Could the World Baseball Classic unlock Julio Rodríguez's full Mariners potential?

Julio Rodríguez is the type of generational talent most teams can only dream of having, and yet this is exactly the position the Mariners find themselves in. With a power bat, speed, arm strength and so on, he truly does have it all, with his charismatic personality and good looks only further highlighting his superstardom as one of the faces of baseball.

Make no mistake about the reality that Rodríguez is on a Hall of Fame trajectory, with the first four years of his career significantly better than fellow center fielders Carlos Beltrán and Andruw Jones, who were both voted into Cooperstown last month as part of the 2026 class. And yet… and yet…

There's still this feeling that Rodríguez is capable of so much more, and that's despite coming off a 2025 campaign where he had a career-high 6.8 bWAR, was named to the All-MLB First Team for the first time, and earned the third All-Star selection of his career. Heck, the reality is he should also have been named a Silver Slugger for a third time and/or won his first Gold Glove.

At the same time, Rodríguez repeated a frustrating habit from the first three years of his Major League career, of always getting off to a slow start and not warming up until the second half of the campaign. This is not to suggest he's downright horrendous during the first few months of the season, but here's a chart using wRC+ to highlight his early struggles:

Now we appreciate that under the mantra of statistics being capable of manipulation to support any argument, there will be counter-points which can be made to suggest the first half of Rodríguez's seasons are not as bad as they seem, particularly in his rookie year and in 2025. However, we would still hope most people acknowledge that first-half J-Rod has nothing on second-half J-Rod.

Rodríguez has received AL MVP votes in three of his four seasons in the majors, and was thought highly enough of to finish fourth in voting at the conclusion of 2023. However, what's it going to take to finally unlock his full potential over the entire course of a campaign, which would in turn see him become a genuine contender to actually win AL MVP of the year?

WBC could get Julio Rodríguez revved up sooner

Given that Rodríguez takes a while to get warmed up each season, one theory is that this year's World Baseball Classic could help, the thinking being that the additional early competitive at-bats could get his bat going sooner. One notable believer? Rodríguez himself.

“We're going to play very big and meaningful games, and at the beginning of March,” he told Daniel Kramer of MLB.com. “That definitely ramps up everybody. I feel like those games, there's always a lot of excitement, and that's something that you can definitely bring into the season kind of right away.”

Some will understandably point to the Mariners giving him extra at-bats during spring training last year and it not working, but that isn't the same level of competitiveness as facing the best international players on a global stage.

To further the theory, consider what happened the last time Rodríguez played for the Dominican Republic at the World Baseball Classic, in 2023. During the actual tournament his numbers weren't spectacular with a .278 batting average and .649 OPS in four games, but it's what followed with the M's which matters more.

Rodríguez went on to set several single season bests during his 2023 campaign with the Mariners, including 32 home runs (which he tied last year), 103 RBI, 37 stolen bases and 47 walks. This led to his aforementioned fourth-place finish in AL MVP voting, second Silver Slugger Award and second All-Star selection.

Some will say that while this is all very well, yet Rodríguez still had a slow start to his campaign despite getting those early competitive bats at the 2023 WBC. However, it's worth noting there's also a couple of tangibles which helped get him going last year, which should realistically spill over into the beginning of this season.

Mariners teammate Cal Raleigh just the man to help

The first thing was Rodríguez deciding to pick up hitting tips from Cal Raleigh, not a bad person to learn from given the latter was in the midst of just the 10th 60-home run season by a player in Major League history. The duo spent more time together, going through pregame drills with hitting coaches Kevin Seitzer and Bobby Magallanes.

As per Kramer, this included Rodríguez adopting the tee drill that Raleigh began using in batting cage work during Spring Training. As Kramer described it, "he raises the tee to an extremely high level off the ground, about chest high, then attempts to elevate the baseball from there."

The other tangible which helped Rodríguez improve as last season progressed and should continue into the 2026 campaign, is taking a more simplified approach with hitting. Shannon Drayer of Seattle Sports went into tremendous detail about this in a recent article, including sharing comments from Magallanes about how he told the 25-year-old to stop chasing balls down and out of the strike zone.

We of course realize that getting the early competitive at-bats in the WBC combined with the invaluable lessons learned from Raleigh, Magallanes and Seitzer are no guarantee of a better first half from Rodríguez. However, he's at least in a better position than ever before for early success, which would in turn have him primed for a serious run at his first ever AL MVP award.