Out in front
Julio hit a very long home run on Sunday.
He hit the ball 113+ mph and it travelled 438 feet. Few players have hit a ball that far up the left field bleachers at T-Mobile Park. The first one that comes to mind is this 470-foot tank by Mike Zunino in 2018.
The blast prompted this quote in The Seattle Times after the game:
âYou canât control where you hit the ball,â Rodriguez said. âHitting is already difficult. I got a good pitch, got out front and I was able to drive it that way.â
For manager Dan Wilson, Rodriguezâs prolonged discipline to the overall team hitting approach preached by Edgar Martinez was a big part of the result.
âWe talk about it a lot with staying to the middle of the field,â Wilson said. âYouâll get your fastball, and youâll be able to hit that up the middle or the other way, and then the breaking ball thatâs out front, youâll catch it early and hit that ball a long way to the pull side. And thatâs what Julio did.â
I thought this was interesting because we can now measure and visualize exactly what they're talking about, thanks to the new batting stance and intercept data from Baseball Savant. There's a bunch of cool things to unpack as the season goes along and samples get bigger (for instance, Julio appears to be setting up a bit wider this year). But for now, we can use it to visualize Wilson's quote directly:
We are four games into the season. Julio has 16 total plate appearances of what will eventually (hopefully) be 600. There isn't anything definitive to be said about Julio's 2025 right now or at any point over the next month or two. But I thought the opening series looked quite promising. Yes, he struck out six times and the whiffs were still there, but he also walked three times and chased pitches at a far lower rate than in 2024. Four of his six batted balls were hit harder than 95 mph, and his quality of contact ranks among the league's best. He's pulling the ball in the air with authority, in a way he didn't early last year. Again, it's a meaningless sample, but it's about as good a start you can expect in Seattle in March. A great season requires many great series. One is in the books.
I didn't write a season preview for Julio because I think his storyline is well understood. Julio is probably the most talented player the Mariners have had since early Ichiro and ARod. He's been one of the 10 most productive batters in MLB by fWAR since 2022, and his presence is the main reason the Mariners are contenders now and in the foreseeable future. But he's also struggled at times, with slow starts and general inconsistency the difference between "Julio had a great season" and "Julio won AL MVP." And while baseball is certainly a team game and the holes of the Mariners roster are not his fault, a slightly more consistent Julio -- one more week of greatness, or even just one more game -- probably makes the Mariners a playoff team the last two years.
The contrast between Julio's greatness and the greatness he's left on the table has him thrust into the middle of the blogosphere's obsession with Blame, making him (or the idea that his performance is attributable in some way to Jerry Dipoto) about as toxic a subject as any in Mariners-verse. Few players in history have been better at this point in their career, but it feels like a pivotal season nonetheless.
That's to say, it's nice to see Julio remind us of himself so early in the year.
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