Mariners fans get their best cue yet to expect a huge leap from Julio Rodríguez

MLB Network's latest "Top 100 Players Right Now" list is out, and the Seattle Mariners are unsurprisingly well-represented with five players. They even have two players in the top 20, with Cal Raleigh at No. 4 and Julio Rodríguez at No. 16.

Oh, sure. One can quibble about which Mariners were robbed, with omissions of Randy Arozarena and Andrés Muñoz representing arguably the worst offenses. But we'd be hard-pressed to come up with a hotter take than the one that came after the big reveal of the actual "Top 100 Players Right Now" list.

In a follow-up piece on MLB.com, 10 writers voted on dark horse candidates to be No. 1 on the list in 2027. And the winner was Rodríguez.

As for the likelihood of this coming true, probably the biggest hurdle concerns how Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge and Bobby Witt Jr. — not to mention Juan Soto, Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes — still exist and will likely still be elite a year from now. And after what he did in 2025, why rule out Raleigh being the one to make the leap to the top spot?

All the same, Manny Randhawa raised a fair point in his write-up on Julio: he's already elite even though it's possible we haven't seen his best yet.

Mariners fans have every reason to expect a huge leap from Julio Rodríguez

Mariners fans who have been watching Julio closely since 2022 will know what Randhawa is talking about. On a 162-game basis, he has averaged 31 home runs, 32 stolen bases, an .800 OPS and 6.3 rWAR per season even though he's a notoriously slow starter.

This past year was perhaps the ultimate example of this. Julio had an oddly timed nadir in the middle of the season, as he decided to drop out of the All-Star Game right when he carried a .687 OPS into the Mariners' final series of the first half. He then torched that series and finished his season with a .954 OPS, 21 homers and 15 steals over his last 68 games.

We already knew that it was around this time that Julio adopted the same tee drill that had helped fuel Raleigh's record-breaking first half. It was a means to keep his swing under the ball so that he could elevate more pitches, and it worked. His ground-ball rate dropped by 5.3 percentage points from the first half to the second.

However, it turns out that there was more to Julio's turnaround than a simple tee drill.

Assistant hitting coach Bobby Magallanes had not only an up-close look at how J-Rod got in a groove last year, but a hand in making it happen. He spoke about how he helped change the star's approach in an interview with Seattle Sports:

"I remember one day in the cage we had a conversation where I said, OK, Julio, I want you to do something. I don’t want you taking the bat to the baseball. Don’t take the barrel to the baseball because you’re going to chase. And he kind of looked at me like, what do you mean don’t take the bat to the baseball? Isn’t that what we want to do? But I said no, because when you’re thinking of taking it from back here to the ball, we’re going to chase. We can’t stop anymore. We’re going to the ball and that’s when we chase."

Bobby Magallanes

The goal, as Magallanes explained, was to get Julio "to think of coming right to the middle, right to your hip." And it worked, as there is a clear difference in his before and after heat zones for his swings, with the latter consisting of a perfectly placed red blob in the middle of the strike zone.

Alas, we wish we didn't have to mention how Julio got away from what worked with his final swing of the season. But as far as he should be concerned, one bad swing should not detract from all the good swings he took after he locked in last year. And if he stays locked in from Day 1 this year, the sky really is the limit.

In the second half for his career, Julio has posted a .902 OPS and what would be 162-game averages of 43 home runs and 28 stolen bases. If he could combine numbers like those with his typically stellar defense in center field over a full season, the Mariners might just have MLB's No. 1 player.