On Tuesday night in Louisville we saw Hector Rodriguez have himself a big game at the plate. The outfielder went 2-2 with two walks, two home runs, and he drove in three runs in the Bats 5-4 win.
For Hector Rodriguez the two home runs on the evening gave him 21 homers on the season. His previous career high was 19, setting a new record for his season best. And he did so in far fewer games than he’s ever done it in over the past few seasons. In 2023 he broke out when it comes to home run power as he hit 16 home runs in his 115 games. Then in the 2024 season he spent the full year with the Dayton Dragons and hit 12 home runs in 125 games played. Last season he split the year between Double-A Chattanooga and Triple-A Louisville. In those 135 games he hit 19 home runs.
This season he’s played in 84 games and is already at 21. Rodriguez has also added in 14 doubles and four triples this season. The step forward in power for Rodriguez has been fun to see. Not just because of the fact that he’s had 21 of them – including one inside-the-park home run, but partially because he’s not hitting cheap, wall-scraping home runs.
Of his 21 home runs this season only one of them has been under 370 feet. 15 of them have gone at least 390 feet. 10 of his home runs have gone at least 400 feet. And six of them have gone at least 420 feet. The furthest went a whopping 450 feet.
Last night the home run line wasn’t the only line in the stat record book for Hector Rodriguez that got a new addition, though. His two walks gave him 40 of them on the season. That now has him tied with his 2025 season for the most he’s ever had. And again, he’s played in 51 fewer games this season than he did last year.
From an overall statistical perspective, the walk rate for the 22-year-old has gone from 7.0% in 2025 to 10.7% in 2026. Rodriguez played in 53 games last season in the second half with Louisville. His walk rate with the Bats was just 5.2% compared to the 8.1% he showed in Chattanooga in 2025.
The 10.7% walk rate this season is easily the highest he’s ever had in his career for any level he’s been at in the US for more than seven games. There’s a few reasons that his walk rate is up when we dig into the pitch-level stuff. We don’t have that level of information for his entire minor league career, but we do have some of it for all levels and all of it for his time in Triple-A.
Let’s start with something simple. How often he’s swinging at pitches. We will focus just on when he’s been in a full-season league and ignore his time in rookie ball. In 2022 he swung at 66% of the pitches thrown to him. In 2023 that number dropped to 63%. That number dropped again in 2024, this time down to 57%. Last season in Double-A it was 54%, but jumped to 60% in Triple-A after his promotion – giving him a 56% rate for the entire year.
To put all of those numbers in context we can look at the MLB league averages. Over the last four years the average swing rate on all pitches seen has been between 47.2% and 47.8%. Rodriguez has been far more aggressive when it has come to swinging. It’s worked out for him as he’s certainly had few struggles over the years. With that said, even someone with his skillset is going to find more success when he shrinks down his “swing zone” to more pitches that are actually strikes.
This year he has been far less aggressive overall. He is swinging at pitches just 46.7% of the time. That’s a massive change. We only have pitch level data for balls/strikes at the Single-A and Triple-A levels in the minor leagues (teams have it at all levels, but the public only gets to see it at those two levels), so we can’t do a full historical comparison when it comes to chasing pitches that aren’t strikes.
What we can do, though, is to compare how things looked in 2025 while in Triple-A with Louisville over his 53 games and how things are going so far through 84 games with the Bats. Last year he swung at pitches outside of the strikezone a whopping 46.2% of the time. For context, the MLB average rate over the last four years has been between 31.5% and 32.7%. This year he is swinging at pitches out of the zone just 33.8%. That’s another massive improvement.
When it comes to how often he’s swinging at pitches in the zone he has also cut back on how often he’s swinging. Last season he swung at strikes 76.5% of the time. Context here again – MLB averages have fallen between 67.5% and 69.4% over the last four years. This season Rodriguez is only swinging at pitches in the zone 62.4% of the time.
The Hector Rodriguez we are seeing this year is a very different guy than the the Hector Rodriguez of the past. He’s less aggressive in some areas and far less aggressive in others. And while he’s never been a slap-and-dash kind of hitter and has shown some pop, he’s taken his power to a different level this year.
On the season Rodriguez is now hitting .290/.369/.549. He’s walked 40 times and he’s struck out 75 times in his 374 plate appearances. He is striking out more than ever before, but not by too much when it comes to the previous high point in his career (20% this year, 19% back in 2023, but as low as 13% in 2024). Still, his strikeout rate is lower than the league average even at his current rate.