Julio Rodríguez Is the New Star Baseball Needs

Late on a March morning, the Seattle Mariners outfielders all gather on one of the practice fields at the Peoria Sports Complex, the team’s spring training facility in Arizona. It’s a multigenerational kind of day: former Mariner Mike Cameron, now Special Assignment Coordinator, leads a drop-step tracking drill in right field, while Ichiro Suzuki hits fly balls with a fungo bat. Throughout the day, players shuttle between the diamonds and to the batting cage, and a mass of about sixty adults and kids clamor for autographs as the players pass by. All but one of the jersey-clad kids wears the #44 of 22-year-old Julio Rodríguez, the reigning American League Rookie of the Year, the proud owner of a record-breaking 17-year contract, $400 million, and the man first in line to be the next face of Major League Baseball.

Rodríguez, better known as JRod, arrived in the Pacific Northwest right as the Mariners’ playoff drought, the longest in professional sports, reached two decades. They’d gone from “America’s team,” as Dodgers outfielder Trayce Thompson put it—headlined by Ken Griffey Jr., Álex Rodriguez, and Randy Johnson in the late 90s—to an afterthought in the AL West. Their last playoff appearance came the same week David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive hit theaters in October 2001. That April, Ichiro Suzuki, joined Major League Baseball from Japan and immediately became a superstar, winning MVP and Rookie of the Year. But then the losing started.

Later, during batting practice, Ichiro shags flies for nearly an hour. Until he removes his cap, revealing a graying head of hair, it’s hard to see that he’s aged at all. The 49-year-old has become the spiritual center, and a guide, to this Mariners team, which finally broke their ignominious streak last October. Fittingly, the Mariners’ newest Rookie of the Year has attached himself to the wise old sage from Nichi Kasugai-gun.

Rodríguez briefly met Ichiro during spring training in 2019, the year he retired, but their relationship bloomed the following spring. “I didn’t have a playing-catch partner and he was the only one there,” Rodríguez explains. So the 19-year-old and the 46-year-old began to warm up together every morning. They still long toss anytime Ichiro is in town. “There's this weird thing in baseball where once you start playing catch with your partner, if you change partners it's like if you cheated on him,” Rodríguez says, smiling. “I don't want to cheat on Ichiro!”

Ichiro feels the same. “When I'm asked about Julio, there's really nothing bad that I can find,” he tells me through a grin, “and that kind of makes me mad.”

Ichiro, speaking through a translator, says he instantly recognized that Rodríguez had that rarest of ineffable gifts—the same thing that Ichiro brought to Seattle in 2001, even if he now downplays it. “There are many, many great players here with great talents. But with Julio, you see the aura of the star,” Ichiro says. “You can just feel something different and I don't think you can teach that. He has that special aura that stars have.” It’s that aura, as much as his play on the field, that has everyone with the Mariners so excited about JRod. 

Jerry Dipoto, the Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations, has been convinced of Rodriguez’s star power since the team offered him a contract in 2017. Rodriguez was a top Domincan prospect. He was also just 16. But you don’t need to be a baseball lifer like Dipoto to see it with JRod. After six years abroad, he tells me, his daughter arrived home during the 2022 Home Run Derby, right as Rodríguez was introducing himself to the world. She walked out of the kitchen just as the broadcast cut to a closeup of the young centerfielder’s face. “She said, ‘Oh my God, look at his eyes!’ And I said, ‘He's a good-looking kid, right?’” Dipoto leans against the counter in the press box and smiles. “And my daughter, she said, ‘He is a star.’”

In today’s MLB, seeking stardom can be a dangerous game. While the NBA has worked hard to build the portfolios of its most marketable players, baseball, with its lengthy unwritten rulebook that seemingly discourages displays of joy and individualism, hasn’t minted a crossover superstar in years. But Rodríguez—strikingly handsome, internet-literate, and unabashedly attention-seeking—appears best positioned to break through baseball’s malaise. The top prospect who came to the big leagues with a videographer, a YouTube channel, and a ready-made hashtag should have been a pariah. But so far, the Pacific Northwest, his teammates, and the league as a whole can’t get enough of the #JRODShow. 

