Comments on: Next stop, stardom: 2011 breakout picks – Carlos Santana

By: tartan1

tartan1 — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:47:13 +0000

Dick Dietz also hates your cutoffs Aaron Gleeman.

And yes, I fully support predictions before they actually happen.

By: Aaron Gleeman

Aaron Gleeman — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:44:03 +0000

Maybe you could mention said criteria in your articles, so it doesn’t look so random. Fair enough, but several of the specifics I mentioned were ignored by commenters anyway. And, just in general, if someone is talking about all-time leaders you can safely assume the cutoff is a whole lot more than, say, 100-something games. At least less random than using 46 major league games to predict entry into what apparently is a very exclusive group. Isn't the whole point of predicting something to do so before it actually happens? Wouldn't make much sense to predict he'll join the club 10 years into his career.

By: tartan1

tartan1 — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:39:37 +0000

Maybe you could mention said criteria in your articles, so it doesn’t look so random. At least less random than using 46 major league games to predict entry into what apparently is a very exclusive group.

By: Aaron Gleeman

Aaron Gleeman — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:15:51 +0000

When the context is “everyone in the past 50 years” I’m not counting guys with 196 games. I appreciate you all pointing out various catchers with good OBPs, but I assure you I didn’t just pick names out of a hat to come up with the lists above. None of the players mentioned meet the criteria.

By: tartan1

tartan1 — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:17:57 +0000

And as long as we’re discussing small sample sizes, Geovany Soto also did the .400-.850-age 24 thing in 18 games.

By: tartan1

tartan1 — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 22:06:01 +0000

Ryan Hanigan has a career .379 OBP in 196 major league games.

By: Lukehart80

Lukehart80 — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:12:31 +0000

Thanks, Aaron, now I know who to blame if Carlos DOESN’T become one of the greatest offensive catchers ever!

By: ThatGuy

ThatGuy — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:37:29 +0000

I know you meant specifically 24, but in saying it as you did it made it seem more exclusive than it was and it is a rather arbitrary cutoff.

By: mordecofe

mordecofe — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:22:15 +0000

I’d argue that your sentence is a bit confusing – I read it as well to mean “by age 24″ rather than at that specific age.

Not as bad as this one bit about Santana from Fangraphs, however:

“Carlos Santana has only played forty major league games, but he’s already topped one significant leaderboard with his play. Consider this little nugget: Last year, he put up the best OPS by a switch-hitting catcher debuting under the age of 25 with 30 or more games.”

By: mordecofe

mordecofe — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:15:41 +0000

Think mmuzia is talking about your second to last sentence.

By: Aaron Gleeman

Aaron Gleeman — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:13:57 +0000

In doing so he joined Jason Kendall in 1998 as the only two catchers in the past 70 years to crack a .400 OBP and .850 OPS at age 24.

By: Aaron Gleeman

Aaron Gleeman — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:13:06 +0000

Yes he did, but 2008 was Iannetta’s age-25 season.

By: ThatGuy

ThatGuy — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:12:27 +0000

Mauer had .429 OBP and a .936 OPS at age 23…

By: mmuzia

mmuzia — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:06:46 +0000

Chris Iannetta had an OBP of .390 through 104 games with Colorado in 2008.