Baseball has a way of spiting people who make definitive judgments 59 games into a player’s career. The 10 years I’ve spent writing about baseball has taught me to tread carefully in both directions until the sample size can be measured in years. Yet all samples have outliers, and in baseball’s talent pool, there occasionally comes a player whose talent is so evident that caution becomes superfluous. In my era of first-hand witness, off the top of my head, I can count Joey Votto (2008), Mike Trout (2012), Kris Bryant (2015), Bryce Harper (2012), Carlos Gonzalez (2009), Carlos Correa (2015) as players who left me convinced of their inevitable greatness less than a season into their careers.
Why Phillies slugger Rhys Hoskins is a superstar: Look at the company he keeps | David Murphy
