Elly De La Cruz, the Cincinnati Reds, and history.
Elly De La Cruz can do things that other human beings can’t do on a baseball field. But it’s not just one thing, it’s so many things. On Monday night in the series opener against the Milwaukee Brewers the Cincinnati Reds shortstop showed off two of those things that make him a different kind of guy. De La Cruz hit a 450-foot home run from the left side of the plate in the 5th inning. Two innings later he homered from the right side of the plate – but this one didn’t leave the ballpark. Nope, this one got by a diving center fielder and rolled to the warning track while De La Cruz raced around the bases and slid head first to the plate for an inside-the-park homer.
Those two things weren’t the only things that he did on the night that made it special, but we’ll get to some of the other stuff later on. Let’s first focus on the home runs.
Jason Bernard of MLB.com’s research department says that Elly De La Cruz is the first player in the Statcast Era (the start of 2015) to have both a 450-foot home run and an inside-the-park home run in the same game.
In 2023 De La Cruz was the fastest player in the big leagues. To put into perspective how fast he was moving on his inside-the-park home run, here’s a freeze frame at the point when Brewers right fielder Jackson Chourio picked up the baseball in center….. note where De La Cruz was on the infield:
When the game was over, Elly De La Cruz went 3-4 with a steal, two home runs, and four runs scored. That helped put his name in a few more spots in the record books. He joined Pete Rose and Javier Valentin as the only Reds players to homer from both sides of the plate in the same game.
Those home runs from each side of the plate, coupled with the fact that one was an inside-the-park home run, the fact that he stole a base, and that he scored four runs all in the same game make him the first player in Major League Baseball history to ever have such a game according to OptaSTATS.
Elly De La Cruz isn’t perfect. But he is a unicorn. There’s no one like him in baseball. There’s a saying about baseball and how you have a chance to see something you’ve never seen before every night, but that same thing seems to apply to the Reds 22-year-old shortstop. He hasn’t even been in the big leagues for a full year and he’s had multiple games where he’s done multiple things no one has ever done before.
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