José Rodríguez estimates that right around the time he started playing seriously, at 14 years old in his hometown of Valverde in the Dominican Republic, the nickname “Popeye” quickly stuck.
Though he’s listed at just 5-foot-11 and 175 pounds, and stands possibly an inch or two shorter out of his cleats, Rodríguez says the moniker comes from his impressive forearms. They betray the strength and pop he showed in lifting 14 home runs in his first full season of affiliated ball, and spraying hard contact to all fields despite his smaller frame. Rodríguez models himself after another middle infielder whose desire to do absolutely everything on the diamond transcends their stature.
“One of my favorite players growing up was Javy Báez,” Rodríguez said through team interpreter Billy Russo, unintentionally issuing a reminder that he does not turn 21 until May. “Since I was a young kid, I played baseball because I love the sport and I did it in the right way. I want to be the best and I wanted to prove that, and show that I was one of the best. That probably comes from it; the aggressiveness you can see.”
That aggressive style saw Rodríguez swipe 30 bags in affiliated ball last season, ending his three-level campaign in Double A. He feels he can man both middle infield positions, insisting he has no preference even as the Sox tack on cameos at third base and left field onto his plate. He aggressively hacked his way to a combined .301/.338/.469 batting line last year before struggling against older players in the Arizona Fall League (AFL). And even his open batting stance with his back foot firmly in the bucket — dividing scouts trying to determine if his success and athletic maintenance of his stride are sustainable — is modeled off Báez.
Because he is a professional baseball player, and because dogged determination has gotten him this far after signing for a relatively meager $50,000 signing bonus as a teenager, Rodríguez wants to be even better than his idol. But whereas Báez was already a first-round pick and a consensus top-20 global prospect by this point of his career, Rodríguez needed to have sustained professional success to earn respect and get noticed. While Báez flashed elite tools that hinted at his All-Star ceiling once it all got put together, Rodríguez is more commonly graded out by scouts as having average major league tools across the board.
This is not meant as an insult to Rodríguez. If you had one major league average tool, your dominance of the local rec league would inspire jealous grumbling from all of your peers. And players with a complete set of average tools, not to mention positional versatility, often enjoy lengthy major league careers. It’s a player profile that can fade into obscurity or mature into a valuable multi-position contributor depending on commitment, smarts and energy level; which is where Rodríguez’s efforts to channel Báez figures to most serve him. He’s here to pump everyone up.
Advertisement
“I want to be a leader,” Rodríguez said through Russo. “When you bring that kind of energy to a team, you can see that the other guys get excited. They can feel that energy and they feel better and more enthusiastic about it. I remember last year when the season started, my manager (Guillermo Quiroz) told me that I am going to be hitting lead-off. He told me ‘You know what? I’m gonna put you in that position because you are kind of a leader of this team. With your energy and your enthusiasm, you can lead these guys. And it happened. That was exactly right. That’s just with the kind of personality I have, the energy that I have, I just try to motivate people and it works.”
And like Báez realized at many points, boundless enthusiasm also needs to be channeled. Rodríguez was beset by fielding errors (27 in 2021), especially at the beginning of the season, and especially with his throwing. Assistant general manager Chris Getz described it as “throwing irregularities,” and the way Rodríguez described it, it was sort of a reverse Tim Anderson situation. The baseball-raw Anderson had the athleticism and arm strength for short, but had not developed the experience and comfort throwing from different slots when the situation dictated. The creative and baseball-loving Rodríguez unleashed the ball from different slots at will, and is learning to prioritize consistent mechanics more.
“I didn’t have a consistent release point,” Rodríguez said through Russo. “I was throwing the ball with a lot of different angles, with no consistency. Once we identified that, we started working on a consistent angle and a better grip of the ball. I’ve noticed some improvement already, but it’s still a work in progress.”
Rodríguez felt like he saw real progress to that end in the AFL, which otherwise might be seen as a stretch where he played infrequently and his run of success with an aggressive approach ran aground against superior competition. He hit .226/.273/.323 (albeit with just a 15 percent strikeout rate), and offered some credence to the idea that he didn’t have the tools to make his approach work against premium stuff. To some degree, he might concur.
“I used to swing at a lot of pitches out of the strike zone,” Rodríguez said through Russo. “I used to chase a lot of pitches.There I started working on being more selective, be more patient and with better pitch selection. I got very good results. I noticed right away that the changes are showing up.”
Advertisement
The challenge will essentially repeat itself in 2022, as Rodríguez figures to return to the prospect-heavy Double-A level after a four-game audition there at the end of 2021. The stuff of opposing pitchers will be at a level where the heaters a foot off the plate will be harder to spray into the right-center gap than they were in Kannapolis. The run environment will make an errant throw on defense more costly. Getz and White Sox personnel have been encouraging attention to Rodríguez since he starred in the complex league in 2019, but much of his broader prospect hype is predicated on results that can’t be denied. And he’ll need to prove the value of his AFL experience by resuming them immediately.
Which is, of course, his goal as well. In a year where setting a goal to reach the majors would obviously be complicated, Rodríguez just wants better results. He thinks he could be better than Báez, so of course he wants to blow away 2021 José Rodríguez, the guy that people in North Carolina learned to call Popeye.
“If my stats are better than last year,” he said, “that will be my goal.”
(Photo: Norm Hall / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
