Forty Power

On the afternoon of May 27, against St. Paul, Héctor Rodríguez hit a shoulder-high fastball 389 feet to right-center field. It caught the top of the wall, came off the brick, and bounced back toward the infield, away from everybody.

He was past second before he knew what he had.

"While rounding second base, I thought I was going to stop at third," he told Jeffrey Robinson of the Louisville Bats in June, speaking through Peterson Plaz, a Bats coach who translated. "I saw the coach waving me home, and I thought, I've got to score."

The throw came up the third-base line. He went in headfirst, alone at the plate.

"I was very surprised I scored," he said.

It was the first of three home runs he hit that day, and the only one that never left the yard.

Two weeks later, against Iowa, he hit for the cycle — single, homer, double, and then a sixth-inning sweeper he was sure he'd hit out, which came off the wall in right-center instead and left him diving into third. Seven runs batted in, a career high.

"I'm going to frame the ball in my house," he said.

The International League named him its player of the week, and then its player of the month for June: eight home runs, a 1.014 OPS.

He is twenty-two years old. He has never played a major-league game.

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The Mets signed him at seventeen, out of Santo Domingo, more than sixteen hundred miles from the ballpark where he plays now.

"I started figuring it out at 13, because when I was 11 or 12, it was fun, but the adversities at home, family not having money, I started thinking bigger," he told Robinson. "I realized I needed to support my family."

His uncle, Fausto Valdez, has died. "He is not alive, but he'll be the proudest when I accomplish it," Rodríguez said. "He'll be the first person I think of."

He was eighteen, and less than two years into professional baseball, when Cincinnati traded for him near the 2022 deadline, in the deal that sent Tyler Naquin and Phillip Diehl to New York — the young piece in it, not the reason for it. Charlie Goldsmith, writing for Fox19 in January, noted that he wasn't on prospect lists at the time.

"It shocked me at first because I had to leave my friends and teammates," he said. "But we adjusted, and we're here."

The speed moved him to center field. The body — five-ten, two hundred pounds, left-handed — eventually moved him to left, where Mason Linken of Just Baseball had him this month. He isn't a big man. In that January piece, Goldsmith described a twitchy hitter whose best contact came as line drives at 110 miles an hour rather than towering home runs, and cited one measured at 108 straight up the middle.

What followed him the whole way was a description, and it was a compliment. He could hit. He used the whole field. He put the bat on pitches he had no business putting the bat on, and across the 2025 minor leagues he struck out fifteen percent of the time.

What the description did not include was home runs.

In December, Eric Longenhagen ranked him fifth in the Reds system for FanGraphs and put numbers on it. Scouts grade tools from 20 to 80, where 50 is an everyday major leaguer, and they grade twice — what a player can do now, and what they think he'll do at his peak.

Longenhagen gave Rodríguez a 50 for raw power. The strength was never the argument. What he graded 40 was game power — the strength arriving in games, as home runs — with a 50 in the future column, meaning he expected it to show up eventually.

He gave the reason it hadn't in the same breath: "This guy swings at everything, and no matter the pitch type or situation, his chase rates are multiple standard deviations worse than the major league average." A hitter who chases pitches off the plate hits them off the end of the bat. The projection was a platoon outfielder.

Doug Gray, ranking him eighth in the system for redsminorleagues eleven days earlier, had already begun to move: "average to slightly above-average power isn't out of the question for him," he wrote, "if he gets the most out of his hit tool and power."

The book had started to bend. It hadn't bent this far, and it hadn't expected it this soon.

The Reds had already put him on the 40-man roster that November, protecting him from the Rule 5 draft, in which clubs may take unprotected minor leaguers from one another. In January, the manager, Terry Francona, told Goldsmith: "He can hit. He can flat out hit. And he's getting better in the outfield."

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Through July 25, feverbaseball's engine reads his EV95 at 108.9 miles an hour.

That number isn't his average exit velocity. It's the ninety-fifth percentile of it — the speed he meets or beats on the hardest five percent of the balls he hits. A mean gets dragged down by jam shots and broken bats. This is the top of his range, the ceiling rather than the habit. No metric the engine keeps is steadier: a hitter's EV95 tends to match his own the following year at a correlation of about .88.

