Unlike Other Giants, Oneil Cruz Lives For High Pitches

Lately, I’ve been very interested in analyzing hitters who make a living off crushing everything in the upper third of the strike zone. As the rise of four-seamers up in the zone has turned that area into a hole for more hitters (especially in terms of whiffs), having someone in the lineup who excels in that area is very valuable. As I perused the leaderboards looking for the best hitters in the upper third, I had an expectation that most, if not all, of them would either have a very flat swing or be on the shorter side with shorter arms. It’s a simple story. If your swing is flat, you’re on plane with the pitch. And if you’re a shorter player or have shorter levers, you should be able to get on plane with pitches in the upper third very quickly.

That story is mostly true, but it wouldn’t be baseball if there weren’t an exception or two. Here is the list of the top 10 hitters against pitches in the upper third by xwOBA in 2024. I used a 15-hit minimum to ensure my focus was on the players who have had success with batted balls in this area:

Like I said, the story is pretty straightforward. Nearly every hitter here has a vertical bat angle (VBA) at or below 31 degrees, excluding Shohei Ohtani and Corey Seager, two of the best hitters in baseball. Those two have swings that are very adjustable and they mash in just about every part of the zone. Their swing variability allows them to modify their swing plane to make sure high pitches don’t pass them by. But most of the other hitters seem to follow the trend of either not being very tall or having flat swings. However, there is one surprise here that I just couldn’t seem to reason through at first.

Oneil Cruz is 6-foot-7, with arms about as long as you could imagine a baseball player having. He is the exact type of hitter you would expect to drop his bat head and get his barrel to anything in the lower part of the zone. Instead, he mashes everything in the upper third! And he doesn’t just compare well to other tall hitters. Out of all the players who saw at least 750 pitches last year, Cruz ranks first in xwOBA on pitches of at least 95 mph in the upper third, and the gap is massive between him and the next player. His .797 xwOBA ranks over .100 points higher than Juan Soto’s .654. Yes, the small sample is contributing to that gap, but regardless, it’s quite the feat. This is a player with a fifth-percentile whiff rate who can’t get enough of high heat. The league-wide whiff rate on pitches of at least 95 mph in the upper third was 26.9% in 2024; Cruz’s rate was 18.9%. He may struggle with making contact on the whole, but those issues almost entirely disappear when he sees high heat.

Cruz’s average swing length is 7.7 feet; the league average is 7.3. Cruz’s average swing length in the upper third against pitches 95 mph and above is 6.3 feet, an 18% decrease from his average swing length. Meanwhile, at the league level, the average swing length in the upper third against pitches 95-plus is 6.6 feet, a 9.5% decrease. Cruz does this while still averaging a 75.7 mph swing speed against these pitches. Basically, he is shortening his swing a ton and still swinging extremely fast relative to the rest of the league. It’s a freaky trait that most players just lack, unless they’re Juan Soto. And even then, Soto’s swing length is 7 feet against this subset of pitches.

It’s hard to fathom how Cruz is capable of this, but you can say that for just about any part of his game. The fact that a 6-foot-7 dude can move around the diamond, switch positions mid-season, have an 88th-percentile sprint speed, and boast the strongest arm in baseball is exactly what makes him so exciting. And his ability to dominate the upper third further contributes to his uniqueness. Just to emphasize how odd this is for a player so tall, let’s check in on last season’s other notably large position players:

Giancarlo Stanton is a talented hitter with a vicious, flat swing. You’d expect him to be better than he is, but his numbers in this zone have been declining for a few years and he really struggles up there now. Elly De La Cruz was the best in this group last season, but he was merely average in this area. As for Freddie Freeman and Aaron Judge – two of the best hitters in baseball over the last five years – we may be looking at the only holes in their game. The combination of their height and steep swings makes it nearly impossible for them to be killers in the upper third with consistency. Long story short, the data supports how weird it is for Cruz to have been as good as he was up in the zone last year.

Cruz had a .319 xwOBA in the lower third of the zone, which is right around league average. De La Cruz isn’t too far off from him, but he doesn’t have the elite performance in the upper third that makes Oneil a unicorn here. The other three excel low in the zone, with Judge and Freeman less surprising than Stanton, given his flat VBA. However, the length of a hitter’s arms can be just as impactful as their VBA. If short arms can easily get on plane with high pitches, then long arms should be able to get on plane with lower pitches, regardless of VBA, by dropping the barrel quickly and getting under the plane of the ball. Once again, we see how Cruz’s profile runs against this point — he is doing the exact opposite.

The data alone cannot tell us exactly how Cruz goes about taking these excellent swings up in the zone. That said, swing length is helpful in telling the story because we know what to look for. By comparing his swings up in the zone to his swings low, we can better understand how he goes against the grain. This is my mindset going in: If Cruz is struggling down low, you have to imagine he either isn’t adjusting his shoulder plane or isn’t creating the right angles in his lower body to drop his bat head. Then in the upper third, he must be chicken winging (creating highly acute angles between his forearms and biceps) at least a little bit to make up for how long his arms are, or is using a lot of upper back flexibility, similar to Ohtani. Let’s start up high:

We knew this from the data, but it’s remarkable how short Cruz’s swing looks on all of these pitches. The bat almost looks like a lightsaber. Yes, hitters have to do that in order to get to pitches up there, but it’s still surprising to see from a player this big with such long levers. By keeping his arms tucked close to his body, he is able to whip his barrel through the zone without his bat traveling much distance. His top hand is already in the slot where he wants to turn his barrel, which is the catalyst for him getting his swing on plane. It’s also very impressive how easily he seems to get on top of a Shota Imanaga four-seamer, even if it only resulted in a groundball. This swing just looks so natural. Now, let’s see how these swings contrast with his swings down low:

Almost all of these swings are top hand dominant. Up in the zone, that translates very well because you don’t have to turn the barrel over all that much. But in the bottom of the zone, it leads to these types of downswings, which are consistent across each of the clips where you see the ground-skimming batted balls. Cruz’s comparably tall peers excel at turning their top hand over to propel the barrel under the plane of the ball well before contact is made, but that’s clearly something Cruz is still getting a handle on. Here are swings from Judge, Freeman, and Stanton that help visualize that:

For each hitter, the angle of the barrel at the beginning of the downswing ends up completely flipping its head before contact is made. It’s a movement that’s reliant on the top hand turning over, rather than it pushing directly to the spot like Cruz does. On the flip side, these hitters can’t quite use that top hand to stay on plane at the top of the zone like Cruz can, making him stand out from them mechanically. When he gets the most of a batted ball at the bottom zone, it’s more likely we see those blistering line drives like the one he scorched against Cade Smith.

Oneil Cruz is used to breaking the mold, and that’s true even when comparing him to other hitters of his stature. While there are hitting concepts that apply across the majority of hitters, there are always players like Cruz who challenge your understanding of how hitting works and force you to think outside the box. It underscores the most beautiful part of this game: There is no one way to be successful.