Marcell Ozuna is Driving Pitchers Up the Wall

When I last checked in on Marcell Ozuna, the Cardinals’ left fielder had just etched himself into blooper reels for an eternity with his epic misplay of a Kiké Hernandez fly ball. Since then, however, Ozuna has atoned for his mistakes with some of the hottest hitting this side of Cody Bellinger. After a disappointing debut season in St. Louis, he’s become a centerpiece of a revamped Cardinals’ lineup that has powered the team to the best record (18-10) in the National League.

The Cardinals acquired Ozuna from the Marlins in exchange for a quartet of prospects on December 14, 2017, just days after their attempt to trade for Ozuna’s teammate, Giancarlo Stanton, fell through. Though he had earned All-Star honors for the first time a year before, Ozuna was coming off a breakout 2017 in which he’d set across-the-board career highs with 37 homers, a .312/.376/.548 line, a 144 wRC+, and 5.1 WAR. He had not only made his second All-Star team, he’d won his first Gold Glove. He looked to be a significant addition to the Cardinals’ lineup, but hit just .260/.308/.337 with three home runs and a 76 wRC+ through the end of May. Ozuna eventually heated up, hitting .290/.334/.482 (120 wRC+) with 20 homers over the remainder of the season, with a wRC+ of 133 or better in three of the final four months. Still, his overall 106 wRC+ and 2.7 WAR represented significant drops from 2017, ones that stuck out like sore thumbs on a team that fell three games short of a Wild Card spot.

To be fair, Ozuna spent much if not all of 2018 battling tendinitis and an impingement in his right shoulder, more or less maintaining his uptick in production in either side of a 10-day stint on the disabled list at the end of August. The injury eroded his arm strength to the point that his outfield throwing speed ranked last according to Statcast, and, by his own account, he struggled to hit pitches on the inside part of the plate.

In late October, he underwent what was described as a cleanup procedure on the shoulder. While the surgery delayed his Grapefruit League defensive debut until March 11, he’s been available since Opening Day, starting 26 of the team’s 28 games despite what he described as “55 percent” arm strength as of April 9, the day of his infamous outfield gaffe.

Ozuna was hitting just .211/.250/.395 (75 wRC+) at that point, though his offense was already on the uptick, as he’d clubbed his first two home runs of the season on April 6 and 8; the latter was the majors’ hardest-hit homer to that point (115.3 mph), since surpassed by Pete Alonso’s 118.3. Since then, he’s hit a sizzling .310/.429/.793 (208 wRC+) while clubbing eight homers, more than any player in the majors besides former Marlins teammate Christian Yelich and Eddie Rosario, who each have nine in that span. Four of Ozuna’s homers have come against Yelich and the Brewers; the Cardinals wound up on the short end two out of three times during their April 15-17 series, in which Ozuna homered in every game, but swept three from the Brewers last week while he homered just once.

Through Monday, Ozuna’s overall .635 slugging percentage ranks sixth in the NL, his 156 wRC+ ninth. As for that inner part of the plate, here’s a look at his heat maps from 2017 to ’19, showing his slugging percentage for each area of the strike zone. It’s early in the season, but the red is back, baby:

Via Statcast, here’s a quick look at some numbers pertinent to Ozuna’s 2017-19 performance for balls on the inner third of the strike zone (Gameday Zones 1, 4, and 7 for the righty swinger).

Obviously, we’re not talking about a large sample size — 14 batted balls on the inner third for this year, compared to 103 last year and 105 in 2017 — but Ozuna’s exit velocity, xwOBA, and slugging percentage are all back in the vicinity of his 2017 numbers. According to Statcast, he was hit-lucky on the inner third in 2017, with an expected batting average of .358, 32 points lower than his actual one, while he’s been rather unlucky this year, with an xBA of .368, 82 points higher than his actual one. Still, his overall production on such pitches appears to be back to pre-injury levels.

Beyond the inner third stuff, what stands out about Ozuna’s performance so far is that he’s hitting the ball in the air more often than in any season of his seven-year career, and pulling it more often as well.

Now, with just 73 batted balls to go by, we’re a bit short of the stabilization point for groundball and fly ball rates (80 batted balls), but the ratio stabilizes at 100 PA (Ozuna’s at 110), so this at least appears to be somewhat noteworthy. Within that, at smaller and presumably less reliable sample sizes, we find that the rate at which he’s pulling fly balls is way up. Those balls do the real damage; he owns a .924 wOBA on them during his career, with marks of 1.152, .692, and 1.313 for the past three seasons, respectively. The extent to which all of this is the result of a philosophical change in approach or a happy accident remains unclear, but it’s something to track as the season goes on.

In the field, as you might guess based upon that hilarious play, Ozuna’s metrics are down (from 4.0 to -2.0 in UZR, and from 8 to -4 in DRS), though 26 games in left field isn’t much to hang a hat upon. Via MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, his arm strength as measured by Statcast — the average velocity of the top 10% of his throws — does appear to be improving. Where he averaged 81.8 mph on such throws in 2017 (which ranked in the sixth percentile), and sank to 78.0 mph last year (last in the majors), he’s up to 82.9 mph so far in 2019 (20th percentile). Sample size, sample size, sample size, it’s still a step in the right direction.

One month is just one month, but Ozuna’s performance so far is reassuring, both for the Cardinals, and for his own well-being as he approaches free agency this coming winter. He’s back to being a mid-lineup force in a significantly revamped offense that’s leading the NL in scoring (5.54 runs per game) and tied for second in wRC+ (114), up from 4.69 runs per game and a 98 wRC+ (both fifth in the league). The arrival of Paul Goldschmidt (138 wRC+) has been a big factor, as have the rebounds of Ozuna, Dexter Fowler (from 62 to 133), Paul DeJong (from 102 wRC+ to 166), and Kolten Wong (from 98 to 128), which all rank among the majors’ 40 largest wRC+ jumps so far. For now it’s given a St. Louis squad a leg up in what’s likely to be a very competitive NL Central race.