Pirates’ Marcell Ozuna disaster looks even worse with one brutal stat

The Marcell Ozuna signing looked like a mistake the moment the Pittsburgh Pirates made it. Now that the season is nearly over, it somehow looks even worse.

There were warning signs everywhere when Pittsburgh handed Ozuna $12 million in February. He was entering his age-35 season. His production had fallen dramatically the year before. His bat speed was trending in the wrong direction, he was coming off a hip issue and, because he was essentially locked into designated hitter duties, adding him immediately made the Pirates’ roster less flexible.

None of that stopped Pittsburgh from making him one of its biggest offensive additions of the offseason. And the result was every bit as ugly as the skeptics feared.

Ozuna finished his Pirates tenure with a .612 OPS and was worth minus-1.1 WAR, according to Baseball-Reference. Pittsburgh finally released him in early August after months of waiting for a turnaround that never came.

Alex Stumpf of Book-Rule Bucs recently highlighted one statistic makes the entire experiment look particularly disastrous. The Pirates went 26-40 in the 66 games Ozuna started, and 51-37 in games he didn't. That's a .394 winning percentage with Ozuna in the starting lineup compared to .580 without him.

Obviously, baseball doesn't work neatly enough to pin 14 extra losses on one player. Plenty went wrong for Pittsburgh aside from Ozuna during the first half of the season. Still, the contrast is staggering.

Pirates' disastrous Marcell Ozuna signing is high on list of reason they missed playoffs

For a team that will spend the final week of September wondering how it missed the postseason despite making a legitimate second-half push, Ozuna has to rank among the biggest what-ifs.

It wasn't merely that he failed to provide the middle-of-the-order production Pittsburgh expected. His presence had ripple effects throughout the roster. Ryan O'Hearn was required to spend significantly more time in the outfield than Pittsburgh probably envisioned, reducing some of the lineup flexibility that made him so valuable. O'Hearn also had two separate IL stints because of quad injuries.

Meanwhile, the Pirates kept giving Ozuna at-bats, hoping his track record would eventually surface. It never did. He struggled immediately, never established a sustained hot stretch and ultimately forced Pittsburgh to admit defeat with two months remaining in the season.

That is what makes this signing different from a normal free-agent miss. Every signing carries risk, but Ozuna's warning signs were hardly hidden. The Pirates chose to overlook them and committed significant money and playing time to a player whose roster fit was questionable before he ever stepped into the batter's box.

Now Pittsburgh is approaching the finish line with a winning record and no postseason berth, while one brutal split hangs over the entire season: 26-40 with Ozuna starting, 51-37 without him.

The Pirates can't say Ozuna alone cost them October, but they also can't look at those numbers and pretend the signing didn't help make the road there considerably harder.

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