Feverbaseball tracks 393 Triple-A hitters, and 108.9 puts him above roughly ninety-two percent of them. The median is 105.2 — so the gap between him and the middle of the population is more than three and a half miles an hour, which over a fence is the difference between a warning track and a souvenir. On the separate pre-consensus board the site publishes — twenty Triple-A bats who hadn't reached the majors before this season, the consensus top twenty-five deliberately left off, sorted by that one number — he is tenth.

The engine is not telling anyone something the scouts missed. Longenhagen graded the raw power 50. Gray wrote that Rodríguez "barrels the ball up quite a bit and that results in good exit velocities and plenty of power." Both men had the hard contact on the page. Our 108.9 agrees with them.

What changed in 2026 isn't how hard he hits a baseball. It's that the line drives Goldsmith described in January started going over fences.

And the reason they hadn't — the chase, the swinging at everything — is the one thing EV95 cannot see. It grades contact quality: how hard, when he connects. It says nothing about which pitches he chases. On the question that actually held his power down, our engine has no reading at all.

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There is evidence on that question, and it doesn't come from us. It comes from the Bats.

Robinson reported in June that Rodríguez's walk rate had climbed from 5.2 percent over 53 games at Triple-A last season to 10.1 percent over his first 64 games this year, and put it down to pitch selection and patience. He is getting on base at .348 against a .272 average.

That is the knock the reports built the 40 around, and it is moving. Nobody has published a 2026 chase rate that we could find, and 10.1 is a mid-June number, not an as-of one. It is also the first figure anyone has printed on the thing that was supposed to keep him from hitting home runs.

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Something else moved, in the other direction.

Longenhagen graded the run tool 45 in December, present and future both. Gray, eleven days earlier, was more generous and more specific: Rodríguez "is still fast, but he's not quite as fast as he was when the Reds first acquired him," slowed by a leg injury in 2022, and "there's still above-average speed there."

In 53 games at Triple-A last season he stole nine bases. In 98 games this season he has stolen six. Steals are a function of green lights as much as wheels.

He is slower than he was. He is also still a man who hit a ball off the top of a wall and beat the throw home.

His 2025 is the last full look at the player the reports had described. He hit .298/.357/.481 with 12 home runs in 82 games at Double-A Chattanooga, was promoted on July 18, and then hit .260/.304/.405 with seven home runs in 53 games at Louisville. That third number is slugging percentage, which counts a double twice and a home run four times — the plainest measure of whether a hitter's contact is doing damage.

.405 at Triple-A last summer.

He is slugging .522 there now.

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He is hitting .272/.348/.522 with an .870 OPS — on-base and slugging added together, the rough one-number version of a hitter's offense — plus 24 home runs through 98 games. He has been on the 40-man roster since November. He has never been called up.

The reason lives outside our engine, which measures a baseball and has nothing to say about a roster. Writing for Just Baseball on July 6, Mason Linken laid out the arithmetic: TJ Friedl, Noelvi Marte and JJ Bleday were in the Cincinnati outfield as of that date, Blake Dunn was on the roster and hurt, and getting Rodríguez into left field would mean moving two of them to make room. In May, after the three-homer game, Brandon Glick wrote for Blog Red Machine that the monster night might not change the plan at all — that Rodríguez would have to wait for an opening, and that if a need came up in Cincinnati first, the infielder Edwin Arroyo had the better claim on the call.

That outfield isn't a fixed object. Linken did his arithmetic on July 6, and the deadline is August 3.

Nobody in the Reds organization has said on the record why he is still in Louisville, as far as we can find. Francona was talking in January, and he was talking about the bat.

Louisville had already sent other outfielders up the road to Cincinnati by the time Robinson talked to him in June. It hadn't been his turn.

"I just need to keep competing," he said, "because that's what I can control."

And the bat has cooled. On July 8, after a two-homer night against Omaha, he was hitting .290 with a .918 OPS. He hit his twenty-fourth home run on July 19 and none in the six days after it. Through Saturday he is eighteen points of batting average and forty-eight points of OPS below where he stood two and a half weeks ago.

Twenty-four home runs in 98 games is well past a 40-grade present, and it is years ahead of the 50-grade future Longenhagen filed seven months ago. Whether that peak has arrived or merely visited is not something 98 games can settle.

There's a version of this where the patience is real, the power is what he is now, and Cincinnati finds out in September what a 108.9 looks like against major-league pitching. There's a version where the swinging at everything comes back at the level where nobody throws a strike, and the 50 turns out to have been the right ceiling all along — reached for one summer, and not held.

"The next big goal I have is to make the big leagues," he said in June.

He is still in Louisville.