Edouard Julien Is A New Man. Can He Regain His Former Excellence?

[Cody Pirkl]

The French-Canadian God of Walks hasn’t had much success this season, but he’s been a changed man at the plate. Finally abandoning his overly patient plate approach, he's worth watching as a Twins breakout hitter in 2025.

Image courtesy of Matt Marton-Imagn Images

Edouard Julien’s patient plate approach was taken advantage of by opposing pitchers last season. While he didn’t hint at being more aggressive, he did recognize his need to compete against non-fastballs this season to bounce back. So far, in 2025, he’s been able to do both.

His sophomore campaign was a massive disappointment for Julien, whose patient approach sometimes crossed over into outright passivity. Opposing pitchers put together a rock-solid scouting report against him, as evidenced by Julien leading the league in called strikeouts—despite spending a good chunk of the season at Triple A. It was time for Julien to make a big adjustment, and that’s precisely what he’s done.

For the first time in his major-league career, Julien is swinging at more than half the pitches he sees. After constantly finding himself down in the count last season, he’s no longer willing to let the borderline pitches sneak by. While he hasn’t worked counts and taken walks as much as we’ve come to expect, he’s also cut down on the strikeouts so far this season.

The quality of contact has also remained steady in the early going. Julien’s hard-hit rate is back to the level it was in his breakout rookie season, and his barrel rate is better than it’s ever been. He’s not just selling out to try to make contact of any kind, he’s consistently putting a charge into the ball.

More encouraging is Julien’s performance against non-fastballs. Last season, he had no chance in non-fastball counts, and pitchers repeatedly attacked him with soft stuff when he was behind.

While Julien may not be punishing fastballs like we’ve seen him do in the past, it’s hard to imagine he’s lost his ability to do so long-term. More importantly, the talk of spring training regarding Julien was his need to compete against other pitches, and so far, he’s doing so at a level we’ve never seen from him before. While the sample size is small, it coincides with a change in approach, which should always be given at least some attention.

It's not just that he's timing his swing to the softer stuff, either—though there might be truth in that, and he might need to make a next wave of adjustments because of it, so he can catch up to the heat. Julien is also hitting from a slightly more spread-out stance, and using a slightly shorter stride this year. That's allowed him to make contact farther in front of his own body, and to catch the ball in front of home plate—which usually means more thump, particularly against breaking and offspeed pitches.

Julien likely still has a bit to iron out with his plate approach in 2025. Swinging so often can also be taken advantage of, particularly when chasing pitches outside the zone. Julien has chased nearly 30% of the time this season, a notable increase from the 18% rate he showed in 2024. While his strikeout rate has declined, his per-swing whiff rate has increased from 30.9% to 35.7%. 

It’s hard to expect Julien to come out this season with a completely different plate approach and have it optimized, but this is a start. Instead of looking for the perfect pitch, it appears he’s more willing to expand what he’s hunting for, and so far it’s worked. 

Julien has shown plenty to be excited about early this season. Watching him take strike three so consistently in 2024 became maddening, and we’re seeing some encouraging signs of him putting that tendency in the rearview mirror. He's a different hitter in 2025. Can he keep it up?

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[Mark G]

I genuinely hope you are right, Cody, that he is a "new man", but small sample or not, 4 singles and 2 doubles in 28 at bats doesn't make me do a double take.  Again, I hope it is all good and true, but I have to say get back to me in May when we have seen more.  I will definitely keep an open mind until then.  

[LA Vikes Fan]

Julien is a strange one so far. He seems to be hitting the ball harder and his Baseball Savant page is much better but he has very little to show for it. As Mark G points out, 6 hits in 28 ABs with 8 SOs and only 2 BBs gives one pause. He reminds me a little of Larnach - seems to regularly hit the ball hard but doesn't seem to have enough power for many extra base hits so he hits a lot of "almost" fly balls and longer line drives that are caught in the OF. I like is new approach but, much like Larnach, it may not lead to much.  That could be a real problem because we need both of these guys to be .800 plus OPS hitters (or one of them plus Miranda or a guy currently in AAA) or we will not have enough length in this lineup to be competitive.  

[RpR]

Julien is Rocco's new Cave with a much lessor glove.

[Mark G]

10 minutes ago, RpR said:

Julien is Rocco's new Cave with a much lessor glove.

And not even half the beard.  🤭

[jmlease1]

10 minutes ago, RpR said:

Julien is Rocco's new Cave with a much lessor glove.

he's 10th in games played and ABs so far this season. (and would almost certainly be lower if Brooks Lee wasn't hurt to start the season) You'd prefer more Mickey Gasper?

the Cave comp is weird: Julien has already been more productive in his 2+ seasons than Cave was in 7, and Cave never had a season as good as Julien's 2023.

