Marcell Ozuna Has a Slice

This article was originally published at Birds on the Black, a St. Louis Cardinals blog. You can find the blog (@birdsontheblack), author (@zjgifford), and artist (@cardinalsgifs) on Twitter.

Back in November, the FanGraphs staff ranked Marcell Ozuna as the seventh-best available free agent. In that article, Kiley McDaniel and the FanGraphs crowd both expected Ozuna would receive a four-year deal, with the median crowdsource estimate coming in at $64 million ($16 million per year) while McDaniel was a little higher at $70 million ($17.5 million per year). Teams could dream on Ozuna’s potential and a return to his 2017 production with relatively minimal risk — since his 2013 debut, Ozuna has consistently produced as an average or better player. Coming into this offseason, he had produced more than 2 WAR in four straight seasons dating back to 2016. Free agents are never a sure bet, but Ozuna seemed pretty close to one at a reasonable price.

Ozuna ended up betting on himself by taking a one-year deal with Atlanta, which was a bit of a surprise. With that context, I wanted to see what happened during his breakout 2017 campaign and what might be holding him back from tapping back into that potential. We’ll start with some numbers:

Many breakouts start with improvements in approach, and Ozuna’s was no different. His non-contact wOBA (driven by strikeouts, walks, and HBP) jumped from .155 in 2015 to .195 in 2016, or, in other words, from pretty bad to pretty average (MLB average is around .200). He maintained those gains in 2017 and ’18 before making another jump into pretty-good territory in 2019. Ozuna’s ability to maintain his non-contact gains is a good sign if we want to believe he can re-unlock his 2017 form, and so far he looks like he has that part of his game covered.

Now the fun stuff. The next four lines are different ways I like to measure contact quality. We know Ozuna hits the ball hard, with an average exit velocity ranking in or near the top 10% of hitters each year since 2015, when that data became publicly available. His average exit velocity of 91.8 mph in 2019 is tied for his highest over that period.

Ozuna’s 2017 breakout was marked by an improvement in his ability to generate the best contact more often, as evidenced by a jump in his barrel rates as a percentage of batted balls and plate appearances. Again, he’s maintained the gains made in 2017 and even continued to improve in 2019. His expected slugging percentage (used here to measure overall contact quality) made a similar jump in 2017 and, while it’s varied some, improvements over the younger version of Ozuna are still there. And, once again, 2019 was Ozuna’s best season according to this metric.

Obviously those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Those metrics all show a player who broke out and continued to perform at a high level. If you’re reading this blog, you probably know the Cardinals didn’t get the 2017 version of Marcell Ozuna after they acquired him from the Marlins. Here’s his actual wRC+, along with an estimate of his expected wRC+ (derived from xwOBA) based on exit velocities and launch angles:

The expected numbers back up Ozuna’s breakout from 2015-17 — the plate discipline gains along with contact quality improvements culminated in a great hitter. Ozuna has regressed some since then, but he continued to look like a high-level performer in 2018 and 2019, if we were only looking at the expected numbers. Based on the actual results, however, 2017 stands alone as an outlier. The gap between his expected wRC+ and actual wRC+ was 15 points in both 2018 and 2019 and would make him one of the “unluckiest” hitters in baseball. What gives?

For all the great things we can garner from Baseball Savant, their expected metrics leave out a few critical components. Two of those components are batted ball spin (more on this later), and – most importantly – spray angle. A 390-foot fly ball to left field is a home run almost every time; a 390-foot fly ball to center field is an out almost every time. With that in mind, look at where Ozuna’s fly balls have clustered over the last few years.

Source: Baseball Savant.

There’s a cluster in shallow right field. Those are mis-hits, and most mis-hit fly balls are popouts to the opposite field. That cluster is normal. There’s another cluster, however, in the 2018-19 chart, and it’s a cluster of outs near the center / right-center warning track. Those aren’t mis-hits. Those are drives that are falling just short. The expected slugging percentage on those outs is over 1.400 – something like 60% of balls hit at that velocity and launch angle are doubles or home runs. For Ozuna, those have mostly turned into outs, in part because he’s hitting them to the wrong part of the field.

There’s a little more to it, though. On average, Ozuna hit these fly balls approximately 100 miles per hour at an average launch angle of 32.4 degrees, and their average flight was 364 feet. When the rest of the league hit the ball at similar angles at similar velocities in a similar direction in 2018, they went 371 feet. In 2019, they went 375 feet. Ozuna’s fly balls to this part of the field are traveling about 10 feet shorter than we would expect them to fly, and the lost distance has turned a number of potential home runs into outs.

Thanks to the great @cardinalsgifs, we can watch a few of these outs and see where he’s losing distance. Here’s a warning track drive from 2019 against Oakland:

Warning track power here, and neither broadcast sounded terribly convinced that the ball was going to leave the yard. Still, similar balls went for home runs or extra bases about a quarter of the time in 2019 and traveled an average distance of 398 feet – Ozuna’s fell in a glove 389 feet away. Nine more feet, and the ball is probably in the stands.

