The Elly De La Cruz story: From nearly giving up to making it to MLB
Elly De La Cruz #EllyDeLaCruz
Editor’s note: This story was initially published in 2022. With Reds’ top prospect Elly De La Cruz getting called up to MLB on Tuesday heading into the Reds game against the Dodgers, it has been updated to reflect his journey to the Reds’ big league roster.
Elly De La Cruz was taking batting practice at the Cincinnati Reds’ spring training complex. With every home run swing, the pendant with his mother’s photo twirled around his neck as he powered 400-foot line drives over the fence in center field.
It’s there because it reminds him of all of the times he doubted he could make it to the big leagues.
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It’s there because it reminds him of growing up in the Dominican Republic and how all he ever wanted was a baseball jersey.
It reminds him of when his mother, Carmin, told him that no matter how far his baseball career goes, she’d always be proud of him.
“I just want to give everything to her,” De La Cruz said via interpreter Julio Morillo. “She’s why I’m here, and I want her to feel proud of me.”
To make it this far – earning a call-up to MLB and becoming the centerpiece of the Reds’ rebuild – De La Cruz had to move away from his family’s home when he was 6.
To have a better shot at turning into an MLB shortstop, he went to stay with his coach’s brother on the northeast side of the Dominican Republic to reach the next best tournament and the next best training facility.
Now, De La Cruz, 21, is a unique player with as much potential as anyone in baseball. He’s a 6-foot-5, switch-hitting shortstop with a better combination of power and speed than almost anyone in the sport.
“This is an opportunity that I’ve earned,” De La Cruz said. “My goal is everywhere that I go, I want people to know how good I am. That’s all I have in my mind. Every league that I go to, I want to be the best player that the team has.”
Elly De La Cruz: Reds shortstop with NBA height, wingspan
At spring training in Goodyear, Arizona, De La Cruz sprints from the outfield of Field 3 to home plate. Then he pretends the baseball he’s holding is a basketball and euro-steps around a few cones like he’s about to slam dunk the ball.
As other players take batting practice on the backfields of the complex, he turns his bat into a guitar. De La Cruz is pretending to strum along to the pop song that’s playing over the speakers.
When it’s his turn to hit, De La Cruz’s home runs get lost in the Arizona sky. Over the last three years, De La Cruz has homered over just about every fence in Goodyear, using a high leg kick and a long, fluid swing that finishes with textbook form over his shoulder.
After De La Cruz is done hitting, he runs right to the shortstop position.
Reds shortstop Matt McLain is 5-foot-8. Barry Larkin was a 6-foot shortstop. Dave Concepción was considered tall for his position in the 1970s at 6-foot-2. De La Cruz is 6-foot-5, and he uses his NBA wingspan and his quick strides to set up behind every ground ball that goes his way.
“Everything is athletic for Elly,” Reds farm director Shawn Pender said. “When he fields a ground ball, when he throws, when he runs, when he gets going at full speed, the length of his stride is a joy to watch. It’s the same way with the swing; it’s fluid with great extension. He just stands out.”
De La Cruz wasn’t always this star prospect. When the Reds signed him for only $65,000 in 2018, the front office wasn’t expecting him to show this much potential this quickly.
For years, De La Cruz was dreaming of this type of success.
Growing his baseball talent in the Dominican Republic meant sacrifices
De La Cruz started playing baseball in Sabana Grande de Boya, a town with a population of 34,283 in the southeast region of the Dominican Republic. Sabana Grande de Boya didn’t have the organized Little Leagues that turn young kids into professional prospects, but De La Cruz showed promise hitting tennis balls and rubber balls around outside as a childhood hobby.
What he didn’t yet realize was how much sacrifice it would take to play his favorite sport. De La Cruz needed to move away from home at age 6 just to take that first step.
“The brother of my coach offered me a chance to live with him because he would provide food for me and train me,” De La Cruz said. “I told him, ‘You have to ask my mom.’ After that, they made the decision, and I started living with the brother of my coach.”
De La Cruz started off in a few leagues near Sabana Grande de Boya, but he could only stay at that level for so long.
Four years later, De La Cruz needed to take the next step and play in a more structured and competitive baseball environment. Coach Caisser Thomas recommended De La Cruz move to the capital city, Santo Domingo. He did, this time living an hour away from home.
“He thought (age) 10 was a good year for me to go out, so my name could start to be recognized nationally in the Dominican Republic,” De La Cruz said. “Every good kid was playing around there. It was a step up in competition. It was a league that was recognized across the country.”
In Santo Domingo, De La Cruz began training at a baseball academy. While he was there, he saw some of the older players get signed by MLB organizations. De La Cruz knew there was a path from Santo Domingo to the big leagues.
He just wasn’t good enough yet to get attention from scouts.
The teams he played on already had a shortstop, so De La Cruz was a pitcher and a left fielder. In tournaments, De La Cruz said he usually played against “kids with rich parents.” Those players had more resources, nicer equipment and a better shot to get noticed.
“Obviously, I didn’t have the money,” De La Cruz said.
In one tournament, De La Cruz played well with the Vilorio family in the crowd. The Vilorios were about to start their own team. They picked De La Cruz, and they gave him a new glove, a new bat and a new place to live.
“They treated me like a son,” De La Cruz said. “They gave me everything. Everything I have, I need to thank them for.”
As a teenager, De La Cruz finally had the team, the equipment and the opportunity he wanted. But he was still an hour away from home.
At that point, it had been about 10 years since De La Cruz moved away for the first time. De La Cruz was still a long way from becoming a pro, and he was thinking about quitting.
