The Pittsburgh Pirates sit atop the National League Central division thanks to a holistic team effort. While their pitching has been the driver of success to date, the lineup has much improved over last year’s effort. Pick your metric and the Pirates hitting has made at least some improvement over that metric compared to last season, meaning that while it feels premature to make sweeping statements about player performance, there is one player who’s poor start feels more than just early season rust.
Marcell Ozuna has been, quite frankly, the worst hitter in baseball so far this season. In 44 plate appearances, he’s managed just two hits while striking out 11 times. The advanced stats are somehow worse: Batting Run Value is a Baseball Savant available statistic that essentially asks, “How many runs was this player responsible for at the plate,” and Ozuna has been so poor that he has actually cost the Pirates about seven runs so far. BRV can also be adjusted to include leveraged context, taking into account factors such as men on base and how many outs and innings are left in a game. By this adjusted metric, Ozuna is still one of the bottom hitters in the league, costing the Pirates about eight runs so far this season.
The statistics paint a bleak picture, but as mentioned above, many are willing to write off slow starts to early season rust and cold weather games. Surely a player of his caliber will progress towards the mean and at least deliver something closer to his historical performance? Well the advanced statistics do not seem to paint that picture.
Going back to baseball savant, almost all of his bat tracking and hard hit metrics find him in the bottom quarter of hitters in the league:
The lone bright spot is that Ozuna’s bat speed, which is a process based statistic, is still in the 67th percentile of all batters. However, that bat speed has been slightly dropping ever since 2024, when he registered a 74mph average bat speed. Last year, that number dropped to 72.9mph, and put him in the 64th percentile, far more in line with this year’s stats.
But a slight dip in bat speed won’t explain league worst hitting performance. What else is happening? Simply put: Ozuna is getting underneath everything, pulling nothing, and pitchers are getting more past him while he works through that mechanical issue.
Ozuna is hitting a career high 67.9% of balls in the air, more than 10% higher than his career average. Most notably, he is yanking fastballs in the air with a launch angle of almost 30 degrees and an exit velocity of 87mph compared to last season when the launch angle was 12 degrees and exit velocity was 92mph. This issue is compounded when he has lost the ability to pull fastball pitches, which was Ozuna’s strength as a hitter career to date.
Historically, he’s been about league average in all pull/up the middle/opposite field ground ball and flyball rates, with one exception: he has always been among one of the best hitters in baseball at pulled balls in the air. League average is around 16.7%; Ozuna’s career is 18.4% and last year he was at 19.7 and the year before 24.5%. This year? He’s at 0% with a career high opposite field hitting percentage of 35%, more than 12 points higher than last season.
Because Ozuna has lost the ability to pull fastballs hard and in the air, pitchers are far less afraid to attack him with fastballs this season, with 57% of pitches against him being fastballs compared to 53% from last year. And that extra 4% of fastballs? Turns out Ozuna’s whiff percentage is up 4% year over year. Additionally concerning? Ozuna’s whiff rate against breaking pitches is up to 50%, compared to last season when it was just 34.5%.
This is a lot of data to essentially say that there seems to be both a mechanical and approach issue with Ozuna that has significantly reduced the effectiveness of the one thing he did at an elite level: pull fastballs in the air hard. If we were talking about a 25 year old player coming off a couple successful seasons with these issues, there would and should be optimism that coaching could help adjust the issues. But we’re talking about a 35 year old veteran on the wrong side of most aging curves showing these issues. Even if there was the ability to potentially fix the approach, there’s no guarantee the bat speed could maintain at a level that a pull-first, fastball mashing approach would age as the season takes its toll.
Ozuna’s saving grace is that there is no clear AAA player ready to break down the doors and force the Pirates into a tough decision. However, we’ve seen so far this season that defense will cost the Pirates runs, and therefore games, and Ozuna’s permanent occupation of the position leaves Don Kelly in a bit of a bind. Should Jhostynxon Garcia, Termarr Johnson, or Endy Rodriguez display AAA mastery this season, all three would improve the Pirates defense and offer far more lineup flexibility.
Ozuna has until then to get right, but most likely at the cost of at bats that could be helping the Pirates win games.
