Sandy Ozuna 7/4/26

A headline for Ozuna would say – flame throwing Dominican righty with triple digits heater and a power slider. He is a long-levered, athletic power arm with leverage pen potential. It’s a relatively easy high 90s (T100) heater from big arm strength.

Ozuna is a good athlete with surprising body control for his size. Seeing him field his position off the mound was impressive. He is listed at 6’3” 177 and looks larger than that now. I am guessing 6’4” and north of 200 lbs – a near ideal SP frame. While he has the body to start and elite raw stuff, I would still lean pen future due to depth of arsenal. Still has SP chance but needs to develop an offspeed pitch.

Ozuna worked mostly fastball/slider. The fastball, while hard, had suboptimal shape and was squared up a couple of times. The light, lazy tailing life on his 2sm found barrels. Baseball Savant lists both a slider and cutter, but they blended for me and may as well have been a single pitch. The slider/cutter combo should have good in-zone and chase utility. The changeup was firm and largely a BP fastball. Rehabbing Ethan Conrad unflinchingly jumped on the first one he saw and launched it to deep right/center for a homer.

I see some things that could be cleaned up mechanically that might help Ozuna throw more strikes and/or throw harder. His hips leak open early, and his head doesn’t stay stacked (horizontally) over his lower half. The trunk tilts forward, which creates extension but also causes some disconnect between upper and lower halves. The elbow is high on his layback with “inverted w” look, but the hand is still up on time and the arm action looks clean/repeatable. He has thrown strikes historically but had trouble locating glove side today, and these mechanics tweaks are a possible player dev opportunity.

Maybe I am seeing what I want to see, but I think I see bullpen mentality as well. Ozuna got called for a balk and grimaced wryly - it didn’t appear to bother him that much. After allowing the homer to Conrad, he spun the baseball backwards and caught it in a “dang it, get him next time” type way. And he did, striking out Conrad with a filthy backdoor slider to end his outing.