If anyone stepped into the Major League Baseball scene for the first time and hit just .184/.231/.263 with 49 strikeouts in 122 PA, you’d have some initial concerns. Maybe they’re just getting their feet wet. Maybe they’re still young enough to figure it out. It’s rough out there at first, after all.
If they backed it up the next year by hitting .224/.307/.354 with 69 strikeouts in 217 PA, you’d hopefully find some solace in the gradual improvement. Hey, the K-rate dropped from over 40% to just over 31%! That .307 OBP isn’t ideal, but I’ve seen worse. Still, it’s hard to argue in any form or fashion that the above line is truly palatable, and odds are if that player didn’t provide insane value elsewhere in his game he’d be heading back to the minor leagues to work things out.
If they managed to get a shot at a third year, though, and slumped back to hitting just .246/.276/.342 with 61 K in 210 PA, you’d simply have to be worried it wasn’t working out. The strikeouts improved a tad (down to 29%), but the ability get on base even evaporated. That all came with a .316 BABIP, too, so it wasn’t as if bad luck was dragging the overall numbers down (and, for the record, the BABIP the year before was .316 and it was .302 in the first year).
This offensive profile has problems galore. Through 549 total PA now, this player has hit just .220/.278/.329 with 13 homers and a ghoulish 35/179 BB/K. Billy Hamilton hit .239/.292/.325 for his career. Skip Schumaker’s Reds career featured a .238/.297/.322 line in 539 PA. Santiago Espinal’s time in Cincinnati has seen him hit .245/.294/.322 in 719 PA.
These are not the comparisons you want.
Photo by Ishika Samant/Getty Images
If you haven’t pieced things together just yet, the player I’m singling out here is none other than Elly De La Cruz, the potential superstar shortstop of the Reds who’s already made a pair of All-Star teams, led them in OPS+ in back to back seasons (as the only ‘plus’ offensive player they’ve boasted in that time), and who has been worth nearly 9 bWAR dating back tot he start of the 2024 season. Thing is, I’ve singled out only Elly’s work hitting right-handed against left-handed pitchers, something he continues to try to do despite the above numbers being, well, quite bad.
In a vastly larger sample size, Elly has rocked right-handed pitching to the tune of .271/.350/.496 with 47 homers and a palatable 136/364 BB/K in 1273 PA, and those numbers have been consistent in each of his three big league seasons. Though his power took a slight step back in 2025 from where it was in 2024 against righties, he posted career highs in average (.277) and OBP (.362) against them, all while drastically reducing his proclivity to strike out against them. In this arena, there’s been real progress from Elly, and it’s enough to make you wonder whether that’s something he should just focus on entirely.
Switch-hitters, when they’re actually good against both lefties and righties, are perhaps the single most valuable players in lineups. They’re the battleships that anchor entire lineups, the Jose Ramirezs and Francisco Lindors who never need to be hit for regardless of who’s on the mound. At still just 23 years of age, there’s still certainly the chance that Elly can figure out how to be a good enough hitter right-handed against lefties, but so far his production there is enough to make you wonder if he’d really be any worse against lefties if he just hit left-handed against them.
This even being a question dovetails with what else the baseball heads have been discussing about Cincinnati’s superstar – that he’s playing too many games and being ground to a pulp down the stretch. Only Matt Olson and Pete Alonso (324 each) have played in more games than Elly (322) since the start of the 2024 season, and in both of those years Elly’s second-half stats have fallen completely off the same page as those of his first-halves. Getting him a little bit more rest here and there is the obvious way to begin to address this problem, and it sure would look like getting him days off when there are left-handed starters on the mound would be the days to target.
So, if you’re going to start getting him rest by skipping days when he’d otherwise hit right-handed, well, maybe just get him to hit left-handed all the time?