The dynamic duo everyone saw coming.
If you don’t know, here’s the current fWAR leaderboard for the Braves:
Yes, the best two players on the team to this point of the season have been Orlando Arcia and Marcell Ozuna. You would’ve gotten some decent odds on that before the season.
Ozuna is the least surprising of the two and therefore the easiest to explain. He’s hitting the crap out of the ball. Like normal, he’s producing negative value as a baserunner and as a fielder because he’s a DH-only designation who runs like he’s dragging Brian McCann behind him. But none of that matters when you’re destroying baseballs on a nightly bases and Ozuna is destroying baseballs on a nightly bases.
For the season, Ozuna has 201 wRC+ with a .485 wOBA and mind-blowing .497 xwOBA, meaning he’s somehow actually slightly underperformed his metrics so far. And you can tell how locked in he is by the fact that he’s only sitting at 16% strikeout rate, the lowest of his career.
With Orlando, it’s a little more surprising. Arcia has made his way to the top of the WAR leaderboards by combining tremendous offensive production with elite defensive play at shortstop. For the season Arcia is slashing .377/.412/.577 good for a 159 wRC+ while also being one of the most valuable fielders in baseball so far. Here are Outs Above Average leaders so far:
As you can see, Arcia has graded out as the top defensive shortstop in baseball to this point, which passes the sniff test, as he’s made a number tremendous plays at short. When you combine elite defensive value at one of the most valuable defensive positions along with tremendous offensive production, you’re going to be at or near the top of most player-value leaderboards.
It does need to be pointed out that while Orlando has been tremendous offensively so far, his profile is highly, highly unsustainable. Arcia is currently running a .412 wOBA but only a .297 xwOBA. That means he’s outperforming his metrics by over 150 points of wOBA, which is both wild and impossible to maintain. Every season we see crazy outliers in April that never last the whole season and Arcia’s offensive production will almost certainly be in that category by the time we get to summer.
But even if regression inevitable comes, it won’t change the fact that these two guys carried the offense while the team was dealing with injuries to guys like Sean Murphy and Ozzie Albies and others got off to slower starts.
And it’s not just about their total production, but also the timing. While context neutral metrics (wRC+, WAR) don’t care at all about when events happen, a team’s W/L record is very much effected by when events happen and both guys have come up with massive hits early the season that led directly to wins. Ozuna leads the team at +1.07 Win Probability Added and Arcia isn’t far behind at +0.58.
The Braves would certainly have one more loss on the ledger if not for this 2-strike, 2-out shot from Ozuna:
BIG BEAR BIG FLY#BravesCountry pic.twitter.com/3PQG2TXAyp
— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) April 14, 2024
And just yesterday, with the Braves trying to make another comeback, Arcia did this with 2 outs in a tie game in extra innings:
Orlando for the lead!#BravesCountry pic.twitter.com/iEJv8f1U1M
— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) April 17, 2024
By the end of the season, when you look up at the Braves fWAR leaderboard, the top names you’ll see will almost certainly be Ronald Acuña Jr, or Matt Olson, or Austin Riley or Michael Harris II. Over 6 months, your most talented players usually rise to the top. But over a 3 week sample, anything can happen and anyone can be the story. And so far in 2024, the story has been Orlando Arcia and Marcell Ozuna.