What's Wrong with Julio? Why the Mariners' Young Star Has Yet to Get Established at the Plate

Julio Rodriguez came into the 2024 MLB season expecting not only to be the best player on the Seattle Mariners, but perhaps the best centerfielder in all of baseball. What’s happened instead is that the superstar has seemingly been struck powerless, struggling to be even an average hitter, much less an elite one, and leaving everyone confused as to why.

The easiest answer, and perhaps one that will prove true by the end of the season, is that Julio has always been streaky. During his first months as a big leaguer in the 2022 season, J-Rod was struggling to meet the hype as one of baseball’s top prospects until a blistering June and July landed him on the American League All-Star team. 2023 proved more of the same, with Julio putting up fairly pedestrian numbers until an otherworldly August brought his numbers back to where they were expected.

Still, his 2024 has been more difficult than either of his first starts were. His OPS through May is nearly 100 points lower than it was in 2023, and his four home runs are less than half of the ten he’d hit last year at this time.

The power outage isn’t an especially easy issue to diagnose, either. Julio’s quality of contact is right in line with where he was in his first two years, with his average exit velocity and hard hit rate both being virtually identical from a year ago.

His quantity of contact isn’t especially different either. While Julio has always had a bit of a chase problem, his decision making has actually been slightly better this year, as he’s both swinging at fewer pitches out of the zone and making more contact with pitches inside it.

The one notable difference in what Julio’s doing at the plate isn’t in how hard or how often he’s hitting the ball, but the direction in which his hits are going.

Over his first few seasons, Julio would pull the ball around 39% of the time, with about 37% of his balls in play going up the middle and the other 23% going the other way. This year, though, he’s only been able to pull about 30% of his balls in play, with 44% going up the middle and 26% going to right.

Contrary to what old-timey hitting gurus might say, going the other way isn’t alway a recipe for being a better hitter. Being able to hit the ball to all fields is a great skill for maintaining a high batting average, and Julio’s .270 is well above league average, but an approach that focuses too much on doing so will cut away opportunities for extra base hits. Pulling the ball to all fields has always been the easiest way to hit homeruns, and we're seeing how failing to do so can impact a power-focused hitter like Julio, especially when he’s alternatively hitting so many balls to center, where the wall is farthest from home plate.

The reason he’s stuck in this mode of hitting is harder to diagnose. He’s seeing a slightly higher dose of breaking pitches this year, which fall away from the hitter (assuming it’s a right handed pitcher) and are therefore harder to pull, but it’s not a drastic enough difference from the previous two years to explain the issue on its own. Timing and mechanics likely also are playing a role, though if it were something easy to spot on tape you’d assume the Mariners coaching staff would have helped him adjust by now (although they did just fire their offensive coordinator, which is not the highest vote of confidence on how the front office believes that coaching staff has performed).

Whatever’s going on, Julio will need to figure it out if he wants to live up to the sky-high expectations he’s set for himself early in his career. While he’s still displaying all of the physical tools that made him such an obvious star (especially his defense, which has remained excellent despite his troubles at the plate), his current approach is clearly not optimal. There’s no question he has it in him to turn his offense around, but if the Mariners are going to accomplish anything in 2024 and beyond, they’ll have to hope he does so sooner rather than later.