The Atlanta Braves finally started looking like themselves when they were able to take a series from one of the better teams in the National League, the surprising Arizona Diamondbacks, and there were a lot of positives to take from the series. AJ Smith-Shawver made his big league debut, Eddie Rosario is getting going, Ronald Acuna Jr. is continuing to make things happen, and the rotation is somehow managing to weather all of the injuries. However, one storyline from last night's game involved Marcell Ozuna and it wasn't good...although it wasn't necessarily bad, either.
To be clear, Ozuna has in many ways earned a certain amount of skepticism given his poor behavior off the field and his crummy play on the field before the month of May. As a result, when he admired a long fly ball to center field last night that ended up only being a single despite hitting off the wall, there were more than a few people that had some wild takes about it.
Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake....even with Marcell Ozuna
Lets get the important thing out of the way now: watching a fly ball that doesn't go out instead of hustling out of the box is objectively a mistake. It often costs a player an extra base and that can cost your team runs. That is bad and should be avoided.
That said, there are too many folks that are willing to completely ignore the totality of what a player does on the field and decide, in that moment, that a player is lazy/never hustles/doesn't care/selfish and that is decidedly unfair. Is it a mistake? Again, absolutely....but it isn't like Ozuna didn't have some cause to think he had gotten all of that ball off of Zac Gallen last night.
Marcell Ozuna vs Zac Gallen#ForTheA
— Would it dong? (@would_it_dong) June 4, 2023
Single ⚾
Exit velo: 107.2 mph
Launch angle: 34 deg
Proj. distance: 415 ft
This would have been a home run in 23/30 MLB ballparks, including Truist Park
ATL (3) @ ARI (3)
🔺 4th pic.twitter.com/HEmMLmzfqP
The ball that Ozuna hit goes out of 23 of 30 parks in MLB. 107.2 mph off the bat and 415 feet is crushed, but unfortunately the combination of Arizona's park dimensions, Marcell admiring his work for too long, and Ozuna having a sprint speed that could best be described as the speed of smell meant it was just a long single.
What happened next, though, is a valuable lesson in how to handle this sort of situation like adults.