So you probably saw the lights at Qualcomm burst into flames last night. Pretty bizarre. Slick way to get out of facing Curt Schilling, though. We missed all the excitement, as we were eating sushi about a mile west of the stadium.

I’m working on my Top x Padres prospects, where x will end up being somewhere in the 20-25 range. Depends on whether I can bring myself to include guys like Jeremy Owens. We’ll see.

Meantime, some more loose ends to tie. This one goes way back, to an article I wrote in 1998 comparing Andruw Jones and Barry Bonds. I noted the similarities between the two as hitters in their first full big-league season. Now that Andruw has more than 2500 career at-bats to his credit, let’s see how he’s progressed and whether the comparison to Bonds is still a fair one.

Entering 2001, Andruw had 2335 at-bats in the bigs. Entering 1990, Bonds had 2082. Here, in seasonal notation, is what their numbers looked like to this point:

A few things to bear in mind.

1. This is before Bonds became an absolute offensive moster, at age 25, when he enjoyed the first of nine consecutive seasons with .400+ OBP and .500+ SLG.
2. Bonds began his career in a less offensive-oriented era than Jones.
3. Bonds kicked his career into high gear at age 25. Jones turns 25 next April.

What’s my point in all this? I was reading an interesting article the other day over at BaseballPrimer.com which dealt with the Andruw vs Vlad argument. One of the reasons author Don Malcom gave for downgrading Andruw was that despite so much big-league experience, he really hadn’t "exploded" the way Vlad had at such an early age.
While this is certainly a valid argument, the fact is that as a 24-year-old, Andruw is still a very good candidate to experience a quantum leap or two in production over the next few seasons. Bonds "popped" at age 25 after treading water at a reasonably high level for a few years. Others have done likewise.

Expecting Andruw to be another Bonds was perhaps overly optimistic on my part. Currently the most similar batter to Andruw in big-league history at the same age is Ruben Sierra. Actually, the three most similar players are Sierra, Jose Canseco, and Cesar Cedeno. What’s scary is that all three of these guys looked like sure-fire HOFers when they first arrived. Injuries, among other factors, ultimately forced all three to fall well short of initial expectations, though Sierra and Canseco are enjoying something of a resurgence at the moment. Still, if you go back and look at how good these guys were when they first broke in, this is pretty lofty company. (For the curious, check out the 10 most similar batters through age 23 at Baseball-Reference.com; some interesting names in that list.)

I’m not prepared to offer any conclusions about the future path of Andruw’s career other than this: It’s way too early to dismiss his potential to be a true superstar in this game. Let’s see where he is about 5 years from now. Personally, I give him a better than 50% chance of being one of the elite players in the big leagues by then.