julio vs. Ken Griffey Jr.

[D-train]

Through the first 77 games of their age 21 seasons. Keep in mind this was Junior's 3rd season and he played in the Kingdome vs. T Mobile

KGJ .273/.356/.432/.788

Julio .272/.333/.466/.799

[D-train]

Here is how Griffey finished that season.

ken.JPG (32.46 KiB) Viewed 487 times

[D-train]

JK update

By Matt Calkins
Seattle Times columnist
TACOMA — There are some numbers that pop out when discussing Rainiers outfielder Jarred Kelenic, once considered the best prospect in the Mariners’ organization.

There’s .173 — his career batting average in 123 Major League games. There’s -2.0 — his career Wins Above Replacement mark during his time in The Show. There is also No. 6 — which is where he was selected in the first round of the 2018 MLB Draft.

But during a seven-minute interview from Cheney Stadium on Thursday, a new number emerged in regards to the 22-year-old: 14 — the number of times he said the word “process.”

This was Kelenic’s mantra when answering questions about his trials and tribulations in the big leagues over the past couple of years. His general feelings on the ups-and-downs, most of which have been downs? “I’m just focusing on my process.”

His reaction to being sent down to Tacoma after hitting .140 in 30 games with the Mariners this season? “I knew I wanted to come down here and focus on my process.”

His response to struggling in two-strike situations, an area in which Mariners manager Scott Servais said he needs to improve? “Anyone can improve in two strikes. I think it’s a pretty vague goal. I’m just out here again working on my process.”

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The repetition wasn’t necessarily dismissive or condescending — not like when NBA star Russell Westrbook, clearly miffed by his team’s performance, once answered every postgame question with “we just gotta execute.” But Kelenic’s demeanor did betray a level of frustration not conducive to revealing thoughts about his situation.

Hard to blame him, really.

Two years ago, Jarred was one of the most hyped youngsters the M’s had acquired in the past decade or so. He and Julio Rodriguez, who is mashing major league pitchers, were going be the front men for the franchise’s revitalization. Maybe that still happens. Again, Kelenic is just 22. But the gap between potential and performance for the Wisconsin native thus far stretches from foul pole to foul pole.

A Baseball Prospectus article broke down some of his shortcomings recently. The conclusion was that Kelenic has been a real-life Pedro Cerrano — a standout facing fastballs but substandard against anything breaking or off-speed. This point was illustrated in a graph showing Kelenic’s whiff-per-swing rate by pitch type in MLB. In 2021, he swung and missed on 15.53% of fastballs, 38.36% on breaking balls and 41.38% on change-ups. In 2022, at the time of the piece’s publication, it was 23.33%/46.81%/54.05%.

Perhaps the bigger concern is those disparities didn’t improve much when he was sent down, even if he entered Thursday’s game hitting .297 with an OPS of .905 with the Rainiers. Baseball Prospectus said Kelenic’s swing-and-miss percentages by pitch type in Class AAA this season was 19.63 for fastballs, 50.00 for breaking balls and 53.13 for off-speed.

I asked Kelenic about this. He didn’t seem too worried.

“I definitely think I have an approach down right now that’s allowing me to layoff on the off-speed pitches down (low). I don’t think I struggle with off-speed pitches in the zone. I think when I struggle with off-speed pitches it’s below the strike zone and that’s what I’m chasing,” Kelenic said. “But I don’t think I struggle with off-speed pitches. Someone that struggles with off-speed pitches, you put a curveball machine out there and they’re gonna swing and miss. I don’t swing and miss.”

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This is the sort of confidence you’d expect from a player with a major league future. And it’s the sort of confidence Mariners senior director of player development Andy McKay thinks Kelenic has rediscovered in his time in Tacoma. In fact, McKay said that the totality of Kelenic’s professional baseball experience — whether it be a collection of clutch hits for during last season’s wild-card run, or an extended demotion in 2022 — is properly preparing him for a solid, if not stellar career.

“From a mental standpoint, he’s probably in the best place he’s ever been,” McKay said. “We still think we have one of the top young players in baseball, and we’re quite confident of that.”

Speaking of mental standpoints, a minor-league manager once told me that, unless you’re a phenom like Ken Griffey Jr. or Alex Rodriguez or Bryce Harper, the difference between a major leaguer and a minor leaguer is one’s ability to endure the inevitable dips that come with a 162-game season. And when you’re a high first-round draft pick hyped as the future of a franchise, dealing with those dips can be difficult to — what’s the word? — process.

“You can’t ever prepare for it,” Kelenic said of the expectations. “A lot of times it can speed up on you as I think sometimes it did for me.”

What do you mean by ‘speed up on you?’

“A lot of different things,” he said. “But I think anytime something speeds up on you, it’s when you make an emotional decision whether it’s getting frustrated with a call and you end up chasing.”

So that’s where the process comes back into play — Kelenic recognizing where he can improve mechanically and emotionally.

We’ll see if it works out. Jarred has a whole lot of talent. But to get back to the game’s highest level, he has a whole lot more to prove.

[seattlefan-daBronx]

Wow.
You know that home run swing is very Griffeyesque.

And I would argue the pitchers throw harder and the baseballs are different now.

Very cool.

[Sibelius Hindemith]

You went off-topic on your own thread.

