on regret. The lesson learned here is there can sometimes be interesting data points lost in a sea of bad indicators and if the player can maximize those, they can outperform expectations as De La Cruz is doing now. If not for the amazing hitting of Shohei Ohtani this season, De La Cruz would be well on his way to lap the field in fantasy production. De La Cruz and Ohtani are now tied atop the leaderboard of earned auction value at $59, with Mookie Betts trailing both by $12.
