Bryan De La Cruz suffers from a lack of contact

Proposal no. 1: Identifying the smartest front office in baseball would be a difficult task even if it wasn’t such a complex question to begin with. How do you evaluate scouting versus development? How do you view the influence of ownership, for better or worse? Or injuries, or luck, or other elements of force majeure?

So I’ll phrase my premise this way: The Braves appear to be a competently run organization. They’ve made the playoffs seven straight years, six of them winning the NL East, and are well-poised to continue contending in the future. They’ve had internal development successes, shrewd trade wins and the occasional opportunistic buy-down move for a veteran free agent. Are they the best managed team in the league? I don’t know, but I would listen to an argument to that effect.

They certainly wouldn’t go out of their way to acquire a player coming off a historically bad season.

Proposal no. 2: Baseball teams these days are pretty good at identifying bad players. The theoretical substitution level is as theoretical as it has ever been; anyone who spends long periods of time submerged below that line tends to get bounced from the formation before they can cause too much damage. Over the past decade, you’ll find a full season with -1.0 WAR or worse roughly once every 100 single-player campaigns. That’s 14 times in 1,375 qualified position player seasons since 2015, and only four times in 658 individual player seasons with 600 or more appearances.

Usually, such a bad player earns playing time through past performances. Or, more precisely, through path dependence based on a giant contract earned through past performance. Albert Pujols, Victor Martinez, Chris Davis and Pablo Sandoval have all broken this statistical thermocline. For a player in his prime to get 600 caps while stinking up to this point… well, that’s rare.

But Bryan De La Cruz just did it. He hit .233/.271/.384 in 622 plate appearances with the Marlins and Pirates last season. That 77 wRC+, coupled with below-average outside corner defense, was good enough to saddle him with a core WAR value of minus-1.2.

Proposal no. 3: The Atlanta Braves just signed Bryan De La Cruz.

Why would they do something like that? It doesn’t make sense!

I’ll caveat this right away: I know De La Cruz is on a non-guaranteed split contract, meaning he would be paid a different amount depending on whether he’s in the major or minor leagues. (Presumably, De La Cruz’s donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation would be adjusted accordingly.) And since he has two option years left, De La Cruz could actually be demoted.

But he currently has the infield on at least a platoon role out of spring training, because — believe it or not — “historically bad” isn’t necessarily a downgrade on what the Braves have in the outfield right now.

It seems ridiculous to say that, given the flashy names at the top of Atlanta’s outfield depth chart. Michael Harris II is an unmissable start, but it gets a little dark after that. Ronald Acuña Jr. is one of the best players in the league when healthy, but he likely won’t be back from his ACL by Opening Day, so there will be at least a temporary vacancy in right field. And left fielder Jarred Kelenic didn’t react as well to his change of scenery as the Braves would have hoped. I could cite Kelenic’s unremarkable 86 WRC+ over the course of an entire season, but instead I think it would be more illustrative to show you how many of Kelenic’s plate appearances came against left-handed pitchers on a month-to-month basis. For comparison, I’ve added league-wide breakdowns for both left-handed hitters and all hitters. If you graphed Atlanta’s confidence in Kelenic’s ability to play every day, you might find worse proxies.

After trading Jorge Soler, releasing Ramón Laureano and Adam Duvall, and hiding Marcell Ozuna’s glove from them, the Braves are surprisingly thin in the outfield. Aside from the players I already mentioned, there are three current members of the Braves’ 40-man roster with major league experience: Austin Riley (has better things to do), Luke Williams (59 career wRC+), and Eli White. (also a career 59 WRC+).

At some point, you just need a guy who stands out in right field. I haven’t taken De La Cruz’s temperature recently, but I’m sure he’s considered a warm body. The same goes for Conner Capel, who Atlanta signed to a minor league contract over the weekend.

Capel is a minor league veteran. (Is 59 big league games in three seasons at age 27 enough to qualify him for Quad-A status? If so, I apologize; I don’t mean to be rude.) But De La Cruz was seen as a promising talent , not that long ago, and has been an everyday player for more than two years before now. He brought back two prospects at the trade deadline just five months ago. The Braves have a propensity to waste time on lottery tickets with their fourth- and fifth-place outfields, especially early in the season. God knows I fell in love with Sam Hilliard two years ago.

Is that all there is to it? Somewhere between a placeholder and this year’s Sam Hilliard? Or can it do more than just crunch numbers?

Well, De La Cruz hasn’t been an above-average hitter, according to wRC+, since his rookie midseason in 2021. As of now, he walks sparingly, strikes out as much as Mickey Moniak and doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard. Despite his average sprint speed, he has very little range in the outfield, though his arm is one of the few attributes that doesn’t appear to have atrophied.

De La Cruz hits lefties better than righties, and while he’s not exactly Wily Mo Peña in “MVP Baseball 2005,” his 99 wRC+ against left-handed pitching last year was a bit more bitter than Kelenic’s 41. We will have a slightly below average hitter in left field.

In 2022, De La Cruz – while performing normally at the plate overall – has had plenty of hard contact. But over the last three seasons, he has gone from the 96th percentile in xBA to 36th, and from the 86th percentile in HardHit% to 58th. His overall numbers against fastballs and off-speed pitches have remained at the same overall level, but it seems like he’s just lost the ability to square things by breaking.

There are few prospect profiles as contact-averse as “the Marlins’ crafty outfielder,” but even in that context, this is pretty shocking. While he’s supported in terms of contact quality, he’s also swinging more – 49.2% in 2022, 53.4% ​​in 2024 – while seeing more strikes – 45.6% zone rate in 2022, 48.7% in 2024. Pitchers aren’t afraid of him, so they see no reason to avoid the zone. Next thing you know, De La Cruz — who was hardly a Joey Votto tribute to begin with — is in the bottom 10 in walks among all qualified hitters.

It’s a situation that can be survived by a hitter with 20-homer power at a center position (Trea Turner, Ezequiel Tovar, Jackson Merrill) or for Luis Arraez, who has anomalous ball-fighting skills. Less for a player like De La Cruz.

So one of two things is happening here. First: De La Cruz just lost his mind. His bat has slowed, his pitch recognition, such as it was, is in the bathroom, and there’s no going back from this. The Braves will find out quickly and De La Cruz will be in Gwinnett – or worse, the White Sox – by Memorial Day. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Or – and hear me out here – we could learn from another member of the Minus-1.0 WAR Club. Enrique Hernández hit .237/.289/.357 and dropped to -1.1 WAR in 2023. He was even worse in the first half of 2024. Then he got the glasses during the All-Star break and everything was fixed.

Hernández hit .274/.307/.458, a 112 wRC+, in the second half, and reduced his strikeout rate by more than 15%. By October, he was a regular starter for the Dodgers and hit .294 with two home runs in 14 playoff games, en route to a second ring.

In other words, De La Cruz should go to the optometrist before we all write him off forever.