Dellupodisabato

Is

your your

so good for as long as

Where might this all end, for Soto’s next team and their fans? We could try to build a fancy modeling system that games out what his projections will be for years to come, but it’s just as satisfying — and far simpler — to look at what his historic comparables are through age 25 in some pretty important stats .

So

.

120

Soto needs 1,789 additional walks to catch Bonds. That’s a number only one person has ever accumulated from age 26 on (Bonds, obviously). He’d need to average 150 walks annually for the next dozen years. That won’t happen. Could he catch Rickey Henderson, 1,421 ahead, for second? Maybe – although Rickey hung around through age 44 to do it. The more attainable target might be walk rate, where Williams’s 20.6% is the gold standard.

Soto seems like a pretty safe bet to get to 500 HR and a top-five walk total — which makes him Bonds, Ruth or Williams. What’s next?

much

Now we’re getting somewhere. Compared to their own contemporaries, with a minimum of 1,500 plate appearances through 25, Williams is still No. 1 in what we’ll call OBP+, but Soto isn’t that far behind – lumped in with some wild names. Read this as 100 being league average, and so a 130 mark is 30% better than average.

. No one’s going to be stopping to have a ceremony if Soto manages to get to “40 percent above average in an era-adjusted stat, topping Williams’s 39 percent.” But even right now, Soto is fifth on the all-time list, for any age, where names 1-4 are Williams, Ruth, Bonds and Josh Gibson. Memorable number or not, “making outs less often than your contemporaries” is what hitting is about, isn’t it?

better

high performance And

The far ahead of Bonds, you know it’s probably not an attainable thing; Soto is only 20 percent of the way there. But to get into the top five, to catch Cobb? Soto needs +687 more batting runs. It’s essentially Stan Musial’s career from 26 on. It’s less than Gehrig had. It is feasible.

Player,