It’s time for the Minnesota Twins’ favorite Canuck to mountie up and regain his rookie form.
Edouard Julien will get plenty of runway to dig his cleats back into a prominent role on the big league roster, especially given the recent injuries to infielders Royce Lewis (moderate hamstring strain) and Brooks Lee (day-to-day with back soreness). He’s in pole position to land a spot on the Opening Day 26-man roster, and it’s high time for him to prove that his challenging 2024 campaign was an outlier.
Going into last season, Julien looked like he was becoming a lineup stalwart. On top of almost three years of stellar play at each minor league level, he was coming off a spectacular rookie campaign the year before. But he failed to reach the level of production that he established that year, dropping more than 200 points in OPS and gaining three percent on his already-high 31.4% strikeout rate.
But it’s a new dawn, day, and life for the talented 25-year-old.
“I’m here, and I’m hungry. Not being satisfied like last year. I walked in, and I knew I had a spot,” he explained to Bobby Nightengale of the Minnesota Star Tribune at the onset of camp. “This year, it’s go ahead and take it, right? Prove you have a place here. That’s all I have to do.”
It’s an interesting and honest reflection of the shift in his mindset this year. It’s not so much that Julien had pomposity or arrogance in his step last season. Still, the longer leash he projected in his head may have deterred how far he’d go.
Someone much wiser than me could find some correlation between this mindset and the typical approach he would seem to take in his at-bats last season.
Think about how often he would scratch and claw through an at-bat, practicing patience with his approach until it got deeper in counts. Then it became a guessing game about what offering he’d get in the do-or-die moment. Unfortunately, he guessed wrong in nearly 35% of his at-bats. Okay, that may be an oversimplification, but the parallel remains. Julien’s almost lackadaisical mindset early in those opportunities led to too many boiling points later on, and his approach couldn’t change in time to get out of that pattern.
So, is it possible that in this grand at-bat that we call life, Julien finds himself at another boiling point due to a blasé game plan early on?
If that’s the case, Julien has some factors working in his favor. First, it’s refreshing to hear his self-reflection and that he acknowledged changes needed to be made rather than the typical “trust the process” canned answer we get far too often from professional athletes.
“With the season I had last year, offensively, it was so bad,” he admitted. “You look at yourself in the mirror, like, ‘What the? What was going on?’”
Then, it sounds like he and the Twins’ hitting coach, Matt Borgschulte, got to work tinkering with his swing path and other mechanical cleanups. Over the winter, the newly minted hitting coach made the trek to Julien’s native Quebec, where they worked on extending his bat coverage over the plate. It was something that Julien felt was a season-long struggle in 2024, especially as it pertained to handling off-speed pitches.
And for what it’s worth, those changes have led to promising results in Grapefruit League action. Sure, it’s wise to take an admittedly small sample of 14 games with a grain of salt. Still, Julien has hit an energizing .302/.375/.442 (.817 OPS) in those opportunities. Better yet, his numbers under the hood match his goals for this season. He’s cut his strikeout rate nearly in half (33.9% in MLB last season, 18.8% this spring) while maintaining a walk rate in the double digits (10.4% this spring).
Time will tell if that small sample holds into the regular season. However, if it does, it bodes well for the Twins and a player who played his way out of a long-term role on this club. Now is the time for Julien to dig his heels back into the big-league roster and continue on the promising path he created for himself in 2023.
