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Pittsburgh Pirates’ Oneil Cruz singles in a game earlier this season. Cruz has struggled with the bat lately.

Pittsburgh Pirates’ Oneil Cruz singles in a game earlier this season. Cruz has struggled with the bat lately.

Oneil Cruz’s most recent stretch of games is not what anyone within the Pirates hoped for.

In his past 13 games, he’s hitting .128 and has struck out in a shocking 24 of 52 plate appearances. It’s a span that comes on the heels of a four-game stretch in which Cruz hit three homers. Monday night against the Braves he hit his first home run since since Aug. 6.

You can chalk it up to early-career struggles for a rookie, but it can be frustrating to do that with Cruz, because when everything does click it’s jaw-dropping. He’s broken Statcast records already this season with his footspeed, his arm strength, his exit velocities. All of that can be true, and it can serve as the basis for lofty expectations, but it doesn’t erase the fact that Cruz is going through a lull right now.

“I’ve recognized this early in my career and I’ve been told so many times and educated through other ballplayers how important it is to be mentally strong because no one goes up to the box wanting to strike out. No one wants to go up there just throwing away at-bats,” Cruz said Monday through team interpreter Mike Gonzalez. “That’s not the goal. That’s not the mission. Every time I get up there, I’m trying to go up there with a plan. I have a good coaching staff that’s pouring into me and equipping me for those at-bats. Unfortunately, the results aren’t falling my way. I just got to keep working. Keep working, keep learning, keep finding ways to dominate and defeat that.”

So if Cruz has a plan at the plate, what is it? Clearly, it’s not panning out how he or the Pirates would like at the moment. From the outside, it’s also fairly easy to nitpick. Opposing pitchers are throwing breaking balls to Cruz 37.8% of the time entering Monday’s game against the Atlanta Braves. Cruz is hitting just .092 against those breaking balls.

It’s also true, though, that pitchers understand the danger Cruz potentially presents. The enormous lefty has received “meatballs” on just 5.8% of pitches, according to Statcast. That’s defined as pitches right down the middle. That percentage is the second-lowest among all Pirates. Only Kevin Padlo has seen a lower percentage of “meatballs,” but he’s seen all of 132 pitches this season in total.

Again, though, both things can be true. Pitchers are attacking Cruz differently than they would a normal hitter. That makes sense. He still will be judged based on whether he adjusts to that effectively or not. That’s just baseball.

“I’m an aggressive hitter. I try to hit any ball that’s near me, near my zone or try to hit it hard,” Cruz said. “Another thing I’m learning up here is I can’t be too picky. I’ve got to be picky, but at the same time, I can’t be too picky. There’s moments where I’m picky and I feel that ball is a ball and they call it a strike, and I come back in here and I see it’s a ball. So it’s trying to find that area of my zone. Trying to get more familiar with my plan and my attack. But I don’t want to change who I really am. I don’t want to change my aggressiveness. I don’t want to change my pitch selection. If anything, I want to be wiser when it comes to it.”

A large part of this whole equation is Cruz trying to recognize the pitches at which he should be swinging. That sounds much simpler than it is. For all of the reasons listed above, yes, but also because the Pirates have a certain plate discipline expectation for their players.

With each player, they identify a specific area of the strike zone where the player can do the most damage. So it isn’t as black and white as swinging at strikes and laying off balls. The Pirates don’t want players swinging at all strikes, they want them swinging at the correct strikes. That isn’t unique to the Pirates, either. It’s something all players work toward, and you hear them discuss it frequently. Swinging at “their pitches.” For a young player going through a down time, though, the difficulty of that task is amplified.

“That’s the in-between that we talk about, and that’s the frustration you’ll see,” manager Derek Shelton said. “He takes a pitch, any hitter takes a pitch early in the count, and you say, ‘Wow, he should have swung at that.’ That’s the in-between, and that’s the challenging part of hitting, man. You’ve got to free your mind to be there. With young hitters, that’s the ebbs and flows that we go through with it.”

The only way through that is more hard work. Cruz says he spends a lot of time hitting on a breaking-ball pitching machine.

More than that, he works to study pitch sequencing, trying to get to a point where he is ready for pitches in his zone.

The frustration for this season, as Shelton said, are the early-count fastballs that come straight through the zone that Cruz has laid off. That’s anecdotal evidence, really, but the point is that Cruz can grow on the mental side of things to be ready for his pitches in his zone when they’re given to him.

Additionally, while Cruz is focused on learning whatever he can along the way, he’s also trying to learn how to move from one game to another, to put any slumps behind him and push forward in a grind of a season.

Right now, for instance, that skill could prove especially useful.

“You want to be mindful of the game, you want to be mindful of the opportunities to grow and the areas where I could get better, but at the same time, there’s this balance of being able to say, ‘Screw it,’ “ Cruz said. “Tomorrow’s another game, showing up tomorrow with the mindset ready to see film, ready to see what the coaches spotted or what did I spot throughout my swings from the previous night. But it’s just that, having a flush-it type mindset where you come back the next game and you’re just refreshed and ready to see what areas you could develop better at or what areas you could adjust. That’s just it. I think that’s growth, right?”

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