The Atlanta Braves have not been able to come close to their historic 2023 output on offense over the past two seasons. Odds were not in their favor to repeat, but that does not mean that whatever happened
wasn’t disappointing anyway. In 2024, they were 15th in runs scored among all MLB teams amid a raft of injuries. While they had better health in 2025, a changing-ish offensive approach meant they finished 13th. Marcell Ozuna was a key member of the offense in all three of these seasons.
How acquired
This past season, Ozuna was one of the longest-tenured players on the Atlanta Braves roster. Way back on January 21, 2020, the Braves signed him to a one-year, $18 million deal. This ended up being one of the best one-year free agent deals in MLB that shortened season, as Ozuna went on to place sixth in MVP voting while leading the league in total bases and a 178 wRC+. Ozuna then signed another deal with the Braves after hanging out as a free agent for a while, inking a four-year contract with a club option for the fifth year, which was picked up before the 2025 campaign.
What were the expectations?
The expectations were likely relatively high for Ozuna in 2025, as he had his best offensive campaign in a full season at age 33 in 2024. While there was a little discussion about whether the Braves would pick up his club option, it was pretty hard to turn down a guy who put up 4.7 fWAR as a DH and an xwOBA over .400 in nearly 700 PAs. Ozuna finished fourth in MVP voting, had a slash line of .302/.378/.546, hit 39 homers, was eighth among qualifiers in OBP and SLG, and DHed in every single game. Combine that with his 2023, where he had a similar-ish .393 xwOBA but missed some time and “only” amassed 3.2 fWAR, and the big risks were that he’d somehow regress to his disappointing 2021-2022 campaigns and/or somehow massively underhit his xwOBA again.
Notably, ZiPS projected substantial decline for his bat, with a point estimate of a 119 OPS+ for the 2025 season. That was somewhat interesting, since even factoring in his terrible 2022, Ozuna’s three-year wRC+ was 131. Still, even weighting 2022 heavily, it seemed like Ozuna was going to be at least an average regular despite taking the field, so there were some pretty high expectations for his bat, if not any other part of his game.
Needless to say, the Braves were likely hoping to get an offensive output at least close to the last two seasons. “Close” is a relative term, but you likely won’t find many people that will argue that his output in 2025 was close to the last two seasons.
2025 results
Ozuna took a nosedive offensively. There were a lot of reasons for it, which we’ll get to, but fundamentally, his wRC+ was actually below that ZiPS projection. (OPS+ and wRC+ track very closely to one another in most cases.) 106 of his 592 PAs came hitting sixth or below, which illustrates not just what he was doing, but also what the tea thought about what he was doing. His final line was a 114 wRC+ and a .232/.355/400 line with 21 homers, good for just 1.2 fWAR.
What went right?
While much of his season went wrong, not everything was the worst. He had a 160 wRC+ in April and a 142 wRC+ in May, driven by a massively engorged walk rate. His ISO cratered and he only hit nine homers across those two months, but he was walking nearly once a game, and his OBP was well over .400. The walks were a constant for Ozuna, and he finished with MLB’s third-highest walk rate among hitters qualified for the batting title, behind only Aaron Judge and Juan Soto.
Early on, he looked unstoppable here and there. In a 10-0 crushing of the Marlins on April 4, he finished a triple short of the cycle against his former team. On April 22, he had four walks in one game, a feat matched by just five other Braves over the last decade or so. He also came through after that stretch ended, though much less frequently. On June 17, he had one of the team’s biggest hits of the season, a game-tying three-run double with the bases loaded and two outs in the eighth:
It wasn’t the kind of laser that we’ve become accustomed to from Ozuna, but it did the job, and the Braves walked the Mets off in the tenth.
That said, Ozuna’s season went off the rails, and even his good start had some issues that clearly became apparent.
What went wrong?
