There’s an old saying that goes along the lines of “The apology needs to be as loud as the disrespect was.” To be fair, the reasons for disrespecting Marcell Ozuna all the way up to May of last season were pretty reasonable. After all, he was pretty deep into his contract with the Atlanta Braves and not only had he been underperforming on the field, he’d also been getting into a ton of nasty trouble off the field.
It’s very tough for me personally as a fan to root for a guy who had gotten in trouble for the types of stuff that Ozuna had gotten into — drinking and driving and domestic violence qualify less as “mistakes” and more as willfully bad choices. I don’t want to come off as preachy or holier-than-thou since I’ve absolutely made a ton of of mistakes in my life’s journey but again, there’s a difference between mistakes and choices. You can choose to get a ride home via a friend or Uber and you can choose to take the high road when emotions are high and heated in the home. Honestly, it’s still kind of hard to square that away, even now.
With that being said, it’s been very nice to see that Marcell Ozuna has stayed out of the TMZ Sports section and the local news that doesn’t involve sports for an extended period of time. It’s even better that it’s coincided with Ozuna suddenly becoming one of the top Designated Hitters in all of baseball. Last season, Ozuna finished with a slash line of .274/.346/.558 with a .381 wOBA, a .396 xwOBA and a wRC+ of 139 over 592 plate appearances. You blinked and suddenly the guy ended up with a 40-homer season! The fact that he was able to finish with such lofty numbers despite essentially wasting his first 114 plate appearances of the season (up until May 15, 2023) with numbers like .172/.274/.434, .301 wOBA and 86 wRC+ is genuinely astonishing.
It’s even more incredible when you consider that his numbers in late March/early April 2023 were even more dire as his first month of the season saw him put up a pitiful slash line of .085/.194/.203, a .188 wOBA and a scarcely-believable wRC+ of 10. Ten!!! He was legitimately unplayable for the first month of the season and it would’ve been well within reason for Atlanta to do what Arizona did with Madison Bumgarner and just pay the guy to stay home for the rest of his contract. Instead, you can now make the argument that Ozuna has indeed lived up to the four-year, $64 million contract that he signed and it wouldn’t really be ridiculous at all if the Braves exercised the club option for a fifth season.
His start to the season so far has only bolstered his case for returning for another season. Marcell Ozuna has blasted out of the gates this season and is currently on track for what would be his best season in a Braves uniform — it would easily his best full season here as well, since the monster year he had at the plate was back in the COVID-shortened 2020 season. He’s hitting .315/.396/.646 with a .445 wOBA, a .469 xwOBA, .331 in Isolated Power and a wRC+ of 190 with 12 homers already. If you look at his Baseball Savant page right now, it’d be like going to a Georgia Bulldogs football game because there’s nothing but red for as far as the eye can see.
baseballsavant.mlb.com
The only pure DH (I’m leaving out the catchers who moonlight as DHs when they aren’t behind the plate) who has been better than Ozuna this season is Shohei Ohtani and that’s only because Ohtani is currently doing his best peak-Barry Bonds imitation at the moment. It’s is essentially taking a Hall-of-Fame caliber player playing at a Hall-of-Fame caliber level to beat out what Ozuna is doing right now.
While it would be easy to simply wave all of this off as Marcell Ozuna simply being able to focus on the game instead of whatever’s going on outside of the game, it appears that in this case the simplest solution is, in fact, the solution. According to quotes from David O’Brien of The Athletic, it does appear that Ozuna has genuinely benefited from simply having peace of mind on the field. The following quote is from April:
“Sometimes you have a full mindset, you have your mind charged, and put all of those problems in the past. I think now it’s clear. Now I can come every day happy like I used to be. Every day, come in happy and play happy when I have the opportunity. Now I have the opportunity and the chance, so I have to take (advantage).”
This one is from a couple of weeks later when it was clear that Ozuna was sustaining his high level of production at the plate:
“I don’t have the struggles that I had before; I don’t have too many things on my mind,” Ozuna said. “Right now I play with a clear mind, which is way better. When you had to go out there and you hear those boos, that was on my mind. And I said to myself, ‘Chill out and do what you need to do. You know you can hit, and they give you the opportunity.’”
One thing that was consistent between those two quotes is the word “opportunity.” I think it’s obvious by now that I don’t have any sources within the Braves front office and I’m in a very, very large club in that regard. With that being said, I’d be willing to venture that in May of last year the team probably gave him a soft deadline to get things going or else he’d see either a diminished role or no role at all in the team.
Even with that speculative deadline, Brian Snitker kept him in the lineup, his teammates kept on supporting him (which you can tell by how excited the other players are whenever he comes up big) and eventually Ozuna broke out of the extended slump and has now been tearing the cover off of the baseball ever since. Speaking of hitting the ball hard, that was one thing that Ozuna could count on even during the slump — It’s all very simple — almost like something out of a work of baseball fiction. He may have had one last and final opportunity, he took that opportunity and now here we are with Marcell Ozuna, the Super DH.
Despite key cogs of Atlanta’s lineup currently not firing on all cylinders at the moment, the Braves are still in a very good place at the moment and their lineup has remained in the top 10 in wRC+ and a lot of that is due to the production of Marcell Ozuna. If you had asked me a year ago about the odds of Ozuna basically carrying Atlanta’s lineup at any point, I probably would’ve called you a big dummy and gone right back to hoping that the Braves would just cut bait and be done with the guy.
Instead, the team is being rewarded for is patience and Marcell Ozuna is paying the franchise back for the faith that they had in him to turn things around, both on and off the field. As long as Ozuna can keep this up (and it wouldn’t be shocking if he did) and also continue to stay out of drama off the field, it’ll be a safe bet that he’ll be around for 2025 as well and continue to be a fixture in Atlanta’s lineup going forward. This isn’t to say that forgiveness from some fans is as easy as simply hitting the ball over the fence but it is to say that Ozuna has done a great job of making sure that the focus is Patience, discipline and time can heal most wounds that appears to be the case with Ozuna and Atlanta’s fan base at this particular moment.
