What’s behind Julio Rodríguez's surge — and how it affects the Mariners lineup

As is usually the case with him, Julio Rodríguez's 2025 campaign is proving to be a tale of two seasons. There was the time when the Seattle Mariners star was slumping earlier in the year, and now there's the present time in which nobody can get him out.

This is an exaggeration, of course, as he isn't even batting .300 since his season took a turn for the better in Detroit back on July 11. His last 26 games have yielded "only" a .296 batting average with "only" a .345 on-base percentage.

He is slugging .667 with a 1.011 OPS, however, which are just a tad better than the .386 and .687 marks he had through his first 92 games. As he's also continued to play excellent defense out in center field, it's no wonder that he ranks third among all hitters with 1.8 fWAR for this span.

Julio Rodríguez has crushed his bad habits and elevated the Mariners lineup

What was going wrong with Rodríguez earlier in 2025 was complicated, but also not really. The 2022 AL Rookie of the Year and three-time All-Star had clearly come into the season with a different approach, but all it got him was too many unfavorable counts and ground balls.

The contact quality was still there, though, so it always figured that Julio's fortunes would improve if he got more discerning with his swings and better at elevating pitches. As the following table shows, this is pretty much exactly what has happened:

These improvements haven't come out of nowhere. The 24-year-old has made a deliberate effort to cut down on his first-pitch swings. We also know that he's taken after Cal Raleigh — i.e., the major league home run leader — with a drill that is meant to get his swing stronger and more vertical, and thus better for driving the ball.

The results speak for themselves. After homering 11 times in his first 381 at-bats, Rodríguez has gone deep 12 times just in his last 108 at-bats.

There was never any doubt that Julio had the talent to go on a run like this, and it was even a solid bet that it would happen sometime around when the first half of the season gave way to the second. Dominating the latter half of the season is kind of his whole thing, as he has yet to post a higher OPS before the All-Star break than after the All-Star break.

Once Rodríguez did get rolling, the only question was how Mariners manager Dan Wilson could maximize his impact. He has since taken a novel approach by swapping Raleigh and Julio in the batting order. They have batted second and third, respectively, every game since July 31.

Hypothetically, this plus Randy Arozarena batting leadoff gives Raleigh more lineup protection. And yet the reality of lineup protection is always murky. In this case, you'd expect to find Raleigh getting more strikes to hit, and that just hasn't been the case in August. His rate of in-zone pitches is actually down from July.

"Big Dumper" has been getting more fastballs to hit, however, and it has now been about a month since he was last walked intentionally on July 13. That was becoming a bit of an issue for the Mariners, as he was given a free pass to first seven times in an 18-game span.

Whether or not it's benefiting Raleigh in any tangible way, it's obviously not a bad thing that Rodríguez has been swinging a hot bat in the middle of the lineup. It means the Mariners have two legitimate superstars hitting back-to-back, and on either side of them are four guys who have been All-Stars: Arozarena, Josh Naylor, Eugenio Suárez, and Jorge Polanco.

Even if Julio getting hot was inevitable, him getting hot in this context is but one of many reasons that seemingly everyone is high on the Mariners right now.