Julio can still fix the Mariners
Another year comes down to whether the 23-year-old can drag a mediocre lineup to the promised land.
It’s year three for Julio Rodríguez. The pride of Loma de Cabrera is in a class only reserved for Hall of Famers among the annals of Seattle Mariners youngsters.
In any conceivable way, even with inconsistencies and little injuries gnawing away at his playing time here and there, Julio has been every bit and more as good as could reasonably be expected for a player younger than 3B Ben Williamson, Seattle’s (talented!) 2nd round pick of the 2023 draft.
The trouble is, the Mariners constructed a team where success hinges on more than merely “reasonable expectations” from their young star. Rodríguez has underachieved this season, but even within that he’s apace to be an above-average regular in a season where he missed a few weeks with an injury infamous for lingering. Now back in what seems to be essentially full health, however, Seattle is on the outside looking in on their playoff hopes. Their brilliant rotation has kept them in game after game, only to be let down by an anemic offense and a flagging bullpen. It’s familiar territory.
On August 30th in 2023, the M’s ended the day tied for 1st place in the AL West with the Houston Astros, one game up on the Texas Rangers. They’d defeated the Oakland Athletics 5-4, closing out an August wherein they went 21-6, with two separate eight-game winning streaks. A roster-wide conflagration spurred the extraordinary month, wherein Seattle’s six losses came by only one or two runs, two of which were walk-offs. Better still, within that stretch came a three-game sweep of the Astros in Houston, vital for a Seattle club that began the month six games back of the division lead and concluded it with a share of first place and a tiebreaker secured against one of the two titans of the Lone Star State. One player, of course, stood above the rest in that inferno of a month that reignited Seattle’s playoff hopes: Julio. Julio at times alone, at times more than anyone, with record-setting hit paces and astonishing aplomb. A 234 wRC+, hitting .429/.474/.724, the greatest month in Mariners history by any hitter. An unfathomable month, likely never to be replicated again.
When the Mariners were 10 games up on the AL West, it was reasonable to think that they could hold serve and simply land the plane into the postseason, securing their first division title since 2001. Instead, like the Cleveland Guardians in the AL Central who watched their nine-game lead evaporate into a dead heat, with both the Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins on their tails, Seattle has lost the veneer of inevitability. In Seattle’s case, even plausibility is their enemy, with FanGraphs holding their playoff odds at just 16.4% and PECOTA at Baseball Prospectus auguring a mere 11.4%. It’s not reasonable to expect Julio to perform at the level he did a year ago, yet nothing is ever quite reasonable in the expectations for Julio now, as the organization’s plans hinge on his superstardom, and they budget without a safety net.
But Julio can do it. It’s wishcasting to expect it, perhaps, but it’s not beyond him. Little on a baseball field is, for the player whose work ethic transformed him from a corner slugger to a premier center fielder, from a hopeful idea into an drought-ending reality. Julio’s mechanics have been a work in progress all season, but they have also been a work in progress his entire career. His work recently with hitting coach Edgar Martinez is not the first time there’s been hope for Rodríguez to turn the corner, but there is still reason to hope. Randy Arozarena and Victor Robles have been godsends to a lineup starved of consistent production beyond Cal Raleigh, and with J.P. Crawford back healthy Seattle is the strongest they are going to get for their final month. But no player in the lineup has the greater range of possibility between their present numbers and their potential than Julio. It’s already going to take something extraordinary for Seattle to pull off a September surge. If a meteoric stretch is to come, it will burst from their shooting star.