The Cincinnati Reds made a lot of changes from 2024 to 2025. Plenty of those changes came in the coaching staff. While pitching coach Derek Johnson is returning, the club is getting a new manager in Terry Francona, and they are also getting a new hitting coach with former Reds infielder Chris Valaika and a new assistant hitting coaches with now former Reds minor league hitting coach Alex Pelaez and newcomer to the organization Will Remillard. They are already getting to work as they are looking to help Elly De La Cruz cut down on his strikeouts by changing a few things with his swing. Charlie Goldsmith wrote about the changes over at his newsletter.
“It’s a little bit different of a set up this year,” new hitting coach Chris Valaika said. “The biggest thing we’re going to focus on with Elly is keeping him aggressive, but being more in control with his forward movement. Moving more through the middle of his body helps with his adjustability. It helps with his decision making.”
The decision making part there feels like it is the most important. When Elly De La Cruz makes contact we all know what happens. It can be magic. But he also led the league in strikeouts last season and had a strikeout rate of 31.3% – which was 10th worst in baseball among players with at least 400 plate appearances. The strikeouts did not stop the Reds shortstop from being a very productive player. He made up for it by posting a solid walk rate, hitting for a lot of power, leading the league in steals, and providing tons of defensive value. At the end of the 2024 season he was the 9th most valuable position player in baseball according to Fangraphs version of WAR.
How much better could that be with better “decisions” while in the batters box? That’s the question the Reds hitting coaches are looking to get an answer to. But to get there, let’s talk about the decisions from the past. The first thing we probably want to look at is how often he swung at pitches that were not in the zone. Last season he swung at non-strikes 28.2% of the time. That is slightly better than the league average of 28.6%. It rated 104th out of 207 players with at least 400 plate appearances last season.
Swinging at pitches out of the zone is something you don’t want guys to do. Even “bad ball hitters” don’t actually hit well on non-strikes as a whole. Maybe there’s one very specific part of “out of the zone” they hit well when it comes to a particular pitch, but overall it’s not something that anyone is actually successful with. One can argue that at times it’s better to make contact on a pitch out of the zone than to not make contact with it – if you have two strikes, making contact is better because there’s a chance it turns into a hit. But if there are less than two strikes the odds of getting a hit are low on contact out of the zone and getting another chance at perhaps a better pitch could be in your favor of getting a hit later in the at-bat (or drawing a walk, etc.).
For Elly De La Cruz in 2024 he made contact on pitches he swung at outside of the zone 45.1% of the time. That was significantly lower than the 55.9% rate he had in 2023 as a rookie. The league made contact 56.2% of the time when they swung at non-strikes, so De La Cruz was significantly worse in this area than average. He ranked 180th of the 207 players with at least 400 plate appearances in 2024.
When it comes to pitches out of the zone, the decision making itself isn’t bad. He’s swinging at a rate that’s pretty much league average. You would like that to improve (and it did indeed improve from 2023 to 2024), and that kind of thing usually does come as players get more experience, though it’s usually a slow process rather than a big leap forward all at once. The issue when it comes to his expansion of the strikezone is far more related to his inability to make contact when he does.
But swing decisions aren’t just related to expanding the strikezone. Most guys also have some spots within the strikezone that they aren’t as good with as other parts of the zone. When it comes to two strikes, you’ve got to swing when it’s in the zone. But before then you might be better off leaving a pitch that is in the zone, but not in “your zone” to go on by and get another shot.
When it comes to the in-zone swinging by Elly De La Cruz we can see that he swung at pitches that were strikes 58.1% of the time. The league as a whole swung 66% of the time at strikes. De La Cruz laid off of strikes more than the average player. He was near the bottom of the league when it came to swinging at strikes – ranking 190th of 207 players last year.
When we look at how often he swings at all pitches, it was just 42.9%. That ranked 176th out of 207. Swinging more on it’s own isn’t the answer, of course. But swinging more at better pitches certainly would be. And those pitches are the ones in the zone, not the ones out of the zone. Juan Soto had the lowest swing rate in baseball last season, but his number was low because he rarely expanded the strikezone. Soto’s rate of swinging at strikes was 57.6%. That’s pretty much where De La Cruz was, but he swung at pitches outside of the zone far less often.
Let’s look a little bit at what Elly De La Cruz did against non-strikes and strikes in 2024. I will preface this by saying that these numbers may not be 100% perfect, but they are going to be pretty close. This data isn’t exactly publicly available in an easy to use format, so I have to run the numbers myself based on publicly available data and parse it all out myself. It’s also worth noting that these numbers will be based only on swings at ended an at-bat. That means a swing that was a swing-and-miss is only accounted for if that was strike three.
On pitches out of the strikezone, Elly De La Cruz had 27 hits and hit .134 and slugged .178. When it comes to pitches in the strikezone, Elly De La Cruz had 133 hits and hit .317 while slugging .609. While I don’t have the numbers for every player in baseball, I’ve done this exercise with plenty of players over the years and the numbers are similar to this in the sense that the disparity is like this. Strikes are far easier to do damage on than non-strikes.
What the numbers tell us is that simply swinging at fewer non-strikes would lead to better overall numbers for Cincinnati’s young superstar. It would lead to fewer outs made on contact, which would boost batting average and slugging as it would lower the denominator. But it would also likely lead to more strikes being seen and likely more quality hits and more extra-base hits given what we’ve seen in the data for how De La Cruz handles strikes.
Getting Elly De La Cruz to swing at non-strikes less often is a good step. But he also would likely see good improvements if he can improve on what he’s doing in the zone. He’s not exactly aggressive in the strikezone. That’s not always a bad thing, but most guys would probably benefit from swinging at strikes a little more often than they do. Again, guys hit strikes well.
We’ve noted that De La Cruz doesn’t swing at balls in the zone nearly as often as the average player does. So getting him to do that a little more is probably a good step int he right direction. But there’s another issue here, too. He doesn’t make contact often enough when he does swing at pitches in the zone. His contact rate on pitches in the zone was 79.4% last season. That was down from 82.9% in 2023 as a rookie. Last year the league average rate was 85.2%.
A big improvement in one area would go a long way for anyone. But for a player like Elly De La Cruz who can make magic happen with contact – whether it’s a 450-foot home run or a ball in the gap that a mere mortal would only turn into a double that he threatens to score on if there’s even the smallest mistake along the way of getting the ball back to the infield – it could go a bit further.
A big improvement in one area isn’t necessarily needed to make a big difference, though. Small improvements in all of these areas would likely make for a pretty big difference, too.
Every spring we hear stories from just about every team and how someone has a new thing going on that’s going to help them take that next step. Most of the time it’s something that we don’t see happen. Maybe that’s what we’ll be thinking about when August rolls around. But we might also be looking back and thinking about how this did make some meaningful impact. Now we just get to sit back, wait, watch, and see.
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