Pirates Add Marcell Ozuna To Cap Active Winter

As you read this, baseball players across the world are flocking to Florida and Arizona. Pitchers and catchers have started reporting. Another annual rite: The last hitter among our Top 50 free agents just signed. Marcell Ozuna and the Pirates are in agreement on a one-year deal worth $12 million, as Jeff Passan first reported. The 35-year-old DH is the latest in a string of mid-market acquisitions, both in free agency and trade, as Pittsburgh improves its lineup in support of Paul Skenes and a dynamic pitching staff.

Allow me to say the obvious thing first: Even with their other moves, the Pirates needed another bat, and it’s great they got one. We project Ozuna as the best hitter on the entire roster. That’s not the kind of acquisition you generally make with a one-year deal in February. The Pirates might be starting from a low base, but that doesn’t make it any less important that they improve. They only have Skenes under team control for so long! This deal makes them better by more than anything else they could have done this week. There are no better free agents remaining, no likely trade targets with greater potential impact. But that’s not an entire article, so let’s consider this deal more deeply.

Ozuna is coming off of a down 2025 where he played through a serious hip injury. It was the latest dip in a career of highs and lows, both on and off the field. In 2024, he finished fourth in NL MVP voting after a majestic offensive season, posting a .302/.378/.546 line and a 154 wRC+. That was his second straight season of offensive success, and for Ozuna, a strong rebound from two years in the doldrums. In 2021, he missed most of the season with a broken hand. That season ended with a 20-game suspension under the league’s joint domestic violence policy, and Ozuna then struggled through a below-replacement 2022 that also saw him arrested for a DUI; he later pled no contest and paid a fine. The Braves looked for alternatives – and then of course, two years later, he nearly won MVP.

He’s an up-and-down player, to say the least. The Pirates are betting on a bounce back, and I think they’re making that bet with very good odds. The aforementioned hip injury clearly hampered Ozuna’s performance last year. His bat speed declined by multiple miles an hour after he got hurt. His batted ball metrics cratered. That’s hardly surprising given how clearly hobbled he was. Even so, he posted a 114 wRC+, a mark that would have been the second best on the Pirates. He also demonstrated his sneakily well-rounded offensive game while doing so.

The first thing that springs to mind when you think about Ozuna’s offense is power. He’s a walking advertisement for barrel rate; he swings hard, gets the ball in the air, and does damage to all fields. When you play through a torn muscle in your hip and still hit 21 homers, that’s true plus power. But there are plenty of powerful hitters in the majors who nonetheless struggle. Ozuna has developed a strong batting eye in the second half of his career, and it kept him afloat even when his greatest tool was much diminished.

Ozuna walked 15.9% of the time in 2025. That’s not a typo, and it’s not some weird artifact of intentional walks. Pitchers quickly caught on to the fact that he was hurt and attacked the zone more than they usually would against someone with his raw power. He adapted by swinging less, making more contact, and working the count. But while this walk-forward approach is new, Ozuna’s batting eye isn’t. This was his fourth season with a double digit walk rate, and he has an 11% mark since the start of the 2019 season.

Ozuna’s projection reflects the uncertainty inherent in any older player returning from injury. Could his bat speed and power spiral down further? Surely. It happens to everyone eventually, and the path of aging is never certain. But if he regains even half of the power he lost, I think he’ll be better than his projection.The range of outcomes is large – it’s Marcell Ozuna we’re talking about – but I think that on a one-year deal, most of those outcomes are good for the Pirates considering their offensive alternatives.

Now that we’ve covered what Ozuna might do, it’s time to talk about how he fits into a strange set of offseason acquisitions. The Pirates started their offensive overhaul by trading for Brandon Lowe. He’s below average at second base, but the Pirates are playing him there anyway. The natural move would be to shift Lowe to first – but the Pirates already have Spencer Horwitz, himself a below-average second baseman, manning the position.