If Julien can't improve over last season he'll likely be gone and/or fighting to try to get a roster spot. But I'm always amazed how quickly people want to give up on him, though: dude produced in 2023, and now people act like that never happened and he's trash with no upside left.

If Julien can reduce his chase rate while getting the kind of barrels he's been registering so far, he should see better results. We'll see if he can do it. It's a good sign that he's been able to change his approach up from something that was working for him for a long time, but clearly he's got work to do.

[DJL44]

There's improvement. We'll see over time if there's enough improvement.

[Riverbrian]

I think he can hit. 

Depends on how messed up he gets and how long the being messed up lasts. 

[RpR]

40 minutes ago, jmlease1 said:

he's 10th in games played and ABs so far this season. (and would almost certainly be lower if Brooks Lee wasn't hurt to start the season) You'd prefer more Mickey Gasper?

the Cave comp is weird: Julien has already been more productive in his 2+ seasons than Cave was in 7, and Cave never had a season as good as Julien's 2023.

 

Cave

Julien

Guess again.

[CRF]

Excellence?

[chpettit19]

His swing looks better as he's flattened his VBA so he has a fighting chance against non-fastballs. And we're seeing that in his contact quality against breaking stuff. Now he needs to get back to being patient.

I don't expect him to OPS .840 again, but I don't think .775-.800 is an outrageous expectation for him. He's working on adjustments. If it takes him an offseason to make them every time he's doomed, but he failed significantly for the first time in his life last year. He got his offseason reset and now he's working on combining everything. From there it's about making little adjustments over and over for the rest of his career. 

Eddie is a talented guy. He needed to revamp his swing, and he did. Now he needs to find the balance in his approach. He's gotten too aggressive. They don't want to take away his incredible eye, they want to dial it in. Attack pitches over the heart of the plate early, but not every strike is worth swinging at. 

I've had my doubts about Eddie since 2023 and advocated for him to be traded after that season because of his swing (and defense). Overhauling a swing is hard. But he's adjusted it. His approach was never his major problem, his swing was. He's given himself a chance now with his swing changes. Now we see if he can dial it all in. Going to take way more than 30 trips to the plate to figure that out. Things look pretty promising so far, though.

[Doctor Gast]

Julien never had excellence, He's been bad in defense & is now focusing on hitting; his defense is much worse. The league has taken away his HR advantage & now he's just trying to hit the ball w/o striking out. 

Twins invested in him to be their future 2B, but it has failed miserably & left us very vulnerable at 2B. They should have sent him down early last season to adjust & learn 1B & kept him there until he profiles at 1B. But being stubborn, they have took too long to send him down & brought him up too early. & the Twins are still paying dearly for him to adjust at the MLB level, playing 2B too much & he still not any closer to learn 1B.

[tony&rodney]

26 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

I've had my doubts about Eddie since 2023 and advocated for him to be traded after that season because of his swing (and defense). Overhauling a swing is hard. But he's adjusted it. His approach was never his major problem, his swing was. He's given himself a chance now with his swing changes. Now we see if he can dial it all in. Going to take way more than 30 trips to the plate to figure that out. Things look pretty promising so far, though.

Julien and Royce Lewis were my choices to trade after the 2023 season. My goal was for the Twins to maximize the value of these two players. Alas, much of the value is now lost. I'm not giving up on Julien as a useful player. We should have an answer by June. Agree with your thoughts.

Does the author know that a number of people on Twins Daily cannot sleep at night knowing Julien is still on the team? When I saw this article I laughed because it surely triggered a few guys. I'm not sure how Gasper became a darling or how Julien became the whipping boy. The best were several comments blaming him for decrepit play at second base the other day when he wasn't even playing second base. BTW, this has happened several times. Julien is living in people's heads.

The Twins could sure use some good batsmen.

[bean5302]

Julien was solid in 2023 and he opened up 2024 hot at the plate as well. Unfortunately, in a 2 week span, Julien went from fixture of the lineup to almost wholly written off by fans and an organization obsessed with Brooks Lee experience to come.

I wasn't a huge fan of Julien's in 2023 as I didn't believe his approach was likely sustainable, and he almost certainly benefitted from from some luck in terms of his production. That said, I felt he was probably capable of an OPS .725-.750 long term performance which would make him a viable starter in MLB, certainly so long as his pay rate remained at league minimum or near it.