Regarding Julio and Griffey, let's hope the former continues to improve at the plate, although without being fucked over dozens of times on balls/strikes his numbers would be considerably better than KGJr's were in the first 77 at that age.

[D-train]

You went off-topic on your own thread.

Regarding Julio and Griffey, let's hope the former continues to improve at the plate, although without being fucked over dozens of times on balls/strikes his numbers would be considerably better than KGJr's were in the first 77 at that age.

Yeah I didn't think JK deserved his own thread but then realized I had just started a JK thread yesterday but was too lazy to move it. lol

[Sibelius Hindemith]

J'airhead won't be worthy of his own thread until he either earns his way back to the majors or completely fizzles out (or murders someone).

[D-train]

Cal is 4th in baseball for WAR per 500 PAs for catchers.

cr.JPG (85.58 KiB) Viewed 436 times

[ddraig]

This is why I posted that quick comparison of J-Rod and Griffey Jr., plus Ty France and Edgar. I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel!

By the way, in 10 seasons, Mike Zunino has amassed a whopping +1 WAR for each of those 10 years. If Cal keeps this up, he'll halve Zunino's WAR in one season and put up a better WAR than Jay Buhner or Tino Martinez while they were here. The only drawback? J-Rod, Cal, and Ty are right handed. We gotta find some lefties for the lineup.

[D-train]

By Eno Sarris
Jul 1, 2022
14

Save Article
When Julio Rodríguez first got to the big leagues, he was just trying to stay afloat. Maybe it didn’t look that way, since he was hitting for a good average and stealing bases and smiling, but it wasn’t easy out there. A little bit of success allowed him to settle down.

“At the beginning, I was like wow, I’m in the big leagues now — but now I’m doing what I want to do,” Rodríguez said recently. “I feel confident and take my best swing now, instead of being protective at the plate.”

The electric Mariners center fielder added a few other reasons for his power surge — he said he started to understand what pitchers were trying to do to him, and found a way to do what he wanted to do and “stick to his strengths more” — but generally it’s that process of getting used to the big leagues that helped Rodriguez hit seven homers in June, a top-25 number for the month, after hitting zero in April.

“I need to calm down and become who I am,” he said with a smile.

One of the more difficult things about understanding the true talent of players is that they are constantly settling in, adjusting, growing, declining, secretly injured — their true talent is changing in front of us as we try to remove the noise from the results and uncover what’s at the center. Is Julio Rodríguez just better now, or is he the same guy?

To gain that understanding, we use statistics like Barrel rate — which looks at the process by which players produce power when it sums up the best exit velocities and angles — because they get at a player’s true value better than things like slugging percentage and home run rate and even things like fly-ball rate. Barrel rate is also useful because it begins telling us a lot after just 50 balls in play.

But Julio Rodríguez now has two distinct portions of the early schedule in which he had 50 balls in play, and he displayed wildly different Barrel rates in each segment. After Barreling around 5 percent of his balls in play in April, he Barreled nearly 19 percent of his balls in June. That’s the second-biggest increase in baseball among hitters that had at least 70 plate appearances in both months.

One Rodríguez? Two Rodríguezes? That might be a philosophical question, but at least his story tells us a little bit about how full-season statistics (even powerful ones) can mask changes that are happening under the hood. Changes that might produce an almost entirely different player when all is said and done.

Here are the biggest April-to-June surgers in Barrel rate, with a minimum of 70 plate appearances in both April and June.

Biggest Barrel Rate Surgers
Ryan Mountcastle
23.0%
8.9%
14.1%
Julio Rodriguez
18.7%
4.7%
14.0%
Shohei Ohtani
23.5%
9.7%
13.8%
Carlos Correa
16.9%
4.0%
12.9%
Kyle Schwarber
25.7%
13.3%
12.4%
David Peralta
17.4%
5.6%
11.8%
Adam Duvall
19.6%
8.3%
11.3%
Josh Bell
13.0%
3.0%
10.0%
Bobby Witt Jr.
13.5%
3.6%
9.9%
Austin Hays
12.3%
3.3%
9.0%
Paul Goldschmidt
15.8%
7.9%
7.9%
Nelson Cruz
16.4%
8.8%
7.6%
Randy Arozarena
9.5%
1.9%
7.6%
Jonathan Schoop
9.1%
1.6%
7.5%
Jesse Winker
12.5%
5.0%
7.5%
Matt Olson
17.1%
9.8%
7.3%
Joey Votto
11.4%
4.7%
6.7%
Nathaniel Lowe
9.7%
3.2%
6.5%
Dylan Carlson
6.5%
0.0%
6.5%
Trea Turner
10.6%
5.0%
5.6%
This is a fun list. Much more fun than viewing the bottom of the list, which includes many slumping veterans, the top of this list features young players that feasted in June and had the peripherals to support their work.

More than a few of these players were already hitting the ball well and are now hitting it even better, so maybe Shohei Ohtani and Paul Goldschmidt don’t need any more column inches. We know those guys are good, and they have long track records. A few of these players have an outside flaw that these numbers are papering over, too. This is Barrels divided by balls in play, and players that strike out too much, like Kyle Schwarber and Adam Duvall, may look better here but still have the overall problem that reduces their productivity.

There are still a few players beyond Rodriguez, however, who may just be adjusting and growing in front of our eyes, and deserve a closer look.