The Mariners have seen Julio struggle before, but his extended offensive blues are the heart of a lineup too weak to live without him.
This has been a confounding season for Julio Rodríguez. Coming off a Rookie of the Year in 2022 and his second straight Silver Slugger season in 2023 which accompanied a 4th overall finish in MVP voting, expectations were understandably stratospheric for the 23-year-old. Of his 40 teammates thus far this season for the Seattle Mariners, including four players who made their MLB debuts, the lone player younger than Rodríguez has been his friend Jonatan Clase. But youth is a bronze shield against ironclad concerns, as it took a stratospheric August in 2023 to motor Julio out of his doldrums last year, and this season’s struggles create genuine concerns about the young star’s ability to adjust mid-season.
I believe Rodríguez will excavate himself from these frustrations and finish the season as an above-average hitter, but to get there he either needs better execution or better luck. Last August, he got both, as he lasered the ball where they weren’t all month and pulled the ball in the air consistently. As we near June’s closing bell, there are a few identifiable concerns for Julio, some of which I find more worrisome than others. To me, one thing stands out above all others.
Yeah, yeah, real easy for me to say. But this is, more than anything, more than strikeouts (which are up but only a few percentage points), whiffs (same - 28.2% in 2023 to 31.2% this year, not good but not cataclysmic), chase rate (flat/actually down infinitesimally, 37.4% to 37.1%), nor even his hard hit rate (down a tick but still elite). Julio’s offensive numbers are down 20-30 points in batting average from the last two years, 30-40 points in OBP, but a crushing 120-140 by isolated power (ISO). Yes, he may still be hitting the same rough rate of line drives vs. ground balls vs. fly balls, but on the whole he’s hitting the ball lower to the ground and to more easily defendable locations.
Take a gander at his spray charts from 2023 and 2024 thus far:
There’s immense value to going the other way, something Julio has demonstrated he can effectively do better than most, which allowed him to be a top-10 batter in hits last year and gives him the potential to be a power and average performer, not a mere slugger. But this is a case, intentionally or not, where Rodríguez’s going up the middle or the opposite way is dramatically undermining his offensive potential.
The two most iconic pieces of contact in my mind’s eye of watching Julio play since he was 17 years old are line drive doubles yanked into the left field corner (see that healthy smattering of purple dots near the 331 sign) and inside-out lasers skipping to the wall in the right-center gap. That’s to say nothing of the moonshot home runs, of course, all of which are pieces of contact that require Julio to get the barrel through the zone and meet the ball in front of the plate. Here’s that one double from this year:
Rodríguez boasts among the best bat speed in the league, and try as I might I’ve not parsed dramatic differences in most of his mechanics from last year to this. In the above clip particularly, everything lines up perfectly, his hands don’t over-coil, his foot gets down on his stride, his hips fire fully as his hands explode directly to the ball, scooping the breaking ball into the air for a perfect piece of contact. IF there is a smoking gun for Julio’s performance gap this year, I believe it may be connected to one part of that rotation, specifically his hips.
Too often in 2024, Julio’s contact has looked something like this.
When Rodríguez can get his hips rotated ever so slightly earlier, better contact seems to follow, and he can lash at the ball with greater acuity out in front of the dish instead of getting caught hitting the ball over the plate. I find my background in pitching to be more useful for diagnosing mechanical minutia than hitting, however after parsing through video after video of his swings over the past few years, there’s precious little that separates one from another beyond his hips, as well as perhaps a slightly flatter bat path this season.
The degree to which I feel I’m wading into the weeds is best exemplified below. Here’s the point of contact for a 2023 pitch of near-identical velocity and location to the clip above for Julio. He gets his hips ever so more rotated, allowing himself to rotate and crush the ball just a moment sooner. Below this image is the same moment of contact from the earlier clip:
I seesaw back and forth as to whether I’m really observing anything at all, but what I believe I’m seeing is Rodríguez slightly more upright in his torso at contact this year, throwing off just enough of his rotational torque to leave the bat dragging slightly behind, slightly weaker, and slightly more downward-pushing. The outcome of the 2023 contact was not so dramatically different, but it is better process.
This is a tiny adjustment, which is daunting in that Rodríguez has to be able to feel and tweak something extremely minute in his swing and trust that that is in fact the issue at hand that he’ll be able to identify mid-stream. I’m not even sure what sort of cue the Mariners and/or Julio would attempt to use for such an adjustment. However, the shift being so minor is encouraging that it could simply come as a part of a natural tweak Rodríguez feels himself into as the season progresses. Seattle’s lineup desperately needs a full-bore J-Rod, even if they are aggressive to upgrade this summer. Re-discovering his form is not an impossibility this year, or even this week, but as the pressure mounts because of the organization’s reliance on his superstardom, this season hinges on Julio’s ability to click.
