Selective Aggression and Self-Knowledge Fuel Edouard Julien's Production - Caretaker Exclusive

[Parker Hageman]

If you arrive late to a ball game, you might miss an opportunity to witness Edouard Julien’s biggest offensive attributes. 

Image courtesy of © Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports

On Saturday, as a solid volume of people were making their way to their assigned section at JetBlue Park in Ft. Myers, Edouard Julien dug into the batter’s box, destroying the painstaking work of turning the home plate area into a clean slate that six grounds crew members completed just 15 minutes earlier. Almost as soon as he entered the box, Julien was running out of it, having deposited Nick Pivetta’s first pitch of the game cleanly into right field for a base hit.

In his next two at-bats, Julien followed the same script: He swung at a first-pitch curveball and then a first-pitch slider. The results were not the same as his opening at-bat: he fouled off the curveball and bounced the slider harmlessly to Enmanuel Valdez at second. 

Following the game, Rocco Baldelli was asked why the trend has gone away from the patient, count-working approach by leadoff hitters.

“The pitching is so good,” he said. “If you get a really good pitch to hit on the first pitch of the bat, you better freaking swing at it, because you may get nothing like that again the rest of the bat.”

But Julien doesn’t just "freaking swing at it;" he impacts it. He’s becoming an ambush artist: a patient but lethal assailant.

From a fundamental standpoint, Julien’s swing is somewhat atypical for a left-handed hitter. A high percentage of lefties have shown the tendency to drive fastballs in the lower third for power. Think of Ken Griffey Jr’s swing. Overall, lefties slugged .455 on fastballs in the lower third. Julien, meanwhile, posted a .108 slugging percentage on those same pitches. On the plus side, while the rest of his lefty-swinging brethren slugged .387 against fastballs up in the zone, he drives those pitches better than average (.468).

Of course, like most hitters, Julien also makes meals out of being thrown pitches in the middle third (.345/.389/.642) and it’s where he produces the most hard contact (50% of contact is 95+ MPH). So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when Julien enters the batter’s box, this is almost exclusively his first-pitch swing location.

 

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[Karbo]

He certainly has been successful using his approach. Now they need to work with him on his baserunning. Adding in a few steals would help not only him advancing, but also whoever is hitting while he's on base. Just the threat of him taking off would make the pitcher pay more attention and possibly make a mistake. Not to mention probably a few more fastballs.

[Oldgoat_MN]

Nice article Parker. Thank you. 

It certainly appears that Julian has a well planned approach at the plate. I am optimistic. More so with him than with Wallner.

Hopefully they are all studying their approach as throughly as Edouard is.

[bean5302]

This is the big concern for me. Julien only does a lot of damage when pitches are right in the meat of the zone. It's awesome that he's got such great pitch identification and ability to predict movement, but his ceiling will probably always be capped by his swing.

[Oldgoat_MN]

2 hours ago, bean5302 said:

This is the big concern for me. Julien only does a lot of damage when pitches are right in the meat of the zone. It's awesome that he's got such great pitch identification and ability to predict movement, but his ceiling will probably always be capped by his swing.

That may be, but if his OPS is capped at .839 (his 2023 OPS) I think we'll all learn to live with that.

[bean5302]

7 hours ago, Oldgoat_MN said:

That may be, but if his OPS is capped at .839 (his 2023 OPS) I think we'll all learn to live with that.

Julien's xwOBA was .345 last year. His actual wOBA was quite a bit higher at .366.
xBA = .233 vs. actual .263
xSLG = .427 vs. actual .459
Adjusting for expected statistics = .233/.355/.427 = OPS .782 rather than his actual .839.

Now, an OPS of .782 is plenty good, probably about an wRC+/OPS+ in the 110-115 area. Certainly good for a 2.5-3.0 WAR caliber 2B if Julien can play average defense. Expecting Julien is somehow going to play at his absolute ceiling year after year while also getting really lucky isn't reasonable.

There may be more in the tank for Julien to get results which match the underlying metrics expectations going forward and push him up a bit to that 3.0-4.0 WAR area, and that'd be great, but Julien's approach has a razor's margin involved. Much like the razor's margin Brian Dozier had years ago when he went from stud to dud almost instantly.