Maybe Lowe could have DH’ed sometimes, but then the Pirates signed Ryan O’Hearn, a solid first baseman who can sometimes stand in the outfield, to a two-year deal. O’Hearn will provide some much-needed lefty thump, but he didn’t have a clear position even before Ozuna signed. Now we’re expecting O’Hearn to split time between left field, first base, and DH.

There are going to be days where Pittsburgh’s defense is shockingly bad. Lowe was atrocious in the field last year, -9 by FRV and -14 according to DRS. We’re allocating most of their projected playing time at shortstop to Konnor Griffin, the top prospect in baseball – hey, look, it’s Prospect Week! – but talented though he is, he’s also only 19. Until he debuts, they’re going to use Nick Gonzales, a below-average second baseman, at shortstop. O’Hearn has limited range in a gigantic outfield. Oneil Cruz is an adventure in center. Bryan Reynolds would probably be a DH in an ideal world. Instead, he might be their steadiest defensive outfielder.

Ozuna adds to that pressure, because the Pirates now have five first base/DH/corner outfield types instead of four to sprinkle around the diamond, but the juice is worth the squeeze. For one thing, the offensive upgrade over Jake Mangum or Nick Yorke, the Pirates who I expect to lose the most playing time after this signing, is enormous. More importantly, depth still matters. The Pirates might have one too many versions of the same general archetype of hitter, but one too many is far better than one too few.

Lowe has eclipsed 600 plate appearances only once in his seven-plus years in the bigs. O’Hearn will get his share of days off against tough lefties. Horwitz might have even larger true-talent platoon splits than O’Hearn. Ozuna will need plenty of rest to avoid wearing down, and again, he’s coming off of a major hip injury. The playing time logjam will likely work itself out.

Saying that I haven’t always agreed with the way the Pirates operate would be an understatement. I hate seeing Skenes marooned on a team with a bottom-five payroll, and I hate when they don’t have urgency about fixing that. But this offseason, finally, the Pirates aren’t a bottom-five payroll team. They’ve never spent more in salary than they are now, in fact, and while that’s a low bar to clear, they have nonetheless cleared it.

It might feel like the Pirates are shopping for multiple bargain free agents when they should have pooled their money together and gone after one. But after taking a crack at playing Spend Bob Nutting’s Money (Tagline: Wait, That’s All There Is?!), I think they did a pretty good job here. O’Hearn and Ozuna ran the Bucs a combined $41 million in guaranteed salaries, $26 million of which comes this year. The other free agent hitters in their bracket? Eugenio Suárez, Harrison Bader, Jorge Polanco, Ha-Seong Kim, and J.T. Realmuto. We know they tried to sign Suárez. I’d prefer Bader to Ozuna given the defensive alignment in Pittsburgh, but it’s not like they could force him to play for them. Out of the rest of that group, I’d take the O’Hearn/Ozuna pair over any alternative, and without spending far more money, I don’t see other upgrades they could have found.

Now, would this plan have worked better with more money? Of course. But so would a lot of plans. I can’t blame the front office for failing to spend money they don’t have. Working with a limited budget, they nonetheless signed two hitters who will be among the best on their team and acquired a third in trade.

A lot of ink has been spilled about mid-level batters getting less money in free agency than they used to. The middle class of the game has been getting squeezed in recent years as teams either hunt for stars or build internally. But crucially, that meant good bargain-hunting for Pittsburgh, because those mid-tier hitters still represented meaningful upgrades. Sure, the league might pay less for guys like O’Hearn and Ozuna and their 1-2 WAR projections these days, but Pittsburgh could really use them.

Will this be enough to propel them to the playoffs? We have them with about a coin flip chance of doing so, the best preseason odds we’ve given them since we started calculating playoff odds in 2016. In fact, it’s the highest their odds have been on any date, period, since May 26, 2016. This team is badly in need of some hope, and in my opinion, this winter is providing exactly that.