Elly De La Cruz throws a lightning bolt from third base

This season has been all about 21-year-old Dominican standout Elly De LA Cruz. He has wheels and has been lighting up the base paths, but now he shows that he has defensive skills as well.

Height has always been a knife-edge stat in baseball. Naturally, the longer you are, the more power in your throw, since you can harness a lot more square footage into the throw. But the problem has been that if a player is too tall, they may be gangly, uncoordinated, a little ponderous in their movements.

Those old truisms are cast aside, however, when it comes to De La Cruz. At 6 feet 5 inches tall, he is fluid, quick, and athletic; things that he simply should not be.

Now he sets a new MLB record.

The asterisk to that record of course is “in the Statcast Era.” Over the last eight years, Statcast has measured, with a decent degree of accuracy, all sorts of arcane numbers in baseball. One of them is the speed at which a ball has been thrown from third to first.

And on Sunday’s game against the Brewers, Elly De La Cruz fielded a ball deep in the gap at short and fired a bullet to first. Bang on the money, it clocked in at 97.9 mph.

Expect more to come from this young man.