Fantasy Baseball: What's gone wrong for Julio Rodriguez, how he can turn things around, and more
We've gotten used to slow starts from Julio Rodriguez, but with the schedule officially flipping over from June to July and the season now more than halfway over, this is officially the worst it's ever been for the young superstar outfielder.
Rodriguez has been a notoriously slow starter in his career, but the depths of his struggles this season are new. Entering play July 4 last season, Rodriguez was hitting .243/.306/.410 – a far cry from his final .818 OPS, sure, but also still putting him on pace for 27 homers and 37 steals. Rodriguez was even better in the first half of his rookie season, hitting .272/.333/.466, albeit with a similar 27-homer, 40-steal pace. His best days were yet to come in both instances, but Rodriguez was still an obvious must-start Fantasy option.
That has decidedly not been the case so far in 2024. He enters July hitting .247/.297/.327 for the season, and while his 17 steals put him on a decent pace (32), he has just seven homers, 37 runs, and 29 RBI – full-season paces of 13, 71, and 55, putting him on pace for the worst season of his career in all five Roto categories. It should come as no surprise, then, that Rodriguez isn't even a top-100 player in Roto scoring … and that's his better format! In points leagues, he ranks 98th just among hitters, despite playing all but one game so far this season.
There are two questions you are probably asking yourself right now, whether you have Rodriguez on your team or not:
- How have things gone so wrong for him so far?
- Should we expect him to turn things around?
Question 2 is the easier one to answer, so we'll start there: Yes, probably. But it, obviously, depends on the answer to Question 1, so we'll dive in a little deeper there.
At first glance, the difference between 2023 Julio Rodriguez and 2024 Julio Rodriguez doesn't look like much. Starting with plate discipline, his strikeout rate is a bit worse (24.5% in 2023 to 26.7% in 2024) and his walk rate is a bit worse too (6.1% to 6.6%), which comes out to eight more strikeouts and two fewer walks than last season. Bridging that gap would help, but it doesn't seem like it explains the gap we've seen in production.
Diving into the quality of contact metrics shows a similar change: Slightly worse, but not alarmingly so. Rodriguez's average exit velocity is down from 92.7 to 91.2, but his expected wOBA on contact is much closer: It was .431 in 2023, and it's .424 this season. Rodriguez isn't hitting the ball as hard last season or doing as much damage, but it's close enough that I don't see much reason to panic there.
Combined with the slightly worse plate discipline, you have Rodriguez with a .329 expected wOBA, compared to a .337 mark as a rookie and .345 last season. You'd have noticed if Rodriguez had that kind of gap between 2023 and 2024, but you probably wouldn't be freaking out. A 16-point gap in wOBA isn't nothing, but in a league context where everyone's wOBA is down eight points, it wouldn't really register.
The problem then, comes down to the gap between Rodriguez's expected stats and his actual production. Rodriguez's .329 xwOBA isn't ideal, but it's a whole heck of a lot better than his .280 actual wOBA, the 12th-worst mark of any qualified hitter. What's most alarming is that Rodriguez is actually still running a .326 BABIP this season, good for 33rd out of 145 qualifiers, as you would expect. Because Rodriguez is such an incredible athlete, it might have been reasonable to expect him to actually outperform his expected stats, thanks to the ability to steal a few infield hits over the course of the season, something he did as a rookie.
Rodriguez hasn't lost any of that footspeed, and while his infield hit rate is down a bit, the difference between what you expected from him and what he's given us so far doesn't have much to do with five or so infield hits he's missing. It's the power, and especially the homers. And that's where Rodriguez does actually have one glaring hold in his game right now.
Can you spot the issue in his spray charts from 2023 and 204?
screenshot-2024-07-01-174225.png
One thing should stand out immediately, and it's the lack of batted balls in the air to the pull side of the field. Rodriguez's first homer of the season was his furthest to the pull side all season:
Everything he's hit since then has been hit to left-center or further, where you have to hit the ball deeper to produce homers. Last season, he had 12 homers that were hit closer to the foul pole than his most-pulled ball in 2024, and he's missing a bunch of doubles down the line, too, as you can see here:
Rodriguez just isn't hitting the ball to the pull side as often as he did a year ago. He had a 39.5% pull rate in 2023, but it's down to just 30.8% so far this season, and it's even more pronounced when you just focus on batted balls in the air. Rodriguez's pull rate on just line drives and flyballs is 23%, compared to 38% last season. That's how you get a .080 isolated slugging percentage despite still hitting the ball harder than all but about 19% of major-league hitters.
What's gone wrong? Well, Rodriguez is getting pitched inside more than ever – per BaseballSavant.com, he's gone from seeing 35.2% of his pitches on the inside third of the plate or off the inside part of the plate to 39.6% – and he is hitting worse than ever on those pitches, down from a .413 wOBA in 2022 to .293 in 2023 to .277 so far this season. It's a hole in his swing that showed up last season, but pitchers are really trying to exploit it now.
Covering the whole plate is hard against major-league hitters, and every hitter has a hole somewhere – Mike Trout famously struggled with high fastballs for years, to cite one notable example. But the best hitters are eventually able to either learn to lay off the pitches they can't hit or figure out how to adjust and cover those holes up. To his credit, Rodriguez has lowered his swing rate on those inside pitches from 51.1% last season to 41.1% this season, but given how much more he's seeing those pitches, it remains a glaring issue.
Especially because he hasn't covered up the other holes in his swing. Rodriguez is struggling with pitches on the opposite side of the plate, as he often does, sporting a career-worst .278 wOBA, down from .317 last season. Once one of the most feared hitters in the game, Rodriguez has been a relatively easy AB for pitchers this season given these struggles, and it makes it hard to pinpoint one specific thing he needs to work on to get back to being who he was prior to this season.
And yet, I'm still pretty confident he will get there. Rodriguez is simply too talented to keep putting up an ISO like a slap hitter, and I have to imagine the Mariners coaching staff is already hard at work identifying changes Rodriguez can make to get back to the player he was. This is both a deeper and longer slump than we've ever seen from Rodriguez, and maybe it's asking too much for him to recover and return first-round value at this point.
But I definitely believe that Rodriguez will play like an impact bat at some point soon. June was his worst month of the season, and he's stuck in a 5 for 45 slump over the past 14 days as I write this on July 1, so there's no real sign of Rodriguez figuring it out, unfortunately. If you're going to buy into Rodriguez for the rest of the season, you're kind of putting your faith in blind hope.
Given his track record, that's not a bad bet; in fact, it's one I'm willing to make if I can trade for him at a discount. But it does have to come at a discount; you can't pay first-round value for the player Rodriguez is right now, certainly. But Rodriguez's age and track record mostly outweigh the concrete issues he's had so far. Let's hope he can get back on track quickly.