I think you nailed it. We already have a younger, cheaper version of Ozuna in Santana, and they spent the whole offseason trying to dump him. I somewhat get the point, but Santana is at another level from Ozuna. The question is whether or not one believes Ozuna's season from last year being a new version of him. I'm using FanGraphs' defensive numbers just as a hand-wavy rating, of course they are not perfect: Santana has always been really bad. Yelich has basically been around average his whole career except for one bad year on FanGraphs. Ozuna was a really good defender his first 2 years and now is just OK (a 0 Def rating on Fangraphs, give or take). Career batting average Santana: .262 (trending up) Yelich: .291 Ozuna: .277 (trending up) BB%/K% Santana: (11.5%/31.5%) Yelich: (10.6%/20.6%) Ozuna: (7%/22.1%) There are some aspects of Ozuna that are definitely trending toward Santana, but he's probably a bit closer to Yelich than to Santana. All of that said, I'd take Yelich even with cost/control taken out of the scenario.
I think you nailed it. We already have a younger, cheaper version of Ozuna in Santana, and they spent the whole offseason trying to dump him. I somewhat get the point, but Santana is at another level from Ozuna. The question is whether or not one believes Ozuna's season from last year being a new version of him. I'm using FanGraphs' defensive numbers just as a hand-wavy rating, of course they are not perfect: Santana has always been really bad. Yelich has basically been around average his whole career except for one bad year on FanGraphs. Ozuna was a really good defender his first 2 years and now is just OK (a 0 Def rating on Fangraphs, give or take). Career batting average Santana: .262 (trending up) Yelich: .291 Ozuna: .277 (trending up) BB%/K% Santana: (11.5%/31.5%) Yelich: (10.6%/20.6%) Ozuna: (7%/22.1%) There are some aspects of Ozuna that are definitely trending toward Santana, but he's probably a bit closer to Yelich than to Santana. All of that said, I'd take Yelich even with cost/control taken out of the scenario.