Why my continued fascination with Corey Patterson? I have no idea, but I was checking out his stats at Baseball-Reference.com the other day and came across this:

         Age  AB  BA OBP SLG BB  SO OPS+
Player A  22 592 253 284 392 19 142  78
Player B  22 473 241 292 389 29 120  94

Player A is Patterson. Check out what Player B did at a few years later:

Age  AB  BA OBP SLG BB  SO OPS+
 28 615 320 382 631 61 107 165

That would be George Foster. Is Patterson another Foster? Uh, no. But it is interesting to see that someone with such brutal plate discipline managed to become an offensive force later in his career.

While I was tooling around, I stumbled onto another of Patterson’s comps, Willie Crawford. He was finishing up his career just as I was starting to pay attention to baseball, so I don’t know much about him. But I’ll say this: It sure seems that a guy who can get a big-league hit at age 17 and who hit better than league average at age 22, with good plate discipline, should have a longer and more distinguished career than Crawford ended up having.

I haven’t been able to dig up much information on Crawford. The only reference books I own that mention him are the New Bill James Historical Abstract (cites him as the #123 right fielder of all time, just behind Rob Deer, p. 842) and Win Shares (gives him a C+ defensive grade, p. 148; 123 career win shares, p. 523). Anybody know his story? Did he get hurt? Not that it matters all that much in the larger scheme of things, but I’m curious; drop me a line if you can tell me something about Crawford.

USD

Defending national champ Texas is in town this weekend. First game is at 2 PM Friday. USDHS alum Mark Prior will throw out the first pitch.

Another Prospect List

This one’s over at Baseball Prospectus. The lumping together of Tagg Bozied, Xavier Nady, and Jake Gautreau seems a bit strange to me. Anyway, there’s one more set of opinions for you to digest.

Sean Burroughs Projections

A few of you have been good enough to send me your projection for Sean Burroughs performance in 2003. Here’s what we have so far:

                BA OBP SLG
Eitan Altman   310 375 450
Bob Millhollen 270 350 430
Don Poulin     294 346 392
moi            290 360 430

Of course, I’m ineligible for any accolades should I win the contest. Then again, it’s not much of a contest, really, if all you win are accolades. Can’t sell those on e-Bay.

At any rate, if you’d like to be a part of this wackiness, send me your guess. Or maybe you have a life and don’t have time for this sort of thing.

Right, who are we kidding; you’re reading this, you have no life. Send me your guess already. Go on, it’ll be fun.