Major League Baseball

Reds' Elly De La Cruz is MLB's top prospect and a unicorn, and he’s almost here

Updated Jun. 6, 2023 1:49 p.m. ET

Editor's note: The Reds announced that they have called up shortstop Elly De La Cruz ahead of Tuesday's game against the Dodgers. This story originally ran on May 31.

Stories about Cincinnati Reds prospect Elly De La Cruz read like folktale, high fiction, the stuff of myth and legend. He is Paul Bunyan in baseball pants, Superman with exit velocity. De La Cruz, widely considered the top prospect in baseball, is faster than the speed of light, with a howitzer arm and light-tower home run juice. He's too good to be true yet is.

In a Triple-A game earlier this month, De La Cruz hit three balls (two homers and a double) with an exit velocity of 116.6 mph or higher. Nobody in the MLB exit-velo tracking era — not Aaron Judge, not Oneil Cruz, not Giancarlo Stanton — has ever hit three balls that hard in the same game. De La Cruz did it as a 21-year-old.

His enormous strides also give him top-of-the charts foot speed. On Tuesday evening, prior to hitting a walk-off bomb, he was clocked at 31.9 feet per second on a groundout, a full 1.5 ft/second better than the highest-average runner in MLB this season. Despite standing a ceiling-scraping 6-foot-5, he has the athleticism and flexibility to play a capable shortstop. Oh, and a 99.2 MPH throw he made across the diamond earlier this year was clocked as the hardest infield throw by any Triple-A or MLB player this year.

And now, this phenom is on the cusp of a big-league debut. Within the game there are rumblings and whispers burbling beneath the surface. If not this week then potentially the next. The future is imminent at Great American Ballpark and Reds fans should be incredibly excited.

Signed out of the Dominican Republic by the Reds back in 2018, De La Cruz quickly established himself as a prototypical high-variance prospect. The type of player with jaw-dropping raw juice, but concerning swing-and-miss tendencies. Outrageously talented with more tools than a lawn shed and a real risk of never reaching the big leagues.

In 2021, he did little to assuage concerns about his iffy swing decisions, running an outrageously bad 4% walk rate in low-A Daytona. Players with such profiles against low-level pitching rarely, if ever, overcome their shortcomings and make the needed adjustments to develop into big leaguers. Heading into 2022, De La Cruz looked like another boom-or-bust candidate destined to underwhelm and under-deliver.

But despite racking up a mountain of strikeouts last year (158, to be exact), the lanky and limber infielder made significant progress in high-A Dayton and Double-A Chattanooga. He tallied 68 extra-base hits in 121 games with 47 steals and an eye-popping .304/.359/.586 line, even though he was four years younger than the average player in Double-A. That made him one of the game’s most enticing prospects (in the top 10 to 15 on most lists).

And then ... somehow ... unfortunately for the rest of baseball, Elly De La Cruz got even better.

Since May 9th, an 18-game sample, he has compiled more walks than strikeouts while simultaneously continuing to eviscerate the baseball to the tune of eight homers and 15 extra-base hits overall. He also has nine steals during this stretch.

He is a freak, a unicorn, a baseball typhoon, a repudiation of physics and, most amazingly, outrageously adaptable. That De La Cruz recognized his biggest flaws as a hitter — those evil twin tendencies to (1) chase outside the zone and (2) swing through breaking stuff in the zone — and swiftly and effortlessly improved upon them, is remarkable.

It’s impossible to talk about De La Cruz, whose wiry 200-pound frame looks like it should be in an end zone jumping over a defensive back, without bringing up the similarly young, talented and stick-ish Pirates infielder Oneil Cruz, who just happens to have a similar name. Cruz, despite his minor-league success and flashes of brilliance at the big-league level, has yet to prove himself capable of making adjustments to ensure better contact and be a more valuable contributor. His early-season injury has robbed him of the chance to prove himself this year, but those around the game harbor skepticism that Cruz will ever overcome his flawed offensive approach to totally capitalize on his immense talent.

De La Cruz, on the other hand, has already shown an aptitude to adjust. And at the highest level, that is absolutely vital. Whenever he gets called up to Cincy, the cat-and-mouse game will begin, a game he looks quite capable of playing.

How De La Cruz fits into Cincinnati's roster remains to be seen, but honestly, the resulting roster shakeup is kind of irrelevant. The current infield situation is undoubtedly overcrowded between the Reds' emotional leader Jonathan India and fellow rookies Matt McLain and Spencer Steer. But when you have a freakazoid who hits the baseball hard more often than maybe anyone else ever, you find a spot for him whenever he’s ready. Maybe that means India moves to DH or Steer sees time in the outfield, but it really won’t matter because of how good De La Cruz could be.

Prospects are aspirations, apparitions, theoretical dreams until they actually show up in a major-league stadium and contribute in the bigs. The sport’s history is riddled with coulda-beens and shoulda-beens who never put it together. De La Cruz could very well join that list. Only time will tell.

But what makes him such an enticing proposition is what he could be. Nobody else can do all the things he can do. He is a glimpse at the sun, the inside of Pandora’s box. Soon, we’ll know what’s inside.

Jake Mintz, the louder half of @CespedesBBQ is a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He played college baseball, poorly at first, then very well, very briefly. Jake lives in New York City where he coaches Little League and rides his bike, sometimes at the same time. Follow him on Twitter at @Jake_Mintz.

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