Back in February, I wrote (and sang) about the electric debut of Edouard Julien, which featured excellent plate discipline and extreme platoon splits. The rookie second baseman ran a 136 wRC+ and put up 2.8 WAR in just 109 games, then hit even better in the postseason. Facing a steady diet of righties, Julien balanced out a precipitously high strikeout rate with an even better walk rate. He also balanced out roughly average raw power by hitting the ball hard consistently. This season, however, his strikeout rate has gone from high to untenable and his contact quality has taken a significant step back. Julien was sent down to Triple-A St. Paul to figure things out in June. Let's take a look at what's going on and how he might be able to fix it.

We should start by making it clear that Julien's season, while disappointing, has not been disastrous by any means. He has a 93 wRC+, including a much improved 98 wRC+ against left-handed pitching (though once again it's an extremely small sample size). He's also improved his defense, and as a result, he's put up 0.8 WAR over his 63 games with Minnesota. Prorated out over a full 162-game season, he's right around league average at 2.1 WAR.

Julien's demotion came from a confluence of factors. The Twins are fighting for a Wild Card spot, so every win matters and there wasn't much time to wait for Julien to figure things out, especially with so many other good options available. Twins infielders have amassed 11.9 WAR this season, third most in baseball. The other factor was Julien himself. The team believed the young player had the maturity to take the demotion as a chance to get back on track without letting it shake his confidence. The Twins speak glowingly of Julien, and they had faith that he would figure things out and slug his way back to Minneapolis. After all, he was sent down twice in 2023 and responded well to it, closing out the season with a 142 wRC+ after being called up for good on June 10.

Unfortunately, that plan was somewhat derailed by injuries. Just a few weeks ago, when Julien was brought back up to fill in for the plantar fasciitis-plagued Carlos Correa, he had run a 30% strikeout rate and .323 slugging percentage with St. Paul. That's not terrible, but it's not slugging your way back onto the roster either, and the team sent him back down just a few days later. No doubt the Twins would have preferred to let him keep working on things rather than yo-yoing him between the minors and majors.

Let's start by looking at Julien's swing. As Esteban Rivera wrote back in February, Julien has one of the steepest vertical bat angles in the majors, meaning that his bat is often diagonal rather than perpendicular to the ground. That diagonal bat path helps Julien crush fastballs from righties, as it matches the plane of their movement. Esteban compared Julien to Freddie Freeman, who has a similar VBA, but noted that the two players achieve it very differently: "Julien uses more aggressive movements to get to different pitch heights, while Freeman shifts his shoulder plane and avoids more drastic body adjustments." Julien takes ferocious cuts, and his aggressive movement consists of an extreme sideways tilt to his torso, even on pitches at the top of the zone. Look at the angle of his belt compared to the angle of his shoulders. Oftentimes, his head is nearly parallel to the ground at the moment of contact.

There's no shame in having less barrel variability than Freeman; so does just about everybody else on earth. However, if you're a right-handed pitcher, seeing that extreme tilt on swing after swing gives you a pretty clear plan of attack. In order to avoid that bat path, you're going to throw more breaking balls and fewer fastballs and changeups. When you do throw a four-seamer, you're going to make sure you locate it at the top of the zone, preferably inside, where a flatter bat path and angle are required. That's just what has happened.

Julien's whiff rate against offspeed pitches has jumped from 41.6% last year to 51.2% this season. When pitchers have thrown four-seamers, they've done a much better job of getting them at or above the top of the zone, as you can see in the heat maps below. (In all the graphics to follow, 2023 is on the left and 2024 is on the right.)

Clearly, there's a book on Julien now. This season, his edge rate, the percentage of extremely hard-to-handle pitches on the edge of the strike zone, has increased from 40.4% to 44.5%. That's one of the biggest jump in the league. Some of that increase probably comes from simple bad luck, but some comes from the fact that pitchers are no longer seeing a rookie and challenging him with fastballs over the heart of the plate until he proves that he can handle them. The league has adjusted to Julien, and it's still his turn to adjust back.