Folks around the club mention that Rodríguez has shades of local heroes like A-Rod, Griffey, and Félix Hernández, but also one-team superstars like Mike Trout and even Steph Curry. He can hit homers 450 feet, gun runners out from center with a laser arm, and steal bases like it’s 1980. With baseball in desperate need of a jolt, Rodríguez evokes an era where baseball players could be the biggest stars on the planet. When I ask Mariners manager Scott Servais who Rodríguez reminds him of, he says: “The skill set, the personality, the aura around Julio? If I have to throw a name out there, could he be Willie Mays?” 

After listening to grown men lavish praise on his fluency, his work ethic, his excitement for teammates’ success, and even the unlikely green hue of his eyes, the 6’3”, 228 lb, 22-year-old Julio Rodríguez is still striking when he finally enters the press room in Peoria late in the afternoon. He wears Uggs and a diamond-encrusted #44 chain with the anime character Naruto engraved on the back (“My jeweler Gabriel, I gotta give him a little shoutout; he’s been doing the job!”). He sports a goatee disconnected on the sides and his eyes—more hazel than green—stay locked on mine throughout our interview. 

Rodríguez has always made an entrance. When he was 13, he played in a tournament with 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds and hit a double and triple and scored the winning run. He tells me the desperation he felt as a teenager made him obsessed with mastering the game. “There was no other way out. What else was I gonna do in the Dominican Republic? You cannot really afford life for your family; you cannot really make it out doing other things,” he says. “So there was just baseball. That was my only way.” A man approached his father in the stands that day and invited Rodríguez to a tryout in Santiago de Los Caballeros, a city three hours from his home. Rodríguez impressed and received an offer to leave his family to live at a baseball academy when he turned 14. “It was a big change. A big change. And I definitely missed my parents a lot,” he says. “I told them, ‘I’m gonna be sad. I'm gonna feel all these things because I'm away from you guys. But crying and complaining, it's not gonna do it.’”

People talk about Rodríguez’s infectious joy on the field, and he’s got a matinee star’s smile that’s reminiscent of Ken Griffey, Jr.’s. But that obsession he still holds onto is what makes the Mariners’ brass so confident in his future. Dipoto says they received their first trade requests for Rodríguez when he was still 17, a year after he signed a $1.75 million contract and moved to the Mariners’ Dominican Baseball Academy in Boca Chica, near the capital city of Santo Domingo. At the time, they expected Rodríguez would fill out and become a power-hitting, big-armed corner outfielder. “I think he took that as a challenge. You know, ‘I'm gonna show you I'm a center fielder,’” Dipoto says. Last spring, he arrived in Arizona ready to prove it. “Unbeknownst to us, he had spent a year and a half working with a sprint coach down in Orlando and then the Dominican Republic. And last year, only Byron Buxton was faster than him in the entire league. So, yeah, this dude is just insane.” (The MLB’s high-tech tracking technology Statcast suggests that Rodríguez might have only been the 11th-fastest man in baseball last year. Still not bad!)  

“When you have that sense of desperation, I feel like it’s a little bit different,” Rodríguez tells me. “Whenever you’re uncomfortable in a situation, that’s when good things come.”

The Dominican Republic has sent more than 100 All-Stars to Major League Baseball, but former Braves shortstop Rafael Furcal was the only MLB player born in Loma de Cabrera, a city near the country’s Haitian border, before Rodríguez. Still, to a Dominican kid with talent, it was clear from a young age that baseball was a passport to the world.  I tell him how different it is to be an American standout at that age; how the game is just one part of a relatively normal high school experience. Rodríguez nods. “I had to grow up quicker.” 

JRod, who spent his adolescence hanging with his father and other grown men, arrived wise beyond his years. “I’d been playing with older guys and hanging with older men all the time,” he says. He saw what traits could be valuable and also what mistakes to avoid. “I took from their experience. I took to heart what they taught me.” So, by the time he made it to the big leagues, he knew what he wanted.

Rodríguez the player and Rodríguez the star are distinct, yet hard to disentangle. A camera rolled as Rodríguez got the news from manager Scott Servais that he’d made the big league club. His phone call to his mom to deliver the news was also filmed and shared. Eventually the highly touted prospect arrived in the locker room trailed by a videographer, capturing footage for his YouTube channel and social media accounts. In the staid world of Major League Baseball, this should’ve been a death knell for the rookie. But the veterans accepted the flashy youngster. The league’s culture was beginning to change, and more than that, Rodríguez had an authenticity that everyone I spoke to highlighted. “I've said it for years: you can't bullshit the players. Especially, if you're another player, they'll see right through it,” Servais says. “But they see how genuine Julio is, how he treats fans, how he treats his family, how he treats his teammates. He’s the same guy every day.” Of course, it also didn’t hurt that he could hit the ball a mile.