As I mentioned above, another input missing from the Statcast model is batted ball spin. Typically, when we talk about batted ball spin, we’re talking about backspin and whether it provides extra carry. For Ozuna, the issue appears to be a result of side spin. Think about how a golf ball flies off a driver – a straight drive, where the spin (backspin) is aligned with the direction of the ball’s flight, travels further than a sliced drive, where the spin is perpendicular (side spin) to the ball’s flight. We can’t say for certain whether Ozuna’s flyout had side spin, because that data isn’t available (to my knowledge, at least). But we can look at the ball’s flight path:

Source: Baseball Savant

(Excuse the dot. Baseball Savant estimates where the ball would land if not caught, and that’s where this dot was placed. As you saw, it was short of the fence).

The ball starts out traveling (just) barely to the left side of the second base bag. It ends about 10 feet right of Freese’s lawn. I’m not a physicist, but that ball probably had a lot of side spin. If it didn’t, it would have flow straighter and had a better chance of reaching the bleachers (or lawn).

Compare that flight to this blast from 2017:

Source: Baseball Savant.

There’s still some slice there, but to my amateur eye it appears that there’s considerably less. This ball was hit a little harder at 104 mph, and a little lower. For the shape of the flight, that matters. To me though, it seems like there’s a lot more pushing this ball forward than there is pushing it sideways.

Sliced fly balls aren’t necessarily a symptom of anything bad for a hitter. Balls hit to the opposite field will slice, balls hit to the pull side tend to hook, and balls hit toward center might do either. It depends on the hitter’s swing, and where in the swing path a hitter makes contact.

Here’s a fly ball that Ozuna hit toward left-center, which you’d typically expect to stay relatively straight or maybe even hook slightly:

The camera pans out after contact, and the cameraman is looking for a ball toward left-center. Which makes sense, because the ball starts by flying over the shortstop’s head. But the ball ended up in center field:

Now, we’re talking about one fly ball here. Maybe this wasn’t Ozuna’s best swing. Maybe Busch Stadium had all the air conditioning blow from the left side of the field toward the right. But balls hit like this one normally travel 416 feet, and balls hit like this one that start toward left-center usually end up in the stands. Danny Mac thought this was in the stands. But this ball didn’t even travel 400 feet. It was short of the wall because its flight looked something like this:

Source: Baseball Savant.

That ball is sliced. It’s hard to pull a fly ball toward left field and then banana curl it over to center without a swing that’s geared up to smash the ball into the left field foul pole.

Over the last few years, there’s been a lot written about the benefit hitters can realize by pulling more of their fly balls. A pulled fly ball has been called the ideal result of an at-bat. Ozuna broke out in 2017, at least in part, because he made the most of his pulled fly balls. In 2019, it looked like he was making more of an effort to pull the ball – his pulled fly ball rate of 33.6% was significantly higher than the 25% rate he ran in the previous three years.

I’m speculating, and I admittedly haven’t spent the time to watch enough of his at-bats to make a convincing conclusion. It looks like the potential mechanical issues I wrote about in 2018 were fixed in 2019. However, based on what I watched this time, it looks like Ozuna’s step during the 2019 season was sometimes more toward the third-base side than it was in the 2017 season. It also looks, to me, like his upper body was sometimes flying out in an effort to hit the ball to left field. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but there are trade-offs to every adjustment. The benefits have to outweigh the costs.

Statcast’s metrics love Marcell Ozuna, and I hope he makes a big impact in Atlanta in 2020 before signing a longer contract. Still, the ball flight that a hitter generates is a skill. Ozuna might not be great at that skill, and it might limit the damage he can do at the plate. Somewhere, there’s a key to unlock his lofty ceiling, and Atlanta should be taking a good, hard look.

Credit to Baseball Savant’s Statcast Search for most of this data and their video library, and to FanGraphs for various stats used throughout. Big thank you to @cardinalsgifs for his incredible work, again. I made some estimates here on the ball flights, because flight data isn’t available. Those estimates were made in good faith, but they won’t be completely accurate. Lastly, since the original post at BotB, there were a few minor data updates to the group of outs highlighted in 2018-2019 as a result of more refined queries.





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Mario Mendozamember
4 years ago

Great stuff!

Put him in Yankee stadium, problem solved.

Green Mountain Boy
4 years ago

Maybe it’s just me, but it looks like he’s a “hands inside the baseball” hitter. In other words, he’s pulling his hands closer to his body to get better wood on the ball rather than letting his right hand release and hitting the ball out front. Ted Williams must be rolling over in his grave.

cgarner29
4 years ago

Keeping his hands inside the ball isn’t the problem. Every hitter will pull their hands in to get a barrel. The problem for Ozuna is that he doesn’t stay through the ball as long as elite hitters. Meaning the ball comes off with sidespin instead of backspin, causing it to slice. The phrase i’ve heard is ‘short to it, long through it’. Ozuna has half the equation down.

eph_unitmember
4 years ago

Great article. I wonder if Ozuna slices in golf as well! Busch is a tough park for righties in terms of RHH pull hr/brl. Suntrust/Truist park should be better. So hopefully the hitting coaches get him in the pull mindset this yr.