[I asked AAR to write something up and he didn’t have time. So you get my inferior retrospective. Also, today was the second day of pitchers and catchers and we learned that one pitcher, Spencer Schwellenbach, is really Spencer Won’t-be-back-for-a-while and one catcher, Sean Murphy, is sufficiently uncertain to necessitate a one year contract to once-promising-but-now-hits-like-Damon-Berryhill Jonah Heim. More on these developments soon. Today is about Ozuna.]
Marcell Ozuna left St. Louis under the cloud of a megatrade bust: the Cardinals gave up Sandy Alcantara and Zac Gallen and Magneuris Sierra and Daniel Castano to get him and he put up only 2.5 WAR per year before gaining free agency; Cardinals fans hated him. He then came to Atlanta under what is the clearly established Anthopoulous Doctrine: you’re a dodgy quantity, so you get a year, and if it works out you get a chance at an extension. This technique has had mixed success, from Josh Donaldson at one end to Cole Hamels on the other. Marcell is clearly on the upper end of this distribution by any measure. His 2.8 WAR in the abbreviated 2020 season earned him the extension, and it paid off, though it took a while.
Let’s start with basics: assuming he never returns to the Braves, Marcell Ozuna put up the following body of work in the ATL.
- An extremely solid 127 OPS+ in his 6 years.
- Compared to other Braves over that span, he ranks second in most counting-stat categories (games, at bats, hits, homers) behind Riley, and third in a few (singles, behind Riley and Albies; RBIs, behind Riley and Olson; walks, behind Olson and Acuña)
- Twice, he was top 10 in MVP voting
- He hit a triple and had 3 stolen bases, only being caught once.
- He arrived as a relatively immobile left fielder, and pretty quickly became someone whose glove could be left at home.
In those six years, the Braves paid him just under $100MM to play baseball, and he did so at a very high level. And he was by every account I’ve seen, a great teammate and highly inspirational, particularly to his fellow Spanish-speaking players.
On the other hand, this great offensive performance was concentrated in four of his six seasons here. And most problematic was 2021, the season the Braves won a World Championship. His absence in left field after he badly broke two fingers sliding into third was then compounded with a domestic violence suspension; this led indirectly to the signing of Eddie Rosario, just as Acuña’s injury led to the signings of Jorge Soler and Joc Pederson. Counterfactual history is a mug’s game, but we can only say what actually happened: the Braves won a World Series, and indeed were only a superlative team when two of their best offensive players were missing. Baseball is a funny game.
2022 wasn’t much better and there were grumblings that he was done. But he silenced his critics… not just the critics of his hitting abilities (he only had two games in left field after 2022) but the publicity around domestic violence issues that got him suspended and led many people on this blog to declare they never wanted to see him again on the field.
I am an ostrich on these issues. There are a lot of things I’d rather not know about players. I certainly don’t want to know about their home lives, their strip club antics, or even their salaries for that matter. The fact that the modern age relishes in the feel-good and tsks at the feel-bad forces us to confront these things with a take is, in my opinion, a problem in the current age. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me on this – my grandchildren certainly don’t, and I’ll only be around so much longer to have to wallow in this stew of personal detail. But I hope, even for those of you who wanted Ozuna off the team in 2021, that we realize that with the power to condemn comes the responsibility to recognize the possibility of redemption. Has Ozuna redeemed himself? I have no idea, and I don’t want to know. But apparently no news is good news, and I wish him well in Pittsburgh. Nice town, lousy baseball team. And if we need to find a pinch hitter for our 2026 playoff run, I expect Pittsburgh will be one of the first places on speed dial.
I don’t like this topic but it’s come up recently due to a certain Falcons player. Here’s why I don’t like it. I’m married with kids, multiple daughters, and while my daughters may fear me in a stern, angry dad sort of way, none of the women in my household worry I would be violent toward them. Hasn’t happened. Won’t happen unless I get a frontal lobe injury à la Phineas Gage, which is to say, my temperament and moral sense would have to be radically altered. But when an athlete is violent toward a woman, there’s a lot of lecturing and moralizing and condemning people who don’t condemn the act strongly enough. And even though I am as radically against violence toward women as possible (one of the few things I’m an extremist about), and even though my children will be taught to feel the same, I find anything that smacks of virtue signaling to be nauseating. Adults usually don’t need to be lectured by other adults, but some adults feel they’re doing a great deed in the service of justice by doing so.
And here’s the thing. People have different temperaments. Not only am I not violent toward women, I’ve never been violent toward a man in my adult life, and barely even in my childhood. The chances I would strike my wife, even in retaliation for being struck, are basically zero, but for a different person, they may do something they regret in a particular instance. That is especially true, if there is violence going both ways and if some sort of mind-altering substance is involved. Now sure, he shouldn’t, but I can see how that can happen in an isolated case in a particularly toxic relationship, alcohol in the system. One out of 7 men are victims of DV themselves. Again, men are stronger and can do more damage, and they should not retaliate in kind. I am not excusing it. But I can see how in the moment, it could go that way for a person who is different than I.