I ask Rodríguez about his YouTube channel and whether he was worried about scorn from veterans for courting a following. Did he fear that #TheJRodShow would put a target on his back? He seems perplexed by the question; later, when telling me about his childhood, he tells me, “I was never afraid.” He explains that I’m viewing it all wrong: that it’s less about sharing than about collecting, more diary than diorama. One video on his @jrodshow YouTube channel documents a trip he took with his girlfriend, Canadian soccer player Jordyn Huitema, back home to Loma de Cabrera, where a massive parade was held to celebrate the return of the hometown hero. The parade ended with a performance by Fernando Villalona, the legendary merengue singer also from the city, and Villalona gave him advice he’s held onto. “He said, ‘Record whatever you can, because you're gonna go down the road and whenever you see that, you will have all these feelings that you will not remember,’” Rodríguez says. “That’s the way that I view it. Fifteen or 20 years down the road, whenever I'm with my family, I’ll have all these things from my journey captured.”  

Rodríguez was “anxious” to get to where he is now, he says, but he knew he needed to keep his eyes open and learn to be prepared. Servais tells me Rodríguez has a rare ability to retain information. “You have a conversation with Julio and he doesn't forget,” he says. “And he has the ability to put the adjustment in play rather quickly, which is really different for a young player.” Dipoto witnessed that ability to retain information in leadership seminars and language classes at the Mariners Academy. When Rodríguez was still a teenager, his mother stressed that he focus on his English classes because he’d need fluency to be independent and to be able to share himself with the world. Rodríguez knew that mastering English would serve his bigger off-field dreams. “I don't like being dependent,” he says. “I want to have me come across to you, you know? I want me to talk to my teammates and me to talk to my friends.”

Rodríguez understands that though baseball is increasingly an international game, there is still a barrier to superstardom for non-fluent players. MLB clubs have improved compared to the bad old days when they’d sign teenagers from Latin America and send them to Winston-Salem or Lynchburg or Stockton without any support. Today, foreign MLB A-listers are finally being placed front and center by the league. The Angels’ Shohei Ohtani brought in more than three times the endorsement dollars than the next highest earner, Bryce Harper. Still, it feels significant that in the commercial for MLB The Show 22, for which Ohtani was the cover star, the 2021 AL MVP speaks in English. 

Dipoto and Servais were both in the Los Angeles Angels organization when a young phenom named Mike Trout was taking the big leagues by storm. Both see echoes of Trout in Rodríguez, but the latter’s desire to master English to have “me come across” couldn’t be more disparate from the former. Trout is a generational talent, one of the greatest of all time, but he’d be hard to recognize on the streets of Los Angeles. Rodríguez has already reached the point where he can’t go anywhere in Seattle without drawing a frenzied crowd. Servais—who played 10 years in the Majors—tells me he wasn’t certain how the other players would react to the rookie with a YouTube channel and a hashtag, but “the game has changed” and he watched the veterans embrace the joyful, genuine, and flashy kid. “How’s it working? There is no issue. It’s Julio and it’s the JRod Show and whatever else is around it,” Servais says. “From a teammate perspective, the bright light is on him, and he enjoys it, and he loves it. Then it's a little dimmer on some other guys, which is good for them.”

That light got even brighter in August when Rodríguez signed his $470 million deal. Dipoto tells me the contract talks began in mid-June, right at the start of the Mariners’ 14-game winning streak. He called Rodríguez’s agent Ulises Cabrera who told Dipoto they were open to discussing an extension. The details and many opt-outs and incentives were fleshed out over two months of conversations. “Julio was willing to do something creative. He wanted to do something that changed the way people looked at how contracts can be done. ‘I want to do something new and unique that makes people say, Wow!’” Dipoto explains. “In Julio’s mind's eye, he's going to play a 20-year career, it's always going to be for the Mariners, he's gonna get a statue out front, and take us to the World Series.”

