Héctor Cruz

The sort of player we'll never see again

Héctor Cruz

At the end of Rich Lederer’s excellent review of the 1977 Bill James Baseball Abstract is this interesting note:

Boy, that got me curious.

Cruz was one of three brothers to play in Major League Baseball. He came from the Puerto Rico Cruz family, who gave us the more famous José Cruz (and his son), as well as the extremely obscure Tommy Cruz.

The big question, though, is whatever happened to Héctor. As Lederer notes, Héctor hit a whopping 13 home runs in 1976, finishing third in the Rookie of the Year voting. And then his career simply fell apart:

There are two things that happened after Héctor’s 1976 season that may have derailed his career:

• He switched from third base to the outfield; and

• His strikeout rate declined.

Now, there’s really no question that Héctor was not much of a third baseman. We don’t even need to consider advanced statistics to see that. He committed a whopping 26 errors at third base in 1976, proving, once again, that the major award voters generally ignored fielding.

But it’s that decline in strikeouts that I’m more interested in. His power seems to have declined together with his strikeout rate, turning him from a bottom of the lineup hitter with some power into just another bottom of the lineup hitter.

I suspect that some hitting coach with the Cardinals might have made Héctor his personal project — and that he failed miserably.

Héctor had little to no speed, of course, making him a lot different than the nimble José. And, honestly, the biggest mystery surrounding Héctor’s interesting major league career is how in the world he convinced so many National League teams to hold onto him for so long. He never really was a productive player, only showing some signs of offensive ability during the strike-shortened 1981 season — and that was for the Chicago Cubs, who were simply awful that year.

Héctor played for the Yomiuri Giants in 1983, where he hit 4 hoome runs and put up a .240 batting average in 58 games. I don’t think his problem was major league pitching. I think that he was likely a AA level hitter who was lucky enough to hit 13 home runs his rookie season.