Marcell Ozuna is Headed to Atlanta

In 2019, the Atlanta Braves were the class of the NL East, buoyed by the star tandem of Ronald Acuña Jr. and Josh Donaldson. But the division is hardly locked up for 2020 — the rival Nationals won the freaking World Series, and the Mets and Phillies are no pushovers. With Donaldson stocking up on winter clothing, the Braves had a hole in the lineup to fill. The early signings of Will Smith, Travis d’Arnaud, and Cole Hamels were nice enough, but they didn’t replace Donaldson’s WAR or his lineup-anchoring bat.

Well, the Braves came closer to replacing the Bringer of Rain’s production yesterday, signing Marcell Ozuna to a one-year, $18 million contract. The details are straightforward: one year, no options, and no incentive bonuses. As the Cardinals offered Ozuna a qualifying offer, the club will forfeit their third round draft pick (having forfeited their second round pick to sign Will Smith), though they’ll receive a slightly earlier pick back (after Competitive Balance Round B) due to Donaldson’s declined offer.

At surface level, this deal is a tremendous win for the Braves. The NL East, as mentioned above, is wildly competitive. Our Depth Chart projections peg the team as roughly a win behind the Nationals and Mets, the part of the win curve where additional talent is most valuable. And the Braves are making a clean upgrade; before signing Ozuna, their likely outfield consisted of Acuña, a diminished Ender Inciarte, a whatever-is-past-diminished Nick Markakis, and if you’re being generous in your definition of major leaguers, perhaps Adam Duvall.

Ozuna is better than all of those non-Acuña guys, and better by a lot. ZiPS projects him for 2.8 WAR in 2020:

And if you’re more into Steamer, well:

The point is, Ozuna represents a sizable step up from the current mix. There’s no one to block, no one the team will be forced to marginalize; Ozuna slots into left field, and Acuña can play both center and right, letting the team play whoever they prefer as the third member of the outfield. If top prospect Cristian Pache proves ready for the big leagues in 2020, Acuña can simply slide over to right full-time. The Braves outfield projects to be crowded in years to come, with Drew Waters joining Pache and Acuña, but Ozuna will be long gone by then.

If you stopped the analysis of the deal there, it would be a huge win for the Braves. The team that most needed to fill holes in its roster found 3 WAR in the couch cushions, and found it at one of the positions where it had holes. The cost is eminently reasonable; it’s roughly the AAV we predicted at the start of the offseason, only for a single year instead of four.

There’s a sidebar worth having here on whether a team would rather have Ozuna for one year or four; at 29, he’s still in the tail end of his prime, and if he can recapture his incandescent 2017 form, $18 million would be a bargain. If Ozuna has a banner 2020, he’ll command more than that value over the subsequent three years. For the Braves specifically, however, with their crop of young outfielders, a one-year pact is just what the doctor ordered.

But the pressing question around Ozuna isn’t the dollars in his contract; it’s the untapped potential in his bat. You see, Marcell Ozuna isn’t just an outfielder who has recorded wRC+’s of 107 and 110 over the past two years despite a home park that suppressed right-handed home run power (though Atlanta isn’t much better). He’s also an outfielder who might, if you buy into his exit velocity numbers, be one of the best hitters on contact in all of baseball.

That sounds like hyperbole, but it’s honestly not. Ozuna hit the snot out of the ball in 2019. He clubbed 49.2% of his batted balls 95 mph or harder, the 14th-best rate in baseball among hitters who put at least 100 balls in play. The hardest ball he hit, at 115.3 mph, was only 0.1 mph slower than the best effort from power god Joey Gallo. He’s not merely smashing grounders, either: his 1.18 GB/FB ratio in 2019 was below league average, and he added to his pulled fly ball rate as well.

In fact, if you mainly care about exit velocity and launch angle, Ozuna is one of the best hitters in baseball, period. Among players with at least 300 plate appearances in 2019, his .382 xwOBA ranked 23rd in baseball, only marginally behind Acuña’s and Donaldson’s matching .387 marks. Another Ronald Acuña, and at a bargain rate? Sounds like quite the coup!

But of course, Ozuna didn’t actually produce like that duo in 2019. His wRC+ was a fine-but-not-great 110. 10% better than league average is certainly nice, but it’s good-season-from-average-player territory, not the realm of star hitters that his Statcast numbers suggest he should call home.