Assistant General Manager Andy McKay told me that there had been no hesitation on the Mariners' side. “When you understand the whole package from up close, you really don't even flinch,” he says. “It wasn't like I signed my name on that contract, but I'm guessing it was easier than you think.” Still, I say, he must realize his fate is now intertwined with Rodríguez’s performance—that the guys who sign a player to the longest contract in American sports history will certainly be judged by how it turns out. That, McKay explains, is kind of the point. “It eliminates Plan B for both sides. It's more like a marriage,” he says. “Julio and the Seattle Mariners, we are going to rise and fall together for a very long time. Our fates are totally intertwined. And that's a great thing.”

At first glance, it seems crazy for an organization and a player to tie the knot so early in a career, but Dipoto reminds me that Rodríguez has been in the organization since he was 16. Even at 22, he’s one of the longest-tenured players on the team. For Rodríguez, it was exciting to “open doors for more creativity in contracts” and to “show a whole different version of how things could be done.” But he also kept coming back to the advice his dad had repeated over the years: “If something works don’t change it.” 

I mention to Rodríguez how strange it was for a fan my age to see Mariners greats move on, as often happened when the team’s scouting acumen gave way to its frugality: Ken Griffey Jr. in a Reds jersey, Ichiro with the Marlins, A-Rod as a Texas Ranger. In 2018, Rodríguez told an Athletic reporter he wanted “to break baseball” like A-Rod had before him. “He was like a show,” he tells me. As in: riveting, in a sport not always interested in being entertaining. “That’s where I got the idea for The JRod Show. Because every time he was hitting, every time he was doing something in the field, everybody was watching.” 

That A-Rod led to JRod is not surprising, but it seems slightly cosmic that both became generational Mariners stars who earned unprecedented contracts. I list off all the great players everyone has compared him to throughout our conversations, and ask Rodríguez if A-Rod was his idol growing up, the player off which to model his game. “I don't want to say that I modeled my game off of anybody,” he tells me. “But I did have an idol: my dad. And my game? I try to play like Julio.” 

Rodríguez’s teammate Eugenio Suarez tells me he hopes the game can become more Latin in the coming years. “This is the American game but the Latin players put something different on it,” Suarez says. MLB stadiums are massive but he misses the energy that surrounds the game in Venezuela. Rodríguez misses the Dominican fans’ passion as well. “That was the baseball I saw growing up. That was the baseball that got me excited. That was the way of playing that I really liked. So I've never changed,” he says. Rodríguez is aware of the unwritten rules, but he’s ready to be part of the generation that rewrites them. “I'm just having fun with the game. I feel like people take it too serious,” he says. “If you hit a home run late in the game, you should be able to celebrate and you should be able to flip your bat. If you strike the guy out, you should be able to get pumped up. For me, it's a game. And I'm gonna keep playing this game with joy.”

That mix of flare and joy has already infected the city he now calls home. The Mariners have renamed Section 102-104 in the bleachers “The JROD Squad.” It’s easy to forget that Rodríguez is just 22, about to start only his second season. Already, the Pacific Northwest is his.

As he stretches near the cafeteria in Peoria, Ichiro reminds me that he and Rodríguez are from different worlds. But it’s clear he feels a kinship with a young star so far from home making his way in the Pacific Northwest. “I was able to experience something outside of what I was,” he recalls. “Looking back, obviously, there were tough things about it, but if I had just stayed in Japan and not experienced what I had experienced, I wouldn't be able to know what people go through: the pain and the hardships and the trials that they go through if they're from another place.” 

I ask what he’s told Rodríguez about life as a foreign superstar in Seattle. Ichiro deflects the premise. “I'm really grateful that you say that I'm a star,” he says. “Obviously, I don't think of myself as a star.” He says most of their conversations have focused on the game.

It’s harder to imagine the leading man of the #JRodShow deflecting the premise that he is a star. As he enters his second season, Rodríguez’s shine can bring the Mariners into the spotlight for the first time in decades. He’ll do it one swing, one steal, one batflip at a time. Before a game one afternoon in Arizona, the young Caribbean star and the Japanese legend old enough to be his father take their spots in the outfield for a game of catch: Ichiro on the foul line and Rodríguez stretching the distance between them every so often. After the first few throws, they’re far enough that conversation becomes impossible. By 60 feet, the language barrier ceases to exist. It’s just the buzz of the ball cutting through the wind and the snap of seams on leather. Just two Rookies of the Year who arrived in Seattle two decades apart, brought the Mariners to the center of the baseball world, and did that rarest of things, too: made it impossible for fans to look away. Because if you do, you might just miss the show.