Players · M · RF · 2023 regular season
Óscar Mercado
- Age
- 29
- B/T
- R/R
- Height
- 6' 1"
- Weight
- 197 lb
- Number
- #35
- Born
- December 16, 1994 in Cartagena, Colombia
- MLB debut
- May 14, 2019
- dbWAR
- .7 Regular season, 5 season(s)
- PA
- 32
- AVG
- .290
- OBP
- .313
- SLG
- .387
- wRC+
- 88 100 = avg
Óscar Mercado was a right fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. In 2023 he hit 0 home runs and knocked in 5 RBIs, notching 9 hits across 32 plate appearances in 12 games. His batting average was .290, 16.9% higher than the league average of .248. He reached base at a .313 clip and slugged .387, for an OPS of .700, 4.7% lower than the league mark of .734. He averaged 85.5 mph off the bat, hit 33.3% of balls in play at 95 mph or better and made contact on 76.7% of his swings. Adjusted for his ballpark and league, his 88 wRC+ puts his offence 12% below average. That comes to 0.1 dbWAR — -0.4 runs with the bat, -0.1 for the ballpark, -0.1 on the bases, +0.5 on double plays, -0.2 for the position he plays, against replacement level. It includes no fielding: defensive runs are proprietary and are not estimated here, so the figure credits playing a demanding position but not playing it well.
League context
Percentile among qualified batters, 2023 regular season.
How the WAR is built
Runs above replacement, 2023. These terms sum to +0.8 runs, divided by runs-per-win to give WAR. There is no fielding term.
WAR by season
Batting Regular season
Standard and advanced, by season. Regular-season games only — postseason games are listed separately below.
| Trend | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | STL | 12 | 32 | 9 | 0 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 4 | .290 | .313 | .387 | .097 | .333 | 3.1% | 12.5% | .306 | -0.4 | 88 | 0.1 | |
| 2022 | CLE/PHI | 49 | 128 | 25 | 4 | 16 | 2 | 5 | 29 | .207 | .242 | .372 | .165 | .236 | 3.9% | 22.7% | .267 | -4.6 | 69 | -0.3 | |
| 2021 | CLE | 70 | 238 | 48 | 6 | 19 | 7 | 21 | 42 | .224 | .300 | .369 | .145 | .253 | 8.8% | 17.6% | .297 | -4.1 | 87 | 0.2 | |
| 2020 | CLE | 32 | 93 | 11 | 1 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 27 | .128 | .174 | .174 | .047 | .169 | 5.4% | 29.0% | .160 | -12.8 | -10 | -0.9 | |
| 2019 | CLE | 114 | 482 | 118 | 15 | 54 | 15 | 28 | 84 | .269 | .318 | .443 | .174 | .300 | 5.8% | 17.4% | .323 | +0.0 | 101 | 1.6 |
Separate from the regular season
Postseason Postseason
Wild Card through World Series. These games are counted on their own: none of them are in the regular-season tables, career totals, league context, leaderboards or dbWAR on this page.
Postseason batting
| Season | Team | Round | G | PA | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | SB | AVG | OBP | SLG | OPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 Post | CLE | Wild Card | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | .000 | .000 | .000 | .000 |
Box-score and rate statistics only. wOBA, wRC+, FIP and dbWAR are measured against a full league season, and a postseason is a few teams playing each other for a month, so they are not computed for October.
Platoon splits
How he hits left- and right-handed pitching.
| Split | PA | AB | H | HR | BB | SO | AVG | OBP | SLG | wOBA | K% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| vs LHP | 11 | 11 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 1 | .455 | .455 | .545 | .436 | 9.1% |
| vs RHP | 21 | 20 | 4 | 0 | 1 | 3 | .200 | .238 | .300 | .238 | 14.3% |
Spray chart
Where every ball he put in play landed, 2023.
Loading 27 batted balls…
Contact quality
How hard and at what angle he hits it, over 27 tracked batted balls in 2023. Percentiles are against qualified batters.
- Barrel rate
- 0.0% 0 barrels
- Exit velocity
- 85.5 mph average
- Max exit velo
- 104.2 mph, hardest hit
- Hard hit
- 33.3% 95 mph or better
- Sweet spot
- 29.6% 8–32° launch
- Launch angle
- 22.9° average
A barrel is a batted ball whose exit velocity and launch angle have historically produced at least a .500 average and 1.500 slugging — 98 mph within 26–30°, widening to 8–50° by 116 mph. Reconstructed from Statcast's published anchor points, which reproduces them exactly; the interior is within a degree. Sweet spot (8–32°) is an exact definition.
Hot and cold zones
Batting average by pitch location, 2023.
Situational hitting
How Óscar Mercado hits by base state, outs, score and late-game pressure — each read against his own season line.
| Situation | PA | AB | H | HR | RBI | BB | SO | AVG | OBP | SLG | wOBA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All situations | 32 | — | — | — | — | — | — | .290 | .313 | .387 | .306 |
| Bases empty · thin | 19 | 19 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | .211 | .211 | .263 | .206 |
| Runner on first · thin | 6 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | .333 | .333 | .500 | .358 |
| Runners on · thin | 13 | 12 | 5 | 0 | 5 | 1 | 2 | .417 | .462 | .583 | .453 |
| RISP · thin | 7 | 6 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 1 | 1 | .500 | .571 | .667 | .534 |
Runners on includes runners in scoring position, which is the convention every reference uses. Rows under 25 plate appearances are marked thin — at that size a rate moves several dozen points on one hit. Counted from play-by-play, 2023.
Compare Óscar Mercado with…
Side by side with up to three others.
wOBA uses linear weights measured from this season's own play-by-play rather than published constants, and wRC+ is park-adjusted against that same league. dbWAR is our own open implementation — not fWAR or bWAR — and the full derivation, including its simplifications, is on the methodology page.