“There was a point where no one was paying attention to me,” De La Cruz said. “I wanted to go back home, be with my family.”
His mother repeated how much she loved him and gave him the motivation to keep going. The Vilorio family told him, “Do not leave. You’re going to be good.”
“Nobody really noticed me,” De La Cruz said. “Scouts didn’t really like me. In the academy, I wasn’t making the cuts during tryouts, and that’s why I wanted to go back home.”
De La Cruz decided to stick around, even though it didn’t look like his baseball career was going anywhere. Then he had a chance meeting with a Reds scout. He won the team over in a tryout he wasn’t supposed to get.
De La Cruz practiced with a shortstop who was considered the star of the academy. One day in 2018, the academy’s owner told De La Cruz to work out next to that player in a workout that a Reds scout was scheduled to attend.
This wasn’t a compliment.
“In my country, since I wasn’t good enough, I got paired with that shortstop to make him look good,” De La Cruz said. “The next day, the Reds scouts said they came to watch me. The next day, more people came and watched. Then they signed me.”
It was a modest $65,000 contract. The Reds didn’t expect De La Cruz to become a top prospect, and the Reds were his only option at the time.
He was tall and rangy and athletic, and we liked that he had some bat speed,” Pender said. “But he wasn’t really on the radar.”
De La Cruz remained off the radar in the Reds organization throughout the 2018 and 2019 seasons. He spent a year on the Reds’ Dominican Summer League team, but he didn’t make a splash. When the season ended, De La Cruz wasn’t even on the fringe of the Reds’ top-30 prospect list.
Then in 2020, De La Cruz began to worry that his baseball career was about to end.
Making the cut as Reds cut ties with 2 minor league teams during the COVID-19 pandemic
During the coronavirus pandemic, De La Cruz dreaded the message he expected to receive.
The Reds cut ties with their rookie ball teams in Billings, Montana, and Greenville, Tennessee. As a result, the Reds released 48 minor leaguers. De La Cruz, back in his hometown in the Dominican Republic during the pandemic, was nervous he would be one of them.
When he learned that he wasn’t, his perspective changed.
“Everybody was scared, wondering if we’d get released,” De La Cruz said. “I knew that (not getting cut) meant you had the opportunity to play in a higher league.”
In addition to workouts before sunrise nearly every day during the pandemic, De La Cruz joined a local team of other minor leaguers who were living near his hometown. This team went barnstorming around the Dominican Republic, playing pickup baseball games against any other team it could find.
De La Cruz prioritized finding competition. He found it.
“Wherever I could find a game, I went to play,” De La Cruz said. “It was my city versus the city next to it. Everyone brought their 12 players and competed.”
Since the Reds’ front office wasn’t there, the organization didn’t know how much De La Cruz was improving. The Reds didn’t invite De La Cruz to minor league spring training in April 2021. But when De La Cruz finally got his opportunity at the Reds’ post-draft camp in July, the Reds quickly found out how good of a prospect they had.
‘We’ve got to get him out of here. He’s ready’
In De La Cruz’s first live batting practice at the Reds’ post-draft camp in the summer of 2021, he stood in the batter’s box on Field 3 facing a pitcher with a 98 mph fastball.
“I hit it that far,” De La Cruz says, pointing to the deepest part of the outfield. “It was right in the gap for a double. Then I said to myself, ‘I’m ready.’”
Soon after, De La Cruz played for the Reds’ Arizona Complex League team. He hit .400 with 11 extra-base hits and 13 RBI in 11 games.
“After I saw him for the first couple games, it was apparent,” Pender said. “He hit a ball over the batter’s eye left-handed, and then he hit a double right-handed. Then he played third base and made a body control play.”
“I looked over at (two Reds coaches) and said, ‘Now I get it. We’ve got to get him out of here. He’s ready.’”
De La Cruz earned the promotion to Low-A with the Daytona Tortugas and didn’t miss a beat. Even though he was one of the youngest players in the league, De La Cruz built his reputation as a power hitter, an elite athlete and a standout defender.
“I believe it was all because of the work I did in 2020,” De La Cruz said. “All of a sudden there are fewer minor league teams. You had to come in with the mentality of, you have to make a team. Otherwise, you’ll go home.”
In 2022, De La Cruz made the jump from a top-100 prospect to a top-10 prospect. During the first-half of the season, he hit .303 with a .968 OPS in High-A while being the seventh-youngest player in his league. De La Cruz earned a call-up to Double-A, where he hit .305 with a .910 OPS.
De La Cruz hit 28 home runs with 47 stolen bases in 2022. He cut down on his strikeouts and looked like one of the most gifted players in baseball. De La Cruz started the 2023 season in Triple-A, and he looked even better than he was in 2022.
Scouts’ most frequent comparisons to De La Cruz are players like Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, Eric Davis, Alex Rodriguez and Fernando Tatis Jr.
“He’s fun to watch and be around,” Reds manager David Bell said during spring training in 2023. “He makes the team better by his personality and the way he plays the game. He does a lot of things on the field that are very special.”
For most of his life, De La Cruz needed to make a leap of faith to believe he would even make it this far. He was nervous about moving away from home at 6 years old. It wasn’t easy moving to the capital when he was 10 or waiting eight more years to get noticed by a single MLB scout.
Now, De La Cruz is way past the doubt that he had to deal with growing up. Now, De La Cruz is one of the brightest young stars in MLB.
“My end goal for my career is to be a Hall of Famer,” De La Cruz said. “But it’s not just that. I want the people where I am to love me, and I want to love them back.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: The Elly De La Cruz story: From nearly giving up to making it to MLB