[Parker Hageman]

Quote

There may be more in the tank for Julien to get results which match the underlying metrics expectations going forward and push him up a bit to that 3.0-4.0 WAR area, and that'd be great, but Julien's approach has a razor's margin involved. Much like the razor's margin Brian Dozier had years ago when he went from stud to dud almost instantly.

Couple of thoughts:

Why wouldn't there be more in the tank for Julien? He's coming off his first year in the league. He outperformed his batted ball expected metrics but certainly not by a margin that was out of the norm.

Dozier, compared to Julien, was a one dimensional hitter. Dozier tried to exclusively pull the ball down the left field line. He did this successful for multiple seasons but it eventually caught up to him, either because he tried to pull too many pitches he shouldn't have or because teams exploited this tendency and he refused to adjust. Regardless, Julien has much more hitterish tendencies than Dozier did. 

Final thought, I do believe a lot of what Julien said about experiencing teams adjusting in his rookie season. I also think front offices now have had an entire offseason to design an attack plan. So he might be seeing something different this year. That said, he's extremely good at spitting at pitches not in his zone and pitchers are not *that* good at hitting their spots. 

[bean5302]

2 hours ago, Parker Hageman said:

...Why wouldn't there be more in the tank for Julien? He's coming off his first year in the league...

Because players are who they are and not always who we want them to be? The list of rookie one year wonders is long as the ocean is wide in MLB. You're downplaying the discrepancies. 55pts of OPS is an absolute chasm in terms of value. Julien may take a step forward, but he's at least as likely to take a step backwards in terms of results. wRC+ 110-115 is still very valuable if Julien can be a solid defender at 2B. 

Dozier's razor thin margin of error was fly ball distance. He had warning track +3 feet power. When those 3 feet dropped off, it became just warning track power and Dozier's offense cratered. Dozier's weakness wasn't being a pull hitter (like most power hitters are). The weakness was "barely" being a power hitter in the first place.

Julien struck out at the same rate as Wallner last year. While he's vaunted for his plate discipline, Julien gets rung up on strikes an awful lot (bottom 8% of MLB) because he knows he can't hit pitches at the corners. There's a reason Julien's approach is so unique... He's on the razors edge. Maybe he can make it work long term. Maybe he can make an adjustment to his swing to expand his options. He may grow into a totally different kind of hitter and blow the lid off everybody's expectations. Right now, the glowing expectations for him exceeding even the results that don't track with the advanced predictive metrics publicly available today feel pretty optimistic to me.

[Parker Hageman]

21 minutes ago, bean5302 said:

Dozier's razor thin margin of error was fly ball distance. He had warning track +3 feet power. When those 3 feet dropped off, it became just warning track power and Dozier's offense cratered. Dozier's weakness wasn't being a pull hitter (like most power hitters are). The weakness was "barely" being a power hitter in the first place.

The pull heavy approach certainly was a weakness for him. It wasn’t just about distance traveled, it was also about not being to drive outside pitches away. 

Most power is to the pull side, true, (“It’s the quickest way off the field,” Dozier told me in 2017) but when you have a pull heavy approach, you leave yourself open to pitches on the outer-third which was a huge probably for him in his final year with the Twins.
 

24 minutes ago, bean5302 said:

Because players are who they are and not always who we want them to be? The list of rookie one year wonders is long as the ocean is wide in MLB.

It cuts both ways in your argument. Dozier’s rookie season was not great and he continued to improve. Most hitters make strides. There are plenty of rookie hitters that take steps back but, again, to Julien’s point, if hitters 4-5 years ago did not have the same scrutiny that today’s hitters do in terms of analytics teams coming up with new plans of attack. So where a rookie hitter 7 years ago might not get that league-wide treatment until year 2, rookies now get that almost from week-to-week. 

To me, Julien has shown elite levels of plate discipline at a rookie level and strong exit rates on pitches in his zone/count. I’d hedge bets that those traits play well going forward.

I’m not discounting your point about outperforming his expected numbers. It has merit. Plus, he could get more treatment of left-handed relievers this year (like teams did against Miranda at the end of 2022) and exploit some of his weaknesses (down in the zone)