This year, we've only got a tiny sample size to look at, but it's obvious Julien has been aggressive at the plate. His first pitch K rate is a brutal 77.4% thanks to a pretty poor whiff rate on pitches in the zone and an aggressive out of the gate approach. That's led to a plummeted walk rate, though his K rate has been much better as well. Just have to wait and see whether or not the new approach delivers sustainable results as the sample size increases and luck is weeded out over time... if he gets the chance.

Julien's exit velocity, barrel rate, line drive rate, and xwOBA are all stellar so far so there's reason to be optimistic his bat will come around.

[jmlease1]

1 hour ago, RpR said:

Cave

Julien

Guess again.

I'm not sure these seasons do much to refute my point: Julien's 2023 was substantially better than Cave's 2018, and Julien produced more in his 2+ seasons than cave did in 7 MLB seasons. Cutting off everything from Cave after 2020 doesn't make him a more impactful player. was Julien bad last year? yes he was. There's literally no one arguing that he was good last season.

If this is about Baldelli's relationship to Cave & Julien, then skip the 2018 season when Molitor was his manager?

Cave was an ok-ish bench bat and 4th OF his first couple of seasons in MLB. Then he stopped hitting and was basically a replacement level player after that.

Julien had a great rookie season and a bad sophomore slump after MLB pitching adjusted to him, he was less lucky, and struggled to adjust. He's made a substantial adjustment this season and so far hasn't got any breaks with it, but there are promising signs (barrel%, hard hit%, etc) as well as ones that are worrisome (chase rate). but he doesn't really look like Jake Cave.

[DJL44]

2 hours ago, Doctor Gast said:

He's been bad in defense & is now focusing on hitting; his defense is much worse.

He's not worse than last season at defense. He's also not much better.

[mikelink45]

Too early for this article.

[RpR]

2 hours ago, jmlease1 said:

I'm not sure these seasons do much to refute my point: Julien's 2023 was substantially better than Cave's 2018, and Julien produced more in his 2+ seasons than cave did in 7 MLB seasons. Cutting off everything from Cave after 2020 doesn't make him a more impactful player. was Julien bad last year? yes he was. There's literally no one arguing that he was good last season.

If this is about Baldelli's relationship to Cave & Julien, then skip the 2018 season when Molitor was his manager?

Cave was an ok-ish bench bat and 4th OF his first couple of seasons in MLB. Then he stopped hitting and was basically a replacement level player after that.

Julien had a great rookie season and a bad sophomore slump after MLB pitching adjusted to him, he was less lucky, and struggled to adjust. He's made a substantial adjustment this season and so far hasn't got any breaks with it, but there are promising signs (barrel%, hard hit%, etc) as well as ones that are worrisome (chase rate). but he doesn't really look like Jake Cave.

You see only what you want to see and make the "sophomore slump" excuse.

Cave's second year was actually his best year so the Soph. Slump is bs. Caves defense was average at best , Julien is a black whole to the defense. Has been and always will be.

Going by  2 complete years; with as little faith as I put in WAR, Cave's WAR was 2.2,; Juliens was 2.4.

Cave went steadily down hill till last year when he had his 3rd best year; Julien will, if he is fortunate do as well as Cave did, but will never be as good with a glove..

[sweetmusicviola16]

Julien and excellence do not go together. I'm sure he's a great an likable guy. But no excellence.

[Reptevia]

He has AAAA power and still can’t field. 

[LambchoP]

I will admit he has looked much better at the plate in SSS this year, even though it seems his power has suffered. Hopefully he can keep it up because his only strength and ticket to playing time is his bat. He is borderline unusable at second base, way too many errors. Every ball hit his way makes you worry. I think his only option going forward is to learn first base or be relegated to DH. It will be interesting to see how the playing time shakes out when Brooks Lee gets activated.

[LA Vikes Fan]

I admit that I may have given up on Julien's bat too early. The way the rest of the Twins lineup is playing, he has to play every day or at least every day against RH pitching. With France being one of the only other 2-3 guys hitting at all, 1B is taken. Julien will have to Dh and play a little 2B since we have to get his bat into the lineup. Maybe he can be taught to play 1B over the course of the season since France is on a one year deal, but I don't think Julien playing 1B this year is in the cards absent an injury.  I don't think we can send him down to learn 1B while he's hitting even .250-.280 with a .750+ OPS. That makes him one of the best hitters on the team. Probably should be hitting 1 or 5.

Maybe a better lineup would be Julien, Buxton, France/Wallner, Wallner/France, Correa, Jeffers, Larnach, Miranda, Castro. Lee slides in for Miranda when he returns. Lewis slides into the 3 hole when he's back, everyone slides back one, with Castro going to the bench and playing 2B/3B 2-3 times a week.