Elly De La Cruz

On the record · career milestone this season

500 career hits — Sun, Jul 12 · day game vs. Chicago Cubs The scorecard → · The write-up →

The card rack

FlagshipElly De La Cruz #44 · 2024 Topps Chrome · 725 recent sales 7N ▼2.6%

His flagship is his rookie — one card, one market.

$2.76Raw$19.61PSA 9$63.34PSA 10$82.00BGS 10PSA 10 · 45 nights

Live on eBay now · asking, not sold · as of 2026-08-27 · paid links

$1.00Ungraded$2.39Ungraded$2.39Ungraded

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Paid link — as an eBay Partner, FVR earns from qualifying purchases. · Flagship = his most-traded card (the market’s reference); the rookie = the top card of his first card year. As of August 27, 2026 · trend is FVR's own nightly archive · prices via SportsCardsPro · what these terms mean

Scout’s note

De La Cruz is 24, a 6-foot-6 switch-hitter from Sabana Grande de Boya with 81 home runs and 161 steals in 531 games. His EV95 of 111.6 lands in the 98th percentile of 372 qualified bats (median 105.9), and a luck gap of -0.0028 means what he has produced is what the physics support. The boards rank him No. 79 of 372 on the breakout composite. The last 14 — .182, 19 strikeouts — are the swing-and-miss tax on a talent the market has not finished pricing.

Current signals

The read: Cruz is tracked, not flagged: an EV95 of 111.6 (98th percentile of the 373 qualified MLB bats we track; median 105.8) with results within 0.001 of what the physics support — nothing owed, nothing borrowed. The boards hunt mispricing, and his price is right. He sits No. 87 of 373 on the breakout composite; the board takes 20.

SQUARE — the line and the bat agree. Where he sits in the league →

EV95 (mph)

111.6

Luck gap (park-adj)

-0.0014

Overlay score

0.3438

WAR (season · MLB calc)

4.1

Balls in play

308

Age

24

A market fact, not an engine read: what a club decided about him, on the season before this one. Figures from Cot’s, as of August 20, 2026.

2026 salary

$0.80Mest

Tax hit

$0.80M

Service time

2 yr 118 d

Options left

2 / 3

Cash and the tax hit are two different rulebooks and are never subtracted from one another — see the payroll board for his club, Cincinnati Reds.

A second set of books

The same contract, read by MLB Spreadsheets (Ethan Hullihen), as of August 20, 2026. We keep two sources on this because one source cannot check itself.

Tax AAV

$0.80M

Guaranteed

$0.80M

Term

1 yr

His class

Pre-Arb

The tax AAV above is his number under the CBA’s own rulebook, not the average we work out from Cot’s total. On a contract with deferred money the two come apart on purpose — and neither is subtracted from the other.

Collect Elly De La Cruz

If the signal is right, the cardboard usually finds out later. Current listings:

High-end listings ($75+) →

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Not financial advice. We take positions only after publication — never before. Misses stay on the record.

The Bureau on Elly De La Cruz

The scouting press, in their own words