The gap between Ozuna’s Statcast-estimated production and his actual statline was the greatest in baseball in 2019. Lest you think it was just a year of black cats and stepping on rakes, a series of unfortunate events that waylaid Ozuna unpredictably, look back on 2018. That year, he was in the fifth percentile when it came to the difference between his expected and actual numbers, the 15th-worst mark in baseball.

If once is a coincidence, twice is a trend. And it’s not only xwOBA, either. When I estimated home run rates based on exit velocity of fly balls earlier this year, Ozuna had the 13th-best expected rate in baseball. That would have been worth somewhere around four extra home runs last year, which would go a long way towards evening out the ledger.

With such persistent underperformance, you can be sure people will look for a cause. And my favorite potential explanation is that Ozuna’s bat path produced a slice. This article, while certainly not conclusive, presents a solid theory as to why Ozuna’s fly balls haven’t produced the offensive output we’d expect based solely on their speed and vertical angle.

Those hooking batted ball paths explain a lot of the shortfall in production. Take this loud out, for example:

That ball was crushed off the bat at 105 mph. The average ball hit with roughly the same angle and velocity carried 10 feet farther; the difference between a wall-scraper and a home run. Maybe it was the wind that day. Maybe it was an uncharacteristic ball strike. But Ozuna hit a ton of balls that carried less than would be implied by their exit velocity and launch angle.

Partially, you can call that bad luck. But it also speaks to the limitations of the way we analyze players. When you use only a few variables (in xwOBA’s case, exit velocity and launch angle) to predict outcomes, some people who underperform your expectations are simply getting lucky. But others are doing things not captured by your model that hinder performance. Balls hook or slice, hitters consistently hit fly balls to centerfield, where production goes to die, or top spin saps distance.

The point is, it’s probably not right to say that Ozuna is unlucky, or at least, not fully descriptive. His production is worse than this particular estimate, and what’s causing that shortfall in production remains to be seen.

None of this really matters for the Braves. They didn’t pay for one of the top 25 batters in all of baseball; they paid $18 million, which is what a decent third starter costs these days. If Ozuna merely repeats his 2019 season, the Braves will get acceptable value on a team where wins are desperately needed. If he starts performing more in line with his exit velocities, it’s all gravy.

Strangely, I think this contract is a good idea for Ozuna as well. That’s not to say I’d take it over Kiley McDaniel’s four year, $70 million estimate. But no one was offering Ozuna that, as evidenced by the fact that he would have signed that contract instead of this one if it were out there. And if the options were this pillow contract or some medium-term, lower-AAV deal (three years and $45 million, say, or four years and $55 million), I’d take this one.

If Ozuna merely coasts along at his current rate in 2020, he’ll enter free agency again at age 30 and without a qualifying offer, and I doubt he’d struggle to find multi-year contracts in the $15 million or higher AAV range. Meanwhile, if he has a big year, the story tells itself: here’s a guy who has always demolished the ball, who recorded a career high walk rate in 2019 while cutting his strikeouts, and is finally getting the results to show for it.

I don’t think Ozuna is headed for a 6 WAR season next year. I don’t think he’s going to put up a .382 wOBA to match his 2019 xwOBA, which would make him a top 20 hitter in baseball. But it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility, given his stellar 2017 and his underlying numbers since then. And if that happens, Ozuna would be an enticing free agent.

To be clear, I don’t remotely think this is the most likely outcome. We have two projection systems above to tell you what the most likely outcome is. But faced with a tepid market, I think Ozuna and his representatives made the best of it by banking some money, putting the qualifying offer to bed for good, and trying again next winter, when his production might match the sound of his contact a bit better.

In the meantime, $18 million dollars buys a lot of arm sleeves. The Braves will be in the thick of the playoff race, and Acuña, Ozzie Albies, and the rest of the young core have a ton of fun on the field. There are worse situations to find yourself in.

It’s rare to find a deal that seems both team-friendly and like a good situation for the signing player. But this one qualifies. The Braves are significantly more likely to win the NL East today than they were last week. Ozuna has a chance to rebuild his value and duck the qualifying offer. Everyone gets something they want.