Atlanta Braves: Marcell Ozuna deal could be best Winter signing

Defensive Adjustments

Teams finally started catching on to this by 2019, and the use of the shift against Ozuna increased noticeably (fangraphs splits data cited):

• roughly 1 shift executed in every 5 AB in 2017-18
• strong increase to more than a 1 in 3 AB’s ratio in 2019
• he only hit .239 against those 2019 shifts after seeing little change in his hitting against the shifts during the 2017-18 time period

So the shoulder was definitely bothering him and teams were paying attention.

Honestly, the impressive part is that he was able to keep slugging homers despite what amounted to a 1-armed swing (yes, juiced ball and all).

Fangraphs was puzzling over this phenomenon as well, which stemmed from 2018-19 stats in which Ozuna’s predicted production and actual production ranked with some of the highest (THE highest in 2019) gaps in baseball.

"“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.”"

Well there ya go… if one arm is having to carry most of the load, that’s the kind of result you might see.

2020 Hopes?

The hope is that after a full year of rehab and this intervening offseason, that weakened shoulder will finally have had time to fully heal and return to full strength. That’s not an unrealistic expectation, either — all things considered.

The hope is that his swing won’t need to re-adjust and Ozuna can drive the ball closer to the manner he did in 2017… and throw the ball well again, too, of course.

Heck, if he can produce close to a 3 WAR result with poor defense and one arm, what might he do with both arms?

The thing to watch, then, is whether Ozuna is spraying the ball well to all fields again. It may take some time to figure out if he’s ‘whole’ again, though – small sample sizes being the enemy of all trends.

So even if Ozuna is raking again, it could be that we’ll have to wait until mid/late May before we can say for sure ‘he’s healthy’.

If took a couple of months for Donaldson to get things to ‘click’ into place while on his own 1-year returning-from-injury contract.  Now we’ll see if the Braves can go ‘2 for 2’ on such deals in consecutive seasons with another well-motivated player.

But if that shoulder is strong again… that would be a real shot in the arm (see what I did there?) for this 2020 Atlanta Braves team.