Marcell Ozuna's Slump Is At The Worst Possible Time
The Atlanta Braves need 'The Big Bear' to be hitting big flies and he's doing everything but that right now
The Atlanta Braves are in a bit of a free-fall right now.
Losers of their last three contests, the Braves have fallen two games behind the New York Mets for the third and final NL Wild Card spot. With only eleven games remaining, Atlanta needs to not only win a majority of their remaining games, but also take their three-game series against the Mets at home next week to ensure they get into October. The team’s postseason odds have fallen to 51.5% on FanGraphs, with Atlanta and New York officially swapping positions on this morning’s update.
One of the recurring themes for Atlanta recently has been the struggles of the offense - after taking an early lead on Sunday against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Braves were outscored 17-0 over the final twelve innings of the series to settle for a frustrating split (after taking a 2-0 series lead on the strength of a +13 run differential).
Atlanta was 0-for-10 with RISP against Yoshinobu Yamamoto on Monday, finishing the game 0-for-12. Tuesday against the Reds was more of the same, going just 2-for-9 with RISP and stranding fourteen runners on base in their 6-5 loss.
As much as it’s been a complete offensive collapse, there’s been one worrying trend: Marcell Ozuna.
‘The Big Bear’ is playing more like a cub of late, mired in a 26-game homerless streak that’s his longest since 2018, his first of two years in St. Louis with the Cardinals. Since popping a longball off in the series opener against Philly on August 20th, Ozuna’s batting a healthy .274 with a .367 on-base but only a .316 slug, picking up just four doubles among his 26 hits. He’s driven in just four runs during that stretch, all coming in two games against the Minnesota Twins (19 games ago).
So, what’s happened? Why isn’t he hitting homers?
It’s because he’s not getting his pitch to hit.
Ozuna’s always been a fastball hitter
Ozuna’s a top 20 hitter in all of baseball against four-seam fastballs, sitting at a +13 Run Value after batting .341 with a .584 slug off of heaters. It’s always been like this in healthy years, too - he was +11 in 2023, +16 in 2020, and +22 in 2019.1
But the problem right now is that teams just aren’t throwing him fastballs.
Here’s a chart of Marcell’s slugging (blue line) overlaid with his fastball percentage (red line) in a rolling 15-game average this season - see if you can spot the trend.
The more fastballs he gets, the more productive he is.
And he’s just not getting a lot of fastballs right now.
As you can see from the spike right past game 120, Marcell’s been able to sustain some hot streaks despite periods of low fastball usage against him thanks to an above-average performance against sliders this season. He’s sitting at an outlier +10 Run Value on the year so far, with his previous career high being just +6 and he’s been as low as -8 in his career.
But he goes as the fastball goes - here’s the same fastball chart, now overlaid with his weighted on-base average (wOBA2) :
Absent the one late-summer spike, this graph hews very closely to his fastball percentage.
David O’Brien of The Athletic talked to Braves hitting coach Kevin Seitzer about this, and confirmed that Ozuna’s approach at the plate is out of whack right now:
“He’s guessing wrong a lot of times,” Braves hitting coach Kevin Seitzer said at the beginning of the Dodgers series. “He’s a little late on fastballs. He’s been getting a lot of secondary stuff, so he’s been kind of reacting to fastballs, which, that’s not him. He’s got to get on the heater (fastball).”
Seitzer also added that Ozuna is pressing a bit, feeling the pressure to perform for a depleted offense that has three different DFA’d players starting on any given night.
Ozuna also added that fatigue is partly to blame, something that manager Brian Snitker admitted to Justin Toscano of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he hasn’t noticed but isn’t surprised by:
“I haven’t seen that,” Snitker said. “Everybody’s tired. It’s the end of September, we’ve been doing this for seven months. Everybody’s sore, everybody’s hurting, everybody’s tired – that’s part of the game. No, I think it’s probably more of a mental thing with him than anything. He’s so big and strong that I don’t know that he gets tired – he gets sleepy. He’s just gotta relax and trust himself. He’s a really good hitter. He’s obviously one of the best in the business. He’s just gotta go back to believing it.”
Is the fatigue real?
The easy assumption to make here is that Ozuna’s a designated hitter, so there’s no reason for him to be as fatigued as any of his teammates, as he’s not playing defense every day.
We can’t directly measure fatigue (yet), but there are other metrics that we can look at to try and approximate it.
From a swing speed perspective, Ozuna’s sitting at 39th in all of baseball with an average bat speed of 74.0 mph, tied with Bryce Harper of the Philadelphia Phillies. Ozuna’s 42.5% Fast Swing Rate, how frequently he swings 75 mph or harder, is right in line with several of his peers. There’s also been no real significant drop in his monthly swing speed figures, with September’s 73.4 mph being the slowest but within 3/10ths of a mile per hour of July’s 73.7 (while he actually saw an uptick in August).3
While we can’t look at sprint speed on a monthly basis, he is down YOY from a 28th percentile 26.4 in 2023 to a 14th percentile 25.7 in 2024.
I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume that the fatigue is real, given that he’s a (listed) 225lb designated hitter who hasn’t missed a game all season as he approaches his mid-30s.
But even then, I don’t think the fatigue is a big part of it.
It’s back to the approach.
Ozuna’s approach is off
Seitzer’s right on this - Ozuna sitting on soft stuff means that he’s late on the heaters. He’s seen 120 four-seam fastballs since hitting that homer in Philly, and here’s where he picked up his seven hits:
Five of the seven have been up the middle or to the opposite field, a sign that he’s behind on fastballs.
(Although when he’s expecting a heater, he can still get the bat head out ahead of it and pull it to left field - those two singles to the left side came off of 96.1 from MacKenzie Gore of the Nationals and 95.9 from Chad Green of the Blue Jays.)
The biggest frustration here is that opposing pitchers are taking advantage of his adjustment. The most common count that Ozuna’s been thrown a fastball in this slump is 0-0, seeing 23 of them as the first pitch, but he doesn’t have a single hit off of those because he is going into the at-bat sitting on breaking and offspeed stuff.
(And when he gets that offspeed stuff, he’s crushing it - a .357 average off of changeups and a .500 on splitters, with a .500 slug on both.)
But Marcell’s caught in the middle right now. A fatigued hitter with slightly reduced bat speed is getting fastballs when he isn’t ready for them (early in the at-bat) and then not seeing very many the rest of the at-bat, when he’s usually behind.
I don’t know what the fix is here - he either needs to punish that offspeed stuff so that pitchers go back to throwing him heat or try to adopt Philly’s approach against Spencer Strider in last year’s NLDS of fouling off non-fastballs and sitting on the heater.
But I do know that they’ve only got about two weeks to figure it out, or else the season’s over.
Ozuna had a -2 in 2021 and a -2 in 2022, with the slugger playing just 48 games in 2021 due to both an injury and a suspension and then losing playing time down the stretch in 2022 after a DUI.
wOBA is a derivative of on-base average that adjusts for what that event is worth when it comes to run scoring - a homer is obviously more valuable than a walk, for instance. You can read more about it in MLB’s glossary.
From what I can tell, many players have a natural decline in their swing speed during the course of the season, so the magnitude of the drop is what matters more than fact that it dropped.