Even by mid-April, Ozuna seemed to be ailing with some inflammation in his hip. His April was still legitimately destructive (.402 wOBA, .418 xwOBA), but by May, he was basically just walking and not much else — still good enough for a .375 wOBA/.365 xwOBA, but with inputs well below what he did in most months in 2023-2024. Sadly, he never really recovered even from that dropoff, as his xwOBAs in the following months were .323, .343, .358, and .270. His exit velocity declined every month into August, dipping below league average in June and only bouncing back to league average in September. To be clear: in the Statcast era, Ozuna has only had an exit velocity below league average in May 2021, May 2022, August 2022, and then the last three months of 2025.
None of this was surprising, as by June, the news came out that he was actually playing through a torn hip, but wouldn’t seek a surgical solution until the offseason. We can look at the numbers and it looks like his 26th game of the year might be a breakpoint, though it’s hard to know for sure.
Another thing that’s hard to know for sure is how much his offensive dropoff was purely because of the hip, how much of it was him leaning into an attempt to walk as much as possible given the Braves’ shifting offensive approach, and how much of it was some kind of unholy synthesis where, by focusing on walking because he couldn’t hit the ball hard anymore, he was doing what the team wanted him to do anyway. In any case, teams caught on super-quickly: Ozuna started getting hammered by pitches in the zone (instead of hammering them) by June. It was so stark it was kind of absurd: in his career, he’s had just 13 months where his in-zone rate was 48.5 percent or above (league-average is a little below 49 percent), of which only four came with the Braves from 2020-2024. In 2025, it approached that level in May and then blew well past it in three of the four following months. Meanwhile, his in-zone swing rate cratered so much it seems like a data error rather than something that really happened:
And then there was whatever this was:
Again, you can probably entirely blame his hip. Or, if you want to be vindictive, blame the changing offensive approach. It was probably some mix of the two, but it was awful for everyone.
On top of that, Ozuna also underhit his xwOBA. This has been an issue for him for his career, such that thinkpieces have been written about whether he has a “slice” in his swing or not. We won’t rehash all that here, but fundamentally, Ozuna underhit his xwOBA by more in 2025 than he had since his very problematic times in 2021-2022. When he was going ham in 2020, 2023, and 2024, he wasn’t underhitting his xwOBA by as much, but he was also hitting so well that it wouldn’t have mattered as much, comparatively, if he had. Unfortunately, the baseball gods decided to add insult to injury-and/or-approach-issues in 2025 for Ozuna.
We won’t go through a whole gallery of “Marcell Ozuna unsuccessfully fishing for walks in key situations” here, though we can. Instead, there’s another horrible game worth highlighting for a different reason. On April 26, Ozuna went 2-for-5 with an RBI double, a perfectly fine game. But, he also hit into two double plays in the first three innings, including a foulout where Alex Verdugo somehow got thrown out at home. He also had another horrible moment on June 5, which was the game where Scott Blewett and Raisel Iglesias blew a gigantic lead to the Diamondbacks. Ozuna came up as the winning run in the bottom of the ninth… but hit into a game-ending double play. Sigh.
2026 outlook
The 2026 outlook is murky for Marcell Ozuna. He is a free agent for the first time since 2021 and there are no signs of the Braves actively pursuing him. Again, maybe that’s his hip issue. Maybe it’s the fact that the Braves are finally pivoting to a more flexible, everybody-plays roster where having a permanent, immovable DH isn’t all that useful. Maybe it’s the fact that neither Steamer nor ZiPS really project him to do anything all that different in 2026 than 2025, though in ZiPS’ case, it doesn’t seem to have changed its outlook much from 2025 to 2026.
Ozuna will likely find himself an MLB deal pretty easily, but it will be interesting to see what it will be, and with which team. Kiley McDaniel of ESPN predicts Ozuna to receive a two-year deal worth $30MM. This price tag is palatable for quite a few teams that could pull in a high-risk, high-reward player in Marcell Ozuna. They just need to devote a dedicated DH slot to him to do so. Other sources are less sanguine about his earning potential in the offseason; the FanGraphs crowdsource had him at a $12 million, one-year deal; he did not make either the FanGraphs or MLB Trade Rumors Top 50 list.