If you've been watching Julien closely this season, one thing has surely jumped out at you: the called strikeouts. He's come to the plate just 209 times, but his 39 called strikeouts are tied for fourth most in baseball. That makes his 18.7% called strikeout rate the highest in the majors. The only other player above 11% is Cavan Biggio, who has now been DFA'd by two teams this season. Plate discipline has been Julien's calling card since he was a freshman running a 15% walk rate at Auburn, but this season, he's swinging less overall and the pitches he's swinging at have changed.

Julien is swinging at fewer pitches in the zone and more at pitches outside the zone. Taking so many more hittable pitches has dropped his SEAGER score from the 92nd percentile to the 52nd. In other words, last year, he made some of the best swing decisions in baseball, but this year he's barely above average. The biggest change in the table above comes on Julien's contact rate outside the zone, and it's also one of the biggest year-to-year shifts in baseball. Generally speaking, making less contact on pitches outside the zone isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's often better to whiff than to make a sure out by hitting a bad pitch weakly. But Julien's whiff rate on those pitches is very nearly the highest in baseball, and it illustrates the problem. Last year, when he chased, he was able to foul the ball off nearly a quarter of the time. This year, he's fouling off just 16% of them. It's not just that he's chasing more; it's that more often, he's chasing pitches he doesn't have a chance at hitting.

Passivity isn't just about swing decisions. It's also about attacking the baseball. Julien's exit velocity numbers have fallen, his line drive rate has seen one of the biggest drops in baseball, and his pull rate has nosedived as well. Here's what that looks like in a spray chart.

Look at the home runs in magenta. Last season, Julien's homers were split evenly between left and right field. This season, he has just two pulled home runs. In fact, he has just four pulled fly balls total! Here's what those same spray charts look like if we isolate pulled balls.

This year, if he hits a ball hard to the pull side, he's hitting it right at the second baseman. His groundball rate on pulled balls was around 66% last year, but this season it's nearly at 80%. Hardly anything has even made it onto the outfield grass, and Julien hasn't ripped a double down the right field line or into the gap in right center all season long. His average exit velocity on pulled balls has dropped by an enormous 5.2 mph, and his barrel rate has fallen from 11.6% all the way to 2.7%

Take a look at that last column. When he goes the other way, Julien's average exit velocity has increased by more than five points. According to Baseball Savant's run values, Julien was worth 16 runs when he hit the ball the other way in 2023, tied for eighth most in baseball despite the fact that he only had 408 plate appearances. This season, his swing is somehow even more geared for opposite field contact. However, he's also been less productive when he hits the ball to left. You can see why if you look below at all the extra gray in the launch angle graph on the right. He's hitting more lazy fly balls and fewer line drives.

To my eye, the downturn in swing decisions, contact quality, and pull rate go hand in hand. They speak to a player who is caught in between; he's late on fastballs and early on soft stuff. Here are heat maps of Julien's average exit velocity this season and last year.

You can see that his happy zone has moved from the middle of the plate to the outside. More importantly, it's also gotten much narrower. There's dark blue on the edges of the strike zone, especially the inside corner. That change is even more stark if you look at his slugging percentage on balls in play in the graphs below. Julien doesn't have a hot zone anywhere in the bottom third of the zone, and he's ice cold on the inner third.

This season, the only part of the strike zone where Julien has been able drive the ball consistently is up and away. But now take a look at heat maps of his swing rates. Last season, he was looking for pitches over the middle and hitting them hard. This year, he's hunting pitches up and in, the spot where he's been making the weakest contact.

That's not a coincidence. Earlier I showed you a chart that depicted pitchers elevating their four-seamers and bringing them inside more often. Julien is just following the fastballs, which makes sense, as even in this down year, he's still been great against them. However, that trend has affected his swing decisions against other pitches too. Here are his swing rates against breaking and offspeed pitches. He's still much more focused on the inner third.

