The Pittsburgh Pirates added a proven bat when they signed Marcell Ozuna, and it made a lot of sense to do so at the time. Ozuna might have struggled a bit with the Atlanta Braves a season ago, but throughout his career, he has done nothing but swing the bat at a very high level and has hit for some power, blasting 40 home runs in 2023 and 39 in 2024.<\/p>\n
To start the 2026 campaign, we haven’t seen a whole lot out of the new Pirates outfielder. Ozuna is just 2-27 with eight strikeouts and is hitting .074 on the year.<\/p>\n
Christopher Kline of FanSided believes that his play and some other factors could eventually put him on the hot seat, and he’ll only be with the team for one year, especially after the organization extended Konnor Griffin.<\/p>\n
“Marcell Ozuna inked a one-year, $10.5 million contract with the Pirates, which includes a $16 million mutual option for 2027. He’s probably one-and-done, as older DH types don’t typically have the longest shelf life when it comes to staying in one spot. Just ask Andrew McCutchen (sorry, Pittsburgh fans). Ozuna still has a gorgeous swing and the sort of natural power the Pirates need, but Griffin should bring plenty of thump of his own. Ozuna is expendable.”<\/p>\n
The Pirates have shown over the past two to three years that they’re trying to take a younger approach right now. Whether that means they still want veterans like Ozuna around remains to be seen, but I think there’s reason to believe he could be on the roster longer than one season if he figures it out offensively.<\/p>\n
Ozuna is getting older, though, at 35 years old, so there are a lot of possibilities in this scenario.<\/p>\n
More MLB news:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pittsburgh Pirates added a proven bat when they signed Marcell Ozuna, and it made a lot of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":668940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2402],"tags":[5,4,10,776,64,4297],"class_list":{"0":"post-668939","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh-pirates","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-pirates","11":"tag-pittsburgh","12":"tag-pittsburgh-pirates","13":"tag-pittsburghpirates"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116364989238008751","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/668940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}