Is Julio Rodríguez Destined to Be a Slow Starter Forever?
J-Rod has started off cold in 2024 the same way he did in 2023, only warming up as summer gets near.
After a stunning debut season in 2022 — which saw him put on a show at the home run derby and win Rookie of the Year honors in the American League, as his Seattle Mariners made the playoffs for the first time in 21 years — all eyes were on Julio Rodríguez to see what he could do next. Which made it particularly disappointing that Rodríguez was carrying an OPS barely above .700 by the end of June 2023, with a .238 batting average and just 13 home runs.
J-Rod would have another record-breaking HR derby performance in July, of course, which arguably helped spur him to a .941 OPS with 19 home runs in the second half. His final season stat-line ended up not being too far off the numbers that earned him the RoY award, even surpassing his rookie tallies for homers, doubles, RBIs and stolen bases (in part because he played more games as a sophomore).
But Rodríguez’s season could have been on an entirely different level if he’d combined his stellar second-half performance with a first half that more resembled what he’d done in 2022.
And now, Rodríguez is at it again. Midway through June, his OPS is below .700 — significantly lower than it was even at this stage of the 2023 season — and he will need yet another dramatic second-half turnaround to salvage full-season numbers in line with his previous two campaigns.
Based on the Statcast tracking numbers, it’s likely Rodríguez will pick things up at least some by season’s end; he has an above-average expected wOBA despite a below-average wRC+. But to me, the bigger question might be whether Rodríguez is just one of those guys forever tagged with the “slow starter” label, destined to take months before ramping up to full performance within a season.
Take a look at his career splits by month:
In his career to date, Rodríguez has hit for an OPS 161 points below his overall average in March/April, gradually improving until he hits 188 points above the norm in August. He’s on track for an even more extreme version of that in 2024, having hit 197 OPS points below his career mark this April and 115 points below the norm in May, but 10 points above his usual OPS in June so far.
It’s possible that Rodríguez will just follow this pattern the rest of his career. Surely, certain players are inherently slow starters to some degree or another, ostensibly through a combination of natural physical rhythms and external factors like temperature changes at the home ballpark. (Seattle’s average daily high temp rises from 59.3 degrees in April to 77.6 in August, and while T-Mobile Park has a retractable roof, 78 percent of Mariners home games are played with the roof open.)
But for what it’s worth, there have been other young players who appeared to be similarly slow starters in the past, only to snap out of that early-season malaise in future seasons.
To check this, I used Baseball-Reference’s excellent Stathead Split Finder tool. I went back to the dawn of the divisional era in 1969, gathering all players who are currently at least age 30; who had at least 30 career plate appearances in each of March/April, May and June through age 23; whose OPS through 23 was at least 25 points below their career mark in each early month; and whose OPS was worse in May than June, and worse still in March/April than May.
The resulting list returns 13 players who matched the general pattern of Rodríguez’s early career: A slow first month, followed by gradual improvement as summer nears (but still with an OPS below the usual norm). Keeping that in mind, let’s look at how each of those players did from age 24 onward:
This is an encouraging sign for J-Rod! The average for our group of slow starters saw them actually doing better than usual in March/April and June, while basically holding steady in May. In other words, almost all of the young players who would appear to be cursed to start seasons slowly ended up being pretty much fine early in subsequent years, as their careers progressed.
(Apologies to former Astros/Phillies/etc. shortstop Dickie Thon, who continued his early career trend of cold hitting in the first half of the season — but he did fine for himself anyway, with a 15-year MLB career despite these odd month-by-month splits.)
I would expect Rodríguez to be more like the non-Thon contingent from our list. He hit better in May/June of his rookie year, so we already have an example of him not starting a season ice-cold. And he is too talented to keep up this sub-.675 OPS form. His June OPS (over .800) may indicate that a reversal in fortune is already underway.
Here’s hoping another midseason turnaround is in the cards this year for Rodríguez. But also, here’s hoping he follows the trend from our other sample of slow starters above — and that one of these seasons, he won’t need to make up for a cold first few months by putting on a scorching second-half show.
Filed under: Baseball