The end result is that there's a lot more area in the strike zone where Julien can't handle a pitch and seems all too willing to take called strikes. There are a few subtle benefits to hunting pitches over the middle of the plate. First of all, pitchers throw the ball over the middle kind of a lot. If you're a pitcher targeting any one spot on the edge of the strike zone, a small miss leaves you near the middle. This season, 26.7% of all pitches have been in the heart of the zone, and during the pitch-tracking era, that rate has never once fallen below 25%. On the other hand, if you split the strike zone into thirds by height (upper third, belt high, lower third) and width (inside, middle, outside) no location has ever had a rate above 20.1%. If you're looking for pitches over the heart of the plate, you've got a better chance of getting the pitch you're looking for. The second reason is that if you're looking for pitches over the middle, anything close to your sweet spot is still in a hittable location. Looking for pitches over the middle leaves you able to handle a larger proportion of the strike zone. When you're always hunting pitches in one corner, you're writing off a whole portion of the zone. Pitchers have been happy to oblige Julien, throwing him more pitches away and down and in.

Here's something I wrote back in May: "For a while now, I've suspected that there's an ideal level of aggression for each batter. If you're too aggressive, you're going to end up striking out way too much and making poor contact on pitches that are hard to barrel up. If you're too passive, you'll let a lot of hittable pitches go by, and when you do swing, you'll be less likely to attack the ball and get your A-swing off. That balance point is different for each hitter." As the possessor of one of the game's best batting eyes, Julien's ideal level of aggression will likely leave him with one of the lower swing rates in the league. But even by his standards, it sure seems like he's veered too far toward passivity this season. He's letting hittable pitches go by, and when he does swing, he's letting the ball get so deep that he can't drive it the way he did last year.

If there's one thing that the new bat tracking data has made clear to me, it's the importance of attacking the baseball out in front of the plate. Your bat keeps accelerating as it travels through the strike zone. That's why pulled balls, where contact necessarily happens farther out in front, have higher exit velocities and better results. If I worked for the Twins, I would do a couple things. First, I would do a celebration dance, because it seems like it would be very cool to work for the Twins. Second, I would encourage Julien to attack the baseball. I'd tell him to focus on catching the ball out in front during his pregame work, to get a feel for turning on the ball and driving it again, and for dropping his bat head on pitches at the bottom of the zone. I'd also give him an assignment. I'd tell him that for a few games, he should swing away and forget about waiting for the right pitch. I'd say, "I know you have a great eye, but I don't want to see you take a walk for the next three games. I just want you to go up there and remember what it feels like to attack the ball, even if it means a lot of swinging strikeouts."

Obviously, the Twins know Julien's swing and his head much better than I do, and I can't imagine they would do anything as reckless as the stunt I just described. I'm sure there are much more reasonable ways to help him reset both his approach and his swing. However, it's important to keep in mind that Julien's game is always going to be something of a tightrope walk. Even when he's at his best, his game features a lot of strikeouts and walks, which means that his success will be very BABIP-dependent and he'll run more hot and cold than most hitters. Because he doesn't make extremely loud contact, he needs to hit the ball hard and in the air consistently. He won't be able to do that if he's not swinging at his pitch and if he's not taking his trademark max-effort cut.

It's important to remember that so far in his young career Julien has played just 172 games and made 617 PAs at the big league level. In other words, he has barely more than a season's worth of experience. We're dealing with small sample sizes, especially this year. Julien was likely due for a little bit of regression, and while it's never encouraging to see a player struggle, this downturn hasn't really changed my mind about his batting eye or his ceiling. I'm impressed by how well he's managed to perform despite the fairly extreme changes underneath the hood. Since his return to Triple-A at the end of July, Julien has a 121 wRC+, and he's currently riding a seven-game hit streak, including a homer on Tuesday. However, he's striking out a lot, and there's definitely more work to do before the Twins can be sure that he'll be able to help them down the stretch and, yes, rule again.