Chris Young - where from here?

The positive hype over Chris Young started virtually the day of the trade with the White Sox and included comments like perennial All-Star and so on. As of a couple years ago, he looked like his ceiling might be someone like Jim Edmonds and he likely was going to at least be a 10-15 year regular who made a few AS teams. Um, now it doesn't look quite so rosy.

I previously wrote a post about Mark Reynolds and players who hit 40 HR at age 25 or younger - if you'll recall it was a VERY impressive list indicating that Reynolds is probably headed toward being a legitimate star. I thought I might try a similar analysis to Chris Young to what players who have had similar seasons at a similar age have done in the past.

More after the jump.

Using b-ref's Play INdex I started with a search for all players who had played from ages 24-26 who had played half their games in CF and had 400 PAs and an OPS+ under 90 and there were a TON of hits. The problem with that list is it is heavily populated with speedsters whose lone major league asset is or was speed - guys like Willy Taveras and Joey Gathright and Brian Hunter and Tom Goodwin. None of those guys are potential 30 HR guys like Young is and frankly many of them probably never should have been in the bigs for very long, if at all. So I narrowed the list to guys who had at least 8 HRs in those seasons to get guys who were more than just fast. Here's the list since 1978 (the list went back further but was similarly uninspiring so I stopped at 1978 for brevity's sake):

• BJ Upton (surprise)
• Chris Young
• Coco Crisp
• Brian N Anderson
• Corey Patterson
• Terrence Long
• Gary Matthews Jr
• Ruben Rivera (twice)
• Mike Cameron
• Ernie Young
• Chad Curtis
• Derek Bell
• Junior Felix
• Devon White
• Stan Jefferson
• Kevin McReynolds
• George Wright
• Rick Bosetti
• Rowland Office (arguably one of the best names in MLB history)

Wow, not a very inspiring list there. There are a couple decent names on there but right now it looks like Mike Cameron might be the best we can hope for although Devon White is probably a closer comp to CY (good glove, some power & speed, lots of Ks although he never walked as much as CY). McReynolds had a nice run after that but mostly as a corner OF and not a CF.

So, I'm not sure what that means but it does seem certain that CY is headed toward a much more average career than it seemed 2 years ago. As a DBacks fan, I really hope he turns it around and has a more Mike Cameron career than a Ruben Rivera career. . . .