Guardians Season in Review: Johnathan Rodriguez

The Guardians prospect had a phenomenal season in AAA

Despite his poor performance in a tiny sample size at the MLB level, Johnathan Rodriguez had a phenomenal 2024 season! It was arguably the best season of his career, which is very impressive considering he has raked at every level of the minor leagues. His final AAA slash line was .301/.390/.540 with a 140 WRC+. While it may not look like a huge difference from his awesome 2023 season where he slashed .280/.376/.560, when you dive deeper you can really see the improvements.

As good as he was in 2023, he was still striking out at a 32.7% clip in AAA, which is a lot higher than you’d like to see. In 2024, that strikeout rate plummeted to a very respectable 25.2% in 508 AAA plate appearances. So where exactly did that improvement come from? In 2023, Rodriguez had a swinging strike% of 16.5%, an overall contact% of 64.2%, a Zone-contact% of 74.1%, and a chase rate of 30.9%. Simply put, he was a guy that swung and missed a lot and swung at a lot of balls out of the zone. In 2024, he drastically improved in all of those metrics. His swinging strike% went from 16.5% to 12.1%. His overal contact% went from 64.2% to 71.3%. His Zone-contact% went from 74.1% to 80.4%, and maybe most importantly his chase rate went from 30.9% to 24.2%. In one offseason, we saw a young hitter who had already been succeeding at the highest level of minor league baseball, improve tenfold in every aspect of his game. He became a much more patient hitter, and drastically improved his swinging and missing at pitches inside the zone.

So what exactly went wrong for Johnny Rockets in his MLB debut? Outside of the fact that he had an extremely small sample size, he simply could not hit the ball in the air in his 40 plate appearances. He had a hilariously high 82.4% groundball rate when he played for the Guardians this year, that is unfathomably bad. While that number obviously would have gone down with more ABs, lifting the ball remains an issue for Rodriguez. In 508 2024 AAA plate appearances, he hit the ball on the ground 50.2% of the time, which is not good at all, that number would have tied him for 10th worst in the MLB. Rodriguez consistently hits the ball really hard, but if you’re hitting the ball on the ground most of the time, it makes it much much harder to be a successful hitter at the big league level, especially if you aren’t a fast runner. The good news is that he did have a 45.5% groundball rate in 363 plate appearances in AA in 2023, and while that still isn’t ideal, if he can get back to that number, it’s a lot more doable than being over 50%.

I’m not all too sure how Johnathan Rodriguez gets an opportunity next season, but there’s no doubt in my mind that he deserves one. He has been one of if not the best hitter in the Guardians minor leagues over the last couple years. He has raked at every level, has borderline elite raw power/bat speed, and has shown major improvement in multiple key areas. I’m hoping to see him contribute for the Guardians in 2025.

Here are some Johnathan Rodriguez highlights from 2024: