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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