And the question is whether someone deserves to be unpersoned for such a mistake. I say no, not necessarily, and believing that is not to justify something that is not justifiable. I’m glad we didn’t unperson Ozuna who has a lot of positive attributes and seems to have deserved a second chance.
I think I get your point, Stampton (and I always appreciate your commentary on here), but I think there is a real difference between “unpersoning” someone and feeling excited, as a baseball fan, to root for them 162 times per year, to welcome them into your home (via the radio or tv) every evening over the course of the summer. As we all know, baseball fandom is so particular in its rhythms and constancy and the sort of parasocial relationships you wind up forming with the players, if you’re tuning in most nights of the week and reading coverage etc. I don’t begrudge anyone else their feelings about him, but for me, every time he came up to the plate, I saw his hand around his wife’s neck, and his DUI arrest, and found it extremely difficult to root for him. But even if I do not want him on the team I pull for, and am glad he’s moving on, Ozuna has not been (to use another word bouncing around the culture right now) “deplatformed” or “unpersoned”; he continues to make a lot of money playing baseball. He is doing fine, regardless of how I might feel about him personally, or how I might talk about him on a baseball blog.
Also, I’ve got to say I find complaints about ‘virtue signaling’ to be sort of a tail-chasing exercise with no end—is that not virtue signaling about virtue signaling? I understand if this next thought approaches a line here, and I’m going to try to say this really carefully, but I don’t know how to engage in this topic otherwise: but in a world where violence against women has been so horrifically routine, for so long, and where extremely powerful people will shamelessly brag about it, engage in it on a broad and staggering scale, and protect each other in doing the same, I personally don’t feel guilty or bad about pushing for a culture of even just slightly more accountability for it, especially as so much seems to be careening right now in the complete opposite direction.
Yep, all good points and I don’t disagree with any of it. The line is that you have your opinion and I have mine, and neither of us wants to tell the other they’re a bad person or “complicit” (another popular term these days) for a reasonable take. I would also feel very differently if a person were bragging about this behavior vs showing contrition. “Unperson” is not the best word choice but it was shorthand and poetic license.
It was inevitable that this was going to come here, and I’m going to exercise extreme leniency in discussion of this topic, and I don’t think either of you are anywhere near my line here. So thanks.
But, in anticipation of more comments from others, which I welcome, I double down on my personal conviction that ostrichism (not ostracism) is the correct policy here, and the fact that it is denied to us is unfortunate.
These are humans, and humans are imperfect. Ozuna was a complicated situation, and I’ll leave it at that.
I have Chipper Jones’ “#10” tattooed on my chest inside of my late dog Chipper’s paw print. I love Chipper Jones. Would I want Chipper Jones dating my mother (if that was a thing)? No. No, I would not.
Chris Bassitt signs with Baltimore… 1 yr./$18.5 M.
Not that Bassitt is some savior, but, there are no reinforcements coming.
Sale-Strider-Holmes-Waldrep-Elder-Lopez are gonna have to work.
Wentz too!! 🙂
Also Martin Perez maaaaaybe?
It is mildly irritating to me given how modest the cost, but I’ve grown numb to these sorts of penny-pinching decisions and expect them.
There is some chance Ritchie will be ready to start right away. He is impressive. Seems to know how to pitch. The rest of that collection has too much injury history to all make it through the season, so we need to get very lucky with their health otherwise. A couple more injuries and Welp.
sdp including Elder as a potential rotation piece just ruined my day.
From the Milestone post…
…I should also note that since ahem, most of us are from the South, and some from Alabama, I just finished my debut novel, The Weight of the Light, and I’m now in the waiting game of the snobbish world of publishing…
If anyone would like to read it, it’s a Southern Gothic/family saga novel about my cotton farming family… shoot me an email at wareagle34@hotmail.com and I’d be much obliged for some eyes on target…
If some of you had “Chief Nocahoma very well may soon be a published author based on early feedback” on your bingo card, maybe it’s a good day for you to buy a lottery ticket…
Go Braves and love to you all.
Congrats Chief. Hope it gets published.
I think Giolito has been the guy they want. When he’s off the board, I’ll give up hope.
But they’ve made their bed. 7 out of their top 10 prospects or whatever are pitching prospects. If you don’t give them a chance, what’s the point of collecting them and never trading them? Waldrep is here. Ritchie, Fuentes, and Murphy are close. Burkhalter could conceivably be a 5th-6th starter right now. Elder has clearly shown that he can put together a string of good starts. Gonna have to give one or two of those guys a spot at some point.
Kudos.Chief. Bravo zulu!
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