Pirates beat Tigers, snap 6-game losing streak.
There’s a lot to think about when watching Oneil Cruz, the Pirates’ 6-foot-7 shortstop who’s also one of the team’s top prospects, a left-handed bat with a crazy amount of power.
For John Baker, the Pirates’ director of coaching and player development, the first name that pops into his head, ironically enough, is Kris Bryant, the former Chicago Cub and current San Francisco Giant.
While the Cruz and Bryant obviously bear no physical resemblance, how the latter could impact the former is actually interesting.
Baker technically never played with Bryant in Chicago but got to know him once shifting into a career in baseball operations and as someone who eventually became the Cubs’ chief applied mental skills coach.
“When I think about Oneil Cruz, I think about Kris Bryant,” Baker said Monday before the Pirates hosted the Tigers at PNC Park. “I spent the last six years with Kris. Oneil Cruz hits the ball harder, throws the ball harder and runs faster than Kris Bryant does. And he plays shortstop.”
Baker’s point wasn’t so much a tit-for-tat comparison to the fourtime All-Star and 2016 National League MVP as it was about Bryant’s position flexibility and how much it has helped him.
The Pirates have pushed Cruz to learn the outfield — something he’s seemingly warming to — and Baker said it’s part of a bigger, philosophical shift in how the team wants to develop players.
If more can move around like Bryant, bouncing back and forth between the infield and outfield, it could potentially increase their value and also help the general manager and manager of the big club manage a roster and craft the lineup.
“When we’re talking about
building in some versatility, I think it’s important to think about the other trends that we’re seeing in professional baseball,” Baker said. “The three teams that stand out the most to me are the Dodgers, Giants and Rays.
“If you look at those teams and how they’re doing development, you start to see that there are a lot more multipositional [ players] out there.”
This obviously has a couple layers to it, which Baker explained. In Cruz’s case, it might not make sense for this season, considering he just returned from a right forearm strain. It’s more 2022 and beyond.
It’s also about finding ways to challenge Cruz and other players, to keep things fresh, offer a different perspective and ensure they have some fun.
“You want to do it early,” Baker said. “We want to normalize it, so that’s just what’s expected. It’s also more fun to go out there and learn a lot of new things. It can control the monotony of a long season.”
The Pirates have a case of this that Baker also brought up — but not necessarily in a positive light. More something they’d like to avoid in the future.
Cole Tucker is a terrific athlete and has handled himself fine in the outfield. But Baker would prefer if it wasn’t like jumping into the deep end with freezing cold water. Trying new positions is never something that should happen at the big league level.
“It adds value,” Baker said. “It makes it much easier for you to construct a major league roster. And then you don’t have the thing that they ran into with Cole Tucker here, where Cole comes up to the big leagues and goes out to the outfield for the first time. That has to be scary as hell.”
One school of thought here might be that this sort of thing is prohibitive, that a player who’s worried about changing positions might lose focus on offensive development. Or the sheer volume of fielding work would make it too hard to improve as a hitter.
Baker doesn’t believe in any of that, because of … well, you guessed it, Bryant. When they were together, Baker said Bryant would talk about how left field helped to give him something to think about that wasn’t his swing.
That sort of mental break is something Baker said the Pirates are hoping to achieve by having Jase Bowen play second, third and the outfield at Low- A Bradenton, or bouncing teammate Endy Rodriguez from catcher to first or the outfield.
Will Matthiessen has done it at High-A Greensboro, and Cruz will do it soon — with a smaller and smaller group of players sticking at one position, as the Pirates look for new ways to challenge players and more out of them.
“If we inoculate you to moving all over the field when you’re 18,” Baker said, “you’re not going to think about it.”