If the Atlanta Braves are forced to take Marcell Ozuna back…

MLB has not been a friend to the Atlanta Braves during 2021 in any fundamental way.  The decision on Ozuna could be All-Star Game level.

You may have seen the news sneak in between the flurry of signings early last week.  The Atlanta Braves probably had been given a “heads-up” advance notice, but it’s still a big pill to swallow.

This was shocking… both in the brevity of the suspension and in the nature of how the suspension was being applied.

After all…

When you’re caught on camera in the act, it’s hard to imagine that anything short of actual criminal charges would be appropriate, and yet that’s what’s happened.

Marcell Ozuna has been allowed to complete a ‘diversion program’ that will allow him to walk away as a completely free man with no future obligations to the state or anyone else.

That immediately puts the ball in the court of the Atlanta Braves.  Ozuna’s status with the team — for now — is ‘member of the active roster‘.

What’s most infuriating is that Ozuna is currently a member of the team and Freddie Freeman isn’t.

Braves are a victim, too

I have been writing on this subject for quite a while… dating back to the antics of Hector Olivera and Jose Reyes.

Baseball needs to be out in front of all matters of domestic abuse… and to some extent, they have been in a policy established six years ago.  Seems they still have some work to do on the penalty aspects of this policy.

However, there’s an aspect of this that they completely failed to address:  the fact that nobody associated with the team — teammates, the public, the front office — wants to have a “wife beater” associated with them.

Remember the “faux-selfie” celebrations?  The “Mix it Up” gestures passed from player to dugout after various offensive feats?  All that came from Ozuna… and it all immediately vanished the same day he was arrested.

That should tell us just what his Braves teammates thought of the news they had heard.

Unfortunately, it’s one thing to say “we don’t want him back”.  It’s quite another to figure out how to make that happen.

When Olivera committed his crimes, the Braves had to make an expensive and complex trade to make him go away.  When Jose Reyes did his deeds, he was a member of the Rockies and they opted to buy out his contract — roughly $40 million — to disappear.

These things make teams into a victim, while also effectively rewarding the actual perpetrator for what he did.  Yet no real remedy is available to teams unless the criminal justice process goes a lot further… things like felony convictions and lengthy jail time.

Hence… the Braves are still on the hook for Ozuna’s money:  $16 million in 2022, $18 million in both 2023 and 2024, plus a $1 million option buyout.  $53 million total.

Barring a shocking change associated with the yet-to-be-started new Collective Bargaining Agreement, Atlanta is stuck with this… an amount surely to cripple their team-building efforts this off-season.

What are the Options?

There are roughly three.  None of them are very good.

• Take Ozuna back.  More about that option coming up.
• Pay him off.  Have the Liberty Media Corporation consent to writing a one-time check to pay off the entire contract and release the player.  This would be from monies independent of the Braves’ allocated payroll.
  • Alternative: Pay him off annually… one check to pay off each remaining year as it arrives.
• Negotiate an extended settlement arrangement.  Pay off Ozuna over a period of the next 10-12 years instead of the next 3.  Interest would be involved, but this would reduce the amount due each year so that the Braves could manage it better over time.

It’s the first option that is probably least palatable to both the Braves and everyone involved, money notwithstanding.

Atlanta-area fans will recall the fate of former Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, convicted of his involvement in dog-fighting.

His path back has never been fully paved over, but Vick did undertake a strong attempt to rehabilitate both himself and his image.  He’s one of the few who has opted to do so.  This included trying to un-do what he had done as a spokesman for animal rights.

Ozuna would have to do this… and probably a lot more.  Things like:

• Anger management classes
• Large donations to battered women’s shelters
• Visits to those same shelters to meet with abused women and hear their stories
• Becoming a spokesman against domestic violence — particularly to his fellow Latin-American players, among whom the majority of MLB cases seem to be arising.
• Meeting with his own teammates to convince them that he’s worth forgiving

All of these things, of course, would happen only if Ozuna wants to do it.

At the moment, the only motivation for Ozuna to do so would be if he wants to play baseball again… or at least any baseball outside of the Dominican Republic (he OPS’d .853 with a .280 average and 3 homers in 50 AB for Gigantes del Cibao this Winter).

At the moment, Ozuna knows he has $53 million reasons to do nothing more.  A nice severance check to retire at the age of 31 as a free man while leaving the Atlanta Braves in the lurch.