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